POPE John Paul II has urged Catholics working in health care to do all they can to defend life when it is threatened and to make Catholic hospitals centres of life and hope.
The Pope made the call in his message for the 11th World Day of the Sick which will be celebrated in Washington DC on February 11.
He also gave his blessing on those who suffer in body or spirit.
‘Especially in the presence of tragic human experiences, the Christian is called to bear witness to the consoling truth of the risen Lord, who takes upon himself the wounds and ills of humanity, including death itself, and transforms them into occasions of grace and life,’ he said.
The Pope said that in the Western world a model of society appeared to be emerging in which the powerful predominated, setting aside and even eliminating the powerless.
‘I am thinking here of unborn children,
helpless victims of abortion; the elderly and incurable ill, subjected at times to euthanasia; and the many other people relegated to the margins of society by consumerism and materialism,’ he said.
‘Catholics working in the field of health care have the urgent task of doing all they can to defend life when it is most seriously threatened and to act with a conscience correctly formed according to the teaching of the Church.
Ballarat Bishop Peter Connors, of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Health Care, said that, since the celebration of the 9th World Day of the Sick in Sydney in 2001, more health and aged care facilities throughout Australia were responding to the Pope’s annual invitation for a prayerful response to the challenge to make the Gospel of life and love resound loudly throughout the land.
