Newman’s Compelling Reasons for a Medical School with Catholic Professors

Abstract

Only one year after starting the Catholic University of Ireland (1854), John Henry Newman arranged for the purchase of a medical school, the Cecilia-Street Medical School, which gained immediate success and has continued to this day as a part of University College Dublin. This article is a historical piece that examines the importance Newman gave to Catholic doctrine for the formation of medical students. He understood that according to a hierarchy of sciences, theology and religion are above medicine and its practice and that there are some important religious truths that future Catholic physicians need to learn. In this article, we present a brief history of the origins of the medical school, and discuss his choice of only Catholic professors, and his concern for the doctrinal and moral formation of future doctors.

Summary:

When John Henry Newman established a medical school in Dublin he chose from only Catholic professors to ensure that the students, almost all Catholic, would receive teaching consistent with their faith, and also that they would have as role models Catholic physicians. He understood the harmony between science and faith, and thus sought professors with very good medical knowledge, who at the same time professed the Catholic faith.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, the latest saint in the Catholic Church, occupies a place in the long tradition of Catholics who have dedicated themselves to the care of the sick since the very beginning of Christianity. The parable of the Good Samaritan moved Christians to provide for the needs of the sick at large, not only family members. In the Middle Ages, monks established infirmaries to care for pilgrims. In the eleventh century, a medical school was started at the Catholic University of Bologna. In 1854, Florence Nightingale trained women volunteers, including fifteen Catholic nuns to serve wounded soldiers in the Crimea (Paradis, Hart, and O’Brien 2017, 29–43). In 1860, she laid the foundations for the first professional nursing school at St. Thomas Hospital in London. Newman’s work was set in this rich tradition of medical care provided by Christians.

Experience of Human Suffering

John Henry Newman was born in London in 1801, the oldest of five children. He grew up in a family with financial means, but his father's banking firm failed and later his business venture with a brewery also failed. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford; became a tutor at Oriel College; and was ordained an Anglican clergyman. Soon afterward came his father’s untimely death followed by the death of his young sister Mary. Both were painful for Newman who became the head of his family. He had been close to his sister and thus missed her greatly, remembering her often on his horseback rides in the country and writing poems about her spiritual presence beyond the veil of the present world.

As a young Anglican clergyman, he visited his parishioners at St. Clement’s Church, just outside Oxford. His visits brought comfort to the sick. One woman remarked after his visit that she thought Christ had come to see her. Newman was also attentive and compassionate with friends who were ill or had ailing family members. Edward Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford, and his family were very grateful to Newman for the consolation that his visits and letters provided them in their family illnesses and losses. The young curate acted with empathy and helped his friends and parishioners to accept God’s will and trust in his loving providence.

Later on, while living at Littlemore, there occurred a fatal case of cholera. He wrote his student Frederic Rogers in 1832 that he was resigned to falling ill, “Surely one’s time is come, or it is not; the event is out of our power. David’s meaning is evident to me in a way I never understood it before. When he speaks of falling into hands higher than human, he means to say that the pestilence is beyond the physicians” (Meynell 1907). Years later when cholera broke out in Walsall, near Birmingham, he went with another priest to minister to the people there.

All this acquaintance with suffering was a preparation for his future work as a priest and educator. In 1845, after years of study and prayerful discernment, Newman became a Catholic and two years later was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome. He returned to England to establish the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Birmingham. In 1852, at the invitation of the Irish bishops, he traveled to Dublin and began to work on the establishment of the Catholic University of Ireland.

The Catholic University and the Cecilia-Street Medical School, Dublin

In a memorandum on the ends of the university Newman wrote: “Their (the Bishops of Ireland) object, I conceive, is that of providing for Catholic Education, (in a large sense of the word ‘education’) in various respects, in which at present we have to depend upon Protestant institutions and Protestant writings” (Newman, LD, vol. 17, 557). According to him, they had ten goals. The second one was “To provide a Professional education for students of law and medicine; and a liberal education for the mercantile class” (Newman, LD, vol. 17, 557). The university began with a faculty of letters (liberal arts) soon followed by other faculties.

The first rector of the Catholic University was ambitious; he desired a top university for English speakers. To this end, he had in mind a good school of science, including an astronomical observatory for which he consulted with his friend Manuel Johnson at the Oxford Observatory. As a part of starting a school of science, Newman had the laboratory in the medical house equipped along the lines of German universities, just one year after its opening. As will be seen below, a few years later he began a scientific and literary journal for the university.

In 1785, the College of Surgeons of Ireland established a School of Surgery in Dublin. A decade later, it had 60 students enrolled in the lectures of anatomy. In 1833, it had peaked at 277. During the nineteenth century, a few chartered medical schools and twenty smaller private and unchartered medical schools existed in Dublin (Kelly 2012, 4).¹ Among the first private schools were Crampton’s School, Jervis-Street Hospital School, and Kirby’s School (Cameron 1896, 512–43). Another one was the Cecilia-Street School, opened in 1837. When the Catholic University of Ireland actually opened in 1854, none of these schools were Catholic despite the overwhelming majority of Catholics in the city which had an approximate population of 255,000 people. In the nineteenth-century Ireland, most medical students² enrolled in courses at these small schools with different professors and later sat for examination by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (Kelly 2012, 21). Anatomy, physiology, surgery, the practice of medicine and materia medica (pharmacopeia of medicinal plants), midwifery, and medical jurisprudence were subjects studied by all medical students.

Newman soon recognized the need for a Catholic school of medicine to educate the future doctors in Ireland. He calculated that in Dublin “out of one hundred and eleven Medical Practitioners in situations of trust and authority, twelve were Catholic, and ninety-nine Protestant” (J. H. Newman, 1896, 357). Also, of the five chartered medical schools, three had no Catholic lecturers and the other two only one apiece “so that out of forty-nine lecturers only two were Catholic” (J. H. Newman, 1896, 357). The university rector considered the establishment of the medical school a great accomplishment. In his words: “Did our efforts for the foundation of a Catholic University issue in nothing beyond the establishment of a first-rate Catholic School of Medicine in the metropolis as it has already been done, they would have met with a sufficient reward. Such a school has not only not existed in Dublin or elsewhere, but it could not exist from the natural but inordinate influence which the State Religion exercises over the existing schools of the country. The medical establishments have simply been in the hands of Protestants” (J. H. Newman, 1896, 64).

In addition to a first-rate professional formation, Catholics preparing to be physicians needed at least some rudiments of a liberal arts education, doctrinal-religious instruction, and spiritual care. To become good Catholic professionals, they need the teaching and example of Catholic professors.

Newman thought that while professors and students were found it would be good to have a hospital with professorships, that “would give an immediate dignity and importance to the University, before, during, and until the actual formation of classes of students” (Newman, LD, vol. 17, 559). In the short period, however, of his time as rector, he was unable to accomplish this desire and began instead with finding a suitable property for classes and talented professors.

In June 1854, Newman spoke with a Dublin physician Andrew Ellis about this project, and Ellis soon after notified Newman about the then recent closing of the Cecilia-Street Medical School and the possibility of purchasing this medical school house. The school had been established by Apothecaries’ Hall. With the agreement of Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin, Newman arranged for the purchase of the property at the cost of £1,450. Ellis achieved the purchase after some weeks of difficult negotiations and without revealing the future connection with the Catholic University. The Dublin professor considered the proprietors would not sell the property for the intended use by Catholics. The building in fair conditions was a good acquisition; it had two lecture theaters and laboratory facilities. Newman set himself to look for professors and to plan for the school. The Cecilia-Street School reopened in 1855, becoming the first Catholic medical school in Ireland (Kelly 2012, 34).³

The building and the medical faculty gave the university visibility and came into operation at once. Newman made plans for a university church that would do the same, but it was not built and opened until the spring of 1856. The principal motive for Newman, however, was forming young Catholic doctors by means of a faculty of Catholic professors and a medical lodging house.

Catholic Professors

In a report on the Catholic University for the years 1855–1856, he reminded the Irish bishops that: “Medicine and Surgery, considered as Arts, are confronted, at the great eras of human life, at birth and at death, with a higher teaching, and are forced, whether they will or no, into co-operation or collision with Theology; so again the Practitioner himself is the constant companion, for good or for evil, of the daily ministrations of religion, the most valuable support, or the most painful embarrassment, of the parish priest” (J. H. Newman, 1896, 66).

For Newman, teachers make an institution. They drew students and created a school around them. In short pieces titled University Sketches, he described how this had been the case in ancient Greece as well as in medieval universities. Thus, for the faculty of medicine, he looked for Catholics who were very respected and accomplished in their fields.

When Newman met Ellis, the latter was a distinguished surgeon in Dublin. Andrew Ellis (1792–1867) began his career as a surgeon at St. Mary’s Hospital, Dublin, in 1821. He became one of the founders of Cecilia-Street Medical School in 1837, where he was professor of surgery, and surgeon at Jervis-Street Hospital. He was a fellow of Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and its president in 1849. He published several books including Lectures and Observations on Clinical Surgery (1846; Meenan 1987, 7–21).⁴

Ellis did not think sufficient qualified Catholic lecturers would be found in time to open the school in autumn of 1855, and three persons advised him to find Protestant ones. Newman replied to Ellis: “according to my present state of information, that it was impossible. A Catholic University cannot by any possibility appoint Protestant Professors.” Newman confessed that it was “so large and so anxious a subject” that required consulting of various persons, especially the bishops and some professors such as W. K. Sullivan. Sullivan encouraged him to try to find German professors who were Catholics.⁵ The university was a Catholic institution for Catholics under episcopal control (Froggatt 1999, 98). As will be discussed later, Newman thought theology and religion had an important bearing on the practice of medicine.

The most distinguished professor whom Newman found was Sullivan, a chemist at the Museum of Economic Geology of Ireland (later known as the Museum of Irish Industry) and professor of chemistry at the school of science associated with the museum. Together with Sir Robert Kane, he did research to produce sugar from beetroot. He was a polymath, an expert in geology and published articles on a wide variety of subjects in economics, science education, philology, and other fields (Murphy and Lunney 2009). He also advised Newman on the faculty appointments and relinquished his post at the museum to become a professor at the new medical school in its second year. Newman liked Sullivan’s bold ideas for introducing physiology, pathology, and pharmacy to the study of medicine that until then were only offered in the United Kingdom at the University of Edinburgh. Together with Newman, Sullivan founded the Atlantis (1858), a scientific and literary journal of the Catholic University, and served as its editor, making impressive contributions. Newman hoped that this periodical would give the university an intellectual position in Europe (J. H. Newman, 1896, 368–69).

Sullivan was, thus, a very important contributor to the university in its early years and served as dean of the faculty of science and later on dean of the faculty of medicine. After almost twenty years at the university, he succeeded his mentor, Sir Robert Kane, as president of Queen’s College in Cork. Sullivan made this move because he was pessimistic about the continuation of the Catholic University and disagreed with the attitudes toward science and lay education of the Catholic hierarchy (Murphy and Lunney 2009). The latter wished to run the university more like a seminary.

Newman’s choice of Catholic professors is criticized by philosopher Jay Newman who accuses John Henry Newman of being a “religious bigot” (J. Newman, 1990, 35) and argues that he was inconsistent: “While on one level indirectly encouraging physicians to be amoral technicians, he suggests in other lines that he might encourage ill Catholics to go to modestly competent Catholic surgeons rather than highly competent non-Catholic surgeons” (J. Newman 1990, 32). John Henry Newman himself had described this same unjust accusation by the State Religion’s monopolization of literature and science “making the name of Protestant synonymous with mental illumination and Catholic with bigotry and ignorance” (J. H. Newman 1897, 364). He argued that the monopoly must cease and that the university would provide “for Catholics also a position and influence of their own” (J. H. Newman, 1896, 358).

Jay Newman also fails to see that the university rector could not act on his own; he needed the consent of the bishops. And that with the establishment of a Catholic University, the bishops and families of students would naturally expect Catholic professors. He also disregards Newman’s views about the so-called mixed education (the study of Catholics and Protestants at the same institution). In this regard, the English convert thought Catholic youth could study at Oxford with the necessary support to keep their faith. Newman had many Anglican friends and did not harbor a bias toward them or other non-Catholic professors and professionals.

Newman wrote various Irish bishops to inform them of the negotiation for purchasing the medical school and the appointment of professors. In May, he wrote his friend Bishop David Moriarty that the medical appointments were going well but was worried about assuring them of a place and salary since they were giving up positions. After this, he began making a formal offer (£100–150 a year in addition to the fees of students attending the lectures) to professors (Newman, LD, vol. 16, 475). He had difficulties in finding Catholic professors in Ireland and realized that there was a bias against foreigners.

One of the professors he tried unsuccessfully to recruit was the distinguished Dr. Dominic Corrigan who became the first Catholic president of the King and Queen’s College of Physicians (later the Royal College of Physicians) and served four terms (1859–1863).

By July, he had filled certain chairs and decided to leave the others for another year. Ellis told him “no one could lecture on the Practice of Medicine in Cecilia Street during the ensuing medical session who is not an established and recognised Lecturer, and physician to an hospital in Dublin” (Newman, LD, vol. 16, 533). But thanks to Newman’s persistence, his conversations with many, and correspondence with candidates for the chairs, the school actually opened in the autumn of 1855 with six professors and two demonstrators in anatomy,⁶ all of whom were Catholics.

Ellis gave an inaugural address on November 2, 1855, in which he spoke of the importance of the new field of medical pathology and boasted that this was the only medical school in Ireland to appoint a distinct professor of pathology (Meenan 1987, 13). Ellis was appointed the first Dean of Medicine for the university. When Newman wrote to him about advertising the school and opening a medical house, Ellis voiced his concern about drawing attention to the fact that the medical men at the Cecilia school were Catholic (Newman, LD, vol. 17, 344). Despite his choice of Catholic professors, Newman readily agreed. Advertising the school was one of Newman’s many concerns. It should be noted that while setting up the other faculties of the university, he was busy with setting up rules and regulations, the financing of the school, salaries, and even arranging for the purchase of coal to heat the school.

Robert Spencer Lyons (1826–1886) was another of the first professors for the medical school. Son of the mayor of Cork, he had studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He worked as pathologist-in-chief in the Crimea in 1855 and later that year was appointed professor of physiology and pathology at the Catholic University. Lyons also wrote widely on subjects in medicine, education, and forestry, including various books. One of these was A Handbook of Hospital Practice (1859). At the end of his life, he became Liberal Member of Parliament for Dublin, 1880–1885.

Thomas Hayden, Robert Cryan, Stephen Myles McSwiney, and Robert McDermott were the other professors appointed, the last in 1857. Each professor required recognition by the Royal College of Surgeons, recognition which they speedily received after applying to the college. Within two years of its foundation, other licensing bodies such as the College of Physicians and Queen’s College recognized the lecturers in the school. This recognition ensured the success of the medical school (Meenan 1987, 19).

Newman thus chose capable and respected professors to begin the medical school, men who were distinguished members of the Irish community and a strong foundation for the work of the university. They placed the school in good standing, and in addition to their teaching provided the students with role models for their future professional work as doctors. These men were Catholics. Although we do not have news about their character and practice of the faith, it can rightly be supposed from the recommendations Newman sought before their appointment and the tacit approval of various bishops on the board of the university that they were faithful Catholics.

As for students, forty-three students attended the school in 1855, and fifty-nine the following year. Thirty-six began dissections under the direction of Hayden and Cryan. For the treatment of patients, they were scattered about the hospitals of the city, where according to J. H. Newman, they were “often exposed to influences hostile to the interests of the school” (Newman, 1896, 176).

Newman’s Lecture on Medicine

The founding rector delivered a homily at the beginning of each academic year and various addresses to different schools during his years at the Catholic University. These provide us with some of the main ideas that he had in mind for each of the schools. In an address given to the medical students at the new medical school, Newman wished to warn them of a possible “contracted view of man and his eternal destinies” (J. H. Newman, 1907, 513).

Medicine, for Newman, is subordinate to higher sciences (morals and religion), yet it like other sciences can try to make religion part of its domain. He explained that its

province is the physical nature of man, and its object is the preservation of that physical nature in its proper state, and its restoration when it has lost it. It limits itself, by its very profession, to the health of the body; it ascertains the conditions of that health; it analyzes the causes of its interruption or failure; it seeks about for the means of cure. But, after all, bodily health is not the only end of man, and the medical science is not the highest science of which he is the subject. Man has a moral and a religious nature, as well as a physical. He has a mind and a soul; and the mind and soul have a legitimate sovereignty over the body, and the sciences relating to them have in consequence the precedence of those sciences which relate to the body. (J. H. Newman 1907, 508–9)

Newman pointed out an error in the dictum: “What is true is lawful.” He wrote: “Not so. Observe, here is the fallacy,—What is true in one science is dictated to us indeed according to that science, but not according to another science, or in another department. What is certain in the military art has force in the military art, but not in statesmanship; and if statesmanship be a higher department of action than war, and enjoins the contrary, it has no claim on our reception and obedience at all” (J. H. Newman 1907, 509–10). He offered the example of a Sister of Charity told by a doctor that she would die if she remained caring for sick persons in a given place but told by her religious superior to remain at her post. The physician stated the truth, but the sister was bound by a higher calling. Newman also gave the example of a patient dying in need of spiritual care. A priest wishes to help prepare the patient for death, but the physician thinks it will disturb the patient. In sum, a physician may think that what is true in his science is lawful in practice without considering the other fields of knowledge in the great circle of science. A Catholic physician, informed by theological and religious truths, will give importance to the spiritual and sacramental care of his patients, and will more readily abstain from actions proscribed by natural law such as the procurement of abortion or physician assisted euthanasia.

The Reason for Catholic Professors

From Newman’s letters, there is no explicit mention of why he wanted the professors at the medical school to be Catholic; however, from his life and writings, we can infer some of the reasons that he had in mind. For example, Catholics approach illness and death differently than non-Catholics. The purpose of the university was to educate Catholic men, and thus, it was logical for its professors to be Catholic.

A Catholic has a philosophical and theological understanding of the person, marriage, child-bearing, illness, and death rooted in a long tradition inspired by philosophical reasoning and biblical revelation.

As with most of his writing, Newman did not write systematic works, and often his writing was in response to objections made by other writers or to instruct in questions of the day. Not surprisingly he did not write a treatise on ethics and even less on medical ethics. We can grasp, however, a few solid elements from his teaching which would serve as a foundation for medical ethics and for an understanding of the reason for a Catholic medical school. Furthermore, from these elements, we can enumerate some important aspects with a direct bearing on the exercise of medicine:

1. The immortality of the soul and its eternal destiny. This and most of the other principles below are found in Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons.

2. Absolute respect for each person, his body, reputation, and privacy. The Parochial and Plain Sermons have frequent reference to God as Creator, our condition as God’s creatures, and as his children through baptism.

3. The Christian’s call to holiness of life (which extends to physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals).

4. Charity as a moral and ethical pillar of professional life.

5. A Catholic understanding of suffering and the advice Catholics give to persons suffering. Newman’s letters to friends point to the need for prayer and abandonment in God’s hands.

6. Conscience as the voice of God which obliges and prohibits acts depending on their conformity to natural law discerned through reason. This is discussed in the Grammar of Assent and in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (chap. 5).

7. The harmony between science and religion, reason, and faith. This is a theme throughout the Idea of a University.

8. The proper sacramental care of patients, especially at the end of life (and the Christian burial of the deceased).

When Newman reopened the Cecilia-Street Medical school with Catholic professors, the population of Ireland faced diseases and illnesses that had limited treatment. People suffered from infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, and venereal diseases, as well as infections following abnormal deliveries, work accidents, and mental illnesses. These and other illnesses and problems such as malnutrition, alcoholism, and prostitution had aspects that a Catholic physician would necessarily also consider from a moral point of view. A Catholic physician would consider the moral ills contributing to these pathologies and when appropriate urge the patient, family and members of society to contribute towards the remedy of the whole person, body and soul.

In some medical decisions then, and even more so today, it might seem that medical science has an upper hand over religion. “Conscience, reason, good feeling, the instincts of our moral nature, the traditions of Faith, the conclusions and deductions of philosophical Religion, are no match at all for the stubborn facts (for they are facts, though there are other facts besides them), for the facts, which are the foundation of physical, and in particular of medical, science” (J. H. Newman, 1907, 515). For this reason, J. H. Newman (1907) told the future physicians that they must look to the Church as a teacher and guide, as “an antagonist to sight and sense” (J. H. Newman 1907, 515). He added that although medicine teaches us truths, it does not teach us the whole truth or most important truths that only the Church teaches.

Doctrinal and Moral Formation of the Students

Newman considered that as vital as good Catholic professors are for a Catholic faculty, this was not enough to provide students with the necessary formation as Christian professionals. Newman envisioned that after some years of the beginning of the medical school, students who enrolled would take two years of subjects to acquire the rudiments of a liberal arts education. This education would necessarily include theology to instruct them on the important truths of religion as well as of other subjects to enlarge their mind and help them develop a philosophical habit of mind.

When the medical school opened, the university had four collegiate houses where students benefited from personal human, religious, and spiritual formation and mutual enrichment from shared meals and conversations. Each house had a rector, a chaplain, a tutor, and an older student in addition to the student residents. The former offered the latter guidance in a climate of friendship.

Newman soon conceived the idea of a fifth house, a house for medical students. It would provide lodging for the students but much more along the lines of the other collegiate houses. He was concerned with the “various inconveniences, material and moral, which befall them in a great city.” More than a simple lodging house, he had “the higher object of removing them from the temptations that surround young men who are thrown without protection on a large town” and the hope that such a house would turn into a university residence for medical students (Shrimpton 2014, 206). The house was set up and advertised, but a sufficient number of students was not found, and the plans for a house for medical students unfortunately did not go ahead.

Instruction in the faith and formation in a virtuous life require the supernatural grace that comes from a sacramental life. In the collegiate houses, the students could attend Mass and recite the rosary. The chaplain would be available to hear the students’ confessions. This sacramental life, integral to the idea of the collegiate houses, was no doubt what Newman desired for the medical house. A Catholic physician, in fact, differs from a non-Catholic one from the supernatural life of grace received in the sacraments in addition to the Church’s moral teaching. Newman’s desire for a collegiate house for medical students remains a very worthwhile idea which is also plausible, especially at Catholic medical schools.

Catholic Hospitals

A Catholic medical school requires a Catholic hospital to be able to carry out well its specific educational mission. A Catholic hospital provides patients with medical and nursing care in an environment motivated by religious ends and rooted in the virtue of charity. The organization and policies of such an institution enable and foster the practice of the faith. A hospital, like a university, has its own particular characteristics or, in words of Newman, describing a university: its genius loci. The physical plant, its staff and grounds, and its norms and practices contribute to create a specific ambiance, which in the case of a Catholic hospital has a special religious character and Christian ethos. The faculty acknowledged this need and expressed their desire for a hospital (J. H. Newman, 1896, 176).

In 1855, there were few Catholic infirmaries or hospitals in Ireland. In 1834, Sr. Mary Aikenhead, foundress of the Irish Sisters of Charity, had started St. Vincent’s Hospital originally located at 56 St. Stephen’s Green. The hospital was open to everyone irrespective of their religious beliefs. The sisters took in addition to the three vows, a fourth vow: to devote their lives in the service of the poor. The hospital began with beds for twelve female patients. Fr. Newman probably did not meet Sr. Mary although they were contemporaries, but he visited St. Vincent’s on at least some occasions and said Mass there. Writing to one of her spiritual daughters Mother de Chantal at a convent in Cork, Sr. Mary said:

I am glad you and yours have seen Dr. Newman who, I believe, is a really holy man. I have not seen his Reverence, nor do I expect to do so. He has, however, been several times at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and sent a portion of money he had at his disposal—£ 5—as a donation towards it support (Anonymous 1925, 410–11).

Newman admired the Sisters of Mercy from the time he was an Anglican, and now he voiced his interest in having the physicians on the medical faculty obtain hospital privileges at the future Mater Misericordiae Hospital. The hospital opened some years later under Venerable Sister Catherine McAuley and the Archbishop of Dublin at that time, Daniel Murray, who urged the sisters on and helped the foundation of both hospitals. (In 1886, during a cholera epidemic, it became the first hospital in Ireland to remain open twenty-four hours a day.)

That same year, a French foundation, the Sisters of Bon Secours, sent four sisters to Dublin where they began to care for the sick. (Years later in 1915, they would open a hospital in Cork.)

Newman was rector of the Catholic University for only six years during which he had more than his hands full of the work of renting property, establishing the faculties, finding professors and students, and other related tasks. Had he been longer at Dublin we can venture to say that he would have acquired or established de novo a hospital for the university. Such a hospital would have consolidated the work of formation of the students and facilitated the ethical and spiritual care of the patients as well as physicians.

Today when not only the precepts of the Catholic faith are contested but those of natural law, when financial and legal motives take precedence of over moral principles, and scientific progress is often placed at odds with religious truths, the need for Catholic teaching hospitals and Catholic medical schools for the study and practice of medicine becomes even more imperative.

In 2003 there were five Catholic schools of medicine in the United States, out of approximately 180 schools (Sulmasy 2003), making the situation in the US analogous to the situation in Ireland in the 1850’s. It falls outside of the scope of this article to examine the doctrinal and moral formation given to students in the Catholic schools and the how it differs from the content given in secular schools of medicine. However it is clear that today there is the same need Newman saw for virtuous formation of medical students. In a survey of the teaching of ethics in many medical schools in the US and Canada the topics of informed consent, end of life issues, confidentiality, truth-telling were taught in more than 90% of the schools, but other foundational subjects such as the dignity of the human embryo, the principle of double effect, and cooperation in evil are not even mentioned (Giubilini, Milnes, Savulescu, 131).

Another survey of medical schools indicates that the objectives, content and teaching methods vary greatly from school to school (DuBois, Berkemper, 432). A reading of medical literature gives the impression that in recent decades ethical reasoning has been reduced and impoverished to the balancing of four principles without an adequate anthropology of the human person and a hierarchy of goods. Edmund Pellegrino pointed out how an exaggerated autonomy of the patient has become of equal or greater importance that the first principle of ethics: to do good and avoid evil, and has harmed the legitimate autonomy of the physician (Pellegrino 1994, 47-53). An example of such abuse of a physician’s autonomy is the proposal in New York state to condition medical licensing to a physician’s willingness to do abortions.

In relation to this, it would be worthwhile to examine the implications this has for the freedom of conscience of medical students, and how this freedom is protected, especially in secular schools. In addition, there is need to examine what provisions are made for their spiritual beliefs and needs and those of their patients.

The fact that Catholic healthcare systems constitute the largest provider of nonprofit, nongovernmental health care in the United States makes the need for the formation of a Catholic physicians even greater (Catholic Health Care Association of the United States, https://www.chausa.org/about/about). This too is beyond the scope of this article, but it is a matter for serious consideration and has implications for the urgency to find more ways to reach and form future Catholic physicians who study in secular institutions by means of existing organizations such as the Catholic Medical Association and parish and diocesan groups.

Decisions about the beginning and end of life, the teaching on human sexuality, medical care of women that have suffered sexual assault, choice of vaccines, deliberation on proportionate and disproportionate means of treatment are regulated by clear principles in Catholic teaching. Even though Newman could not foresee many of the questions faced today by patients, doctors, pharmacists, and nurses, he was surely aware of some of these dilemmas and the difference made by Catholic professors and institutions. Furthermore, he understood the central place of the sacraments in the provision of care for patients as evidenced, for example, in the Masses he celebrated at St. Vincent’s Hospital.

Conclusion

Newman’s reasons for establishing a medical school in the new Catholic University of Ireland were various, but one of the principal reasons was the formation of good Catholic doctors. He wanted medical students to trust the Church’s teachings, and urged them: “Gentlemen, it will be your high office to be the links in your generation between Religion and Science” (Newman, Idea, 1907, 518). The arguments made by Newman and the direction he took with respect to medical education in Ireland have similar weight today as we consider the remarkable growth of basic and medical sciences. Future Catholic physicians need professors and mentors who understand the harmony between faith and reason, and have a sound Christian anthropology. All physicians, not only Catholic doctors, need the teaching of the Church to guide them in their ethical dilemmas and respect for the moral conscience. Antagonism must be replaced by an attitude of mutual respect and cooperation if Catholics are to have their proper place in medicine and offer their gifts to the world.

The saints have understood this. St. Camillus de Lellis, and centuries later St. Padre Pio da Pietrelcina cared for the sick and built hospitals. St. Josemaría Escrivá did likewise and began a successful medical school that has been the model for others (Paniagua, 2002, 149-164). In his establishment of Catholic medical education, St. John Henry Newman shows us how the harmony between faith and reason can, and should be, exercised in the teaching and training of future medical doctors. This reminds us even today of the need for knowledgable and distinguishable Catholic professors, and for the Church's teaching and guidance.

Biographical Note

Juan R. Vélez, PhD, a priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei residing in Miami, holds a doctorate in dogmatic theology from the University of Navarre. He has a medical degree, also from the University of Navarre and was previously board certified in internal medicine. He is the author of Passion for Truth, the Life of John Henry Newman (2012) and Holiness in a Secular Age, the Witness of Cardinal Newman (2017).