"It's nice to meet you in person on the day we celebrate San Luca, the dear doctor"
October 18, 2021 - Pope Francis received the members of the Rome Biomedical University Foundation in a private audience together with the top management of the University. Below is the complete text of the Holy Father's speech.
Dear brothers and sisters,
I welcome you and thank you for your presence and for the gift. I am grateful to Prof. Paolo Arullani, President of the Foundation, for the words he addressed to me on your behalf. It is nice to meet you in person on the day we celebrate Saint Luke, whom the Apostle Paul calls "the dear doctor" (Collar 4,14).
I gladly accepted the proposal to meet you for what I know of the Campus Bio-Medico of Rome. I know how difficult it is today to carry on a work in the healthcare sector, especially when, as happens in your Polyclinic, the focus is not only on assistance, but also on research to provide the sick with the most suitable therapies, and above all the it is done with love for the person. Putting the patient before the disease: it is essential in every field of medicine; it is fundamental for a cure that is truly such, truly integral, truly human. The patient before the disease. Blessed Alvaro del Portillo encouraged you to do this: to place yourselves every day at the service of the human person in his entirety. I thank you for that, he is very pleasing to God.
The centrality of the person, which is the basis of your commitment to assistance, but also to teaching and research, helps you to strengthen a unified, synergistic vision. A vision that does not put ideas, techniques and projects first, but the concrete man, the patient, to be treated by meeting his story, knowing his experience, establishing friendly relationships, which heal the heart. Love for man, especially in his condition of fragility, in which the image of Jesus Crucified shines through, is specific to a Christian reality and must never go astray.
The Foundation and Campus Bio-Medico, and Catholic healthcare in general, are called to testify with deeds that there are no lives that are unworthy or to be discarded because they do not meet the criterion of profit or the needs of profit. We are experiencing a true throwaway culture; this is kind of the air we breathe and we have to react against this throwaway culture. Every health facility, especially those of Christian inspiration, should be the place where we practice personal care and of whom it can be said: "Here you see not only doctors and sick people, but people who welcome and help each other: here you touch the therapy of human dignity". And this should never be negotiated, it should always be defended.
Putting personal care at the centre, therefore, without forgetting the importance of science and research. Because cure without science is useless, just as science without cure is sterile. The two things go together, and only together do they make medicine an art, an art that involves head and heart, which combines knowledge and compassion, professionalism and compassion, competence and empathy.
Dear friends, thank you for promoting human development in research. Often, unfortunately, the profitable paths of profits are pursued, forgetting that before the opportunities for earnings there are the needs of the sick. They evolve continuously and it is therefore necessary to prepare to face ever new pathologies and discomforts. I have in mind, among others, those of many elderly people and those linked to many rare diseases, which we don't know what they are, yet there hasn't been research to understand them well... In addition to promoting research, you help those who have no means cheap to support university expenses and face significant costs that the ordinary budget cannot support. I am thinking in particular of the commitment already undertaken for the Covid Centre, for the Emergency Department and for the recent reality of the Hospice.
All of this is very good, it's nice to deal with greater urgencies with ever greater openings. And it's important to do it together. I underline this simple and at the same time difficult word to live by: together. The pandemic has shown us the importance of connecting, of collaborating, of facing common problems together. Healthcare, especially the Catholic one, has and will increasingly need this, of stay online, which is a way of expressing the whole. It is no longer time to follow one's charisma in isolation. Charity requires the gift: knowledge must be shared, competence must be shared, science must be shared.
Science - I say -, not only the products of science which, if offered alone, remain plasters capable of buffering the evil but not of treating it in depth. This applies, for example, to vaccines: it is urgent to help countries that have less, but it must be done with far-sighted plans, not motivated only by the haste of wealthy nations to be safer. The remedies must be distributed with dignity, not as pitiful alms. To really do good, science and its integral application must be promoted: understanding the contexts, root cures, grow the health culture. It is not easy, it is a real mission, and I hope that Catholic health care will be increasingly active in this sense, as an expression of an extroverted Church, of an outgoing Church.
I encourage you to continue in this direction, accepting your work as a service to the inspirations and surprises of the Spirit, who along the way brings you to encounter many situations in need of closeness and compassion. I pray for you, I renew my gratitude and I give you my Blessing. And I ask you, please, to continue to pray for me. Thank you.
