I never quite know how to express the title of this Pontifical Council in English - English doesn't use the word "pastoral" as a noun as some other languages do, so it is often translated as the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral of Health Care. ZENIT are using the "health care ministry" way of translating it.
Earlier this month this Pontifical Council held its annual international conference, dedicated this year to "Pastoral Care in the treatment of sick children". The conference agenda can be found here. It is quite interesting to see the wide range taken in its approach to the topic. The pattern of the different sections of the agenda is that adopted by the Pontifical Council for previous conferences. I found striking the engagement with the work of the World Health Organisation, represented by more than one speaker, and the engagment with the insights of other religions in the section on inter-religious dialogue.
What follows is an extract from the address given by Pope Benedict XVI when he received the conference participants in audience at the end of their conference. The full text can be found here on the ZENIT web site.
Earlier this month this Pontifical Council held its annual international conference, dedicated this year to "Pastoral Care in the treatment of sick children". The conference agenda can be found here. It is quite interesting to see the wide range taken in its approach to the topic. The pattern of the different sections of the agenda is that adopted by the Pontifical Council for previous conferences. I found striking the engagement with the work of the World Health Organisation, represented by more than one speaker, and the engagment with the insights of other religions in the section on inter-religious dialogue.
What follows is an extract from the address given by Pope Benedict XVI when he received the conference participants in audience at the end of their conference. The full text can be found here on the ZENIT web site.
The medical and human aspects must never be separated and it is the duty of every nursing and health-care structure, especially if it is motivated by a genuine Christian spirit, to offer the best of both expertise and humanity. The sick person, especially the child, understands in particular the language of tenderness and love, expressed through caring, patient and generous service which in believers is inspired by the desire to express the same special love that Jesus reserved for children. "Maxima debetur puero reverentia" (Juvenal, Satire xiv, v. 479): the ancients already acknowledged the importance of respecting the child who is a gift and a precious good for society and whose human dignity, which he fully possesses even unborn in his mother's womb, must be recognized. Every human being has a value in himself because he is created in the image of God in whose eyes he is all the more precious the weaker he appears to the human gaze.
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