In appreciation of Catholic health care

Dr. Simon Lasair suggests mainstream discourse surrounding the Canadian Catholic health-care system fixates on the procedures these establishments do not offer — euthanasia, abortions — when it should be recognizing the distinctiveness of its services and principles.

The academic researcher and spiritual care practitioner hopes his newly published philosophical exploration, “Theological, Strategic and Operational Reflections Supporting a Distinctly Roman Catholic Approach to Healthcare in Canada,” will help alter the conversation.

Lasair produced this paper for the Journal of Religion and Health to “provide a much more positive statement” about Catholic health care and the difference this approach can make in the lives of patients and their loved ones.

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His paper was informed by four years with St. Paul’s Hospital in Saskatoon, both as a spiritual practitioner and as the Robert Steane Holistic Research Chair. This appointment enabled him to examine how best to infuse spiritual support and artistic healing practices into front-line care.

It was during his time at St. Paul’s that the self-professed progressive Anglican “with significant intellectual influence from high church Anglo-Catholicism” gained a deeper appreciation of how Roman Catholic institutions are intentional about “taking that holistic approach to care.” He said they view “healing, health and wellbeing as something that includes the mind, the body and the spirit.”

This ethos values patient accompaniment, added Lasair, and he has first-hand experience of the power of walking with a patient who first comes to him in “incredible amounts of distress.”

“I spend time listening to them and come to understand at a very deep level the true nature of their distress,” said Lasair. “(Then) I engage in therapeutic work with them to alleviate that distress, and by the time my contact with those patients comes to an end, in many cases these patients appear like very different people.

“All of a sudden, whatever it was that was causing them the suffering, not necessarily circumstances, but their own ways of engaging those circumstances, has shifted so much that I begin to see joy in their lives again, I begin to see wonder in their lives again, I begin to see an embrace of new possibilities. This really is very powerful and very rewarding to see, particularly in that clinical context.” 

Lasair’s paper highlights what St. Augustine, St. John Paul II and St. Paul wrote or said about suffering. He cited Augustine’s scripturally informed insight about how “the God of the Bible provides support and succour as people move through their suffering.”  

As for Paul’s teachings, Lasair drew upon Philippians 1:12–26, in which the imprisoned apostle exulted about how Christ transforms suffering followers united to His death and resurrection. Paul wrote how this bond “will transform the body of our humiliation so that it may be conformed to the body of His glory by the power that also enables Him to make things all subject to Himself.”

Lasair drew attention to how St. John Paul II, in the apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris, championed Paul’s message as the late pontiff also declared how “suffering is not something to be feared. Rather, suffering can be approached with gratitude for how it can be a catalyst for positive transformation, both individually and collectively.”

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The task Lasair set for himself in his paper is translating the Christian teachings about suffering, death and resurrection into an operational framework palatable to patients and potential secular funders. He acknowledged that average people — even committed Christians — are not immediately receptive to hearing about the necessity of suffering.

“I think that sometimes people in Roman Catholic circles or more broadly speaking, Christian circles, can be perceived as being a bit masochistic in terms of saying, ‘I want to suffer so that I can become more like Jesus,’ ” said Lasair. “Certainly, in my own spirituality, there's been times where I've felt something like that. But I think the reality is that for suffering to be suffering, it's never pleasant and often it's rarely welcome.”

The question is not about how to eliminate suffering, he added, but rather “it’s how can I go through this time of suffering and come out all right on the other side?”

The framework introduced by Lasair in “Theological, Strategic and Operational Reflections Supporting a Distinctly Roman Catholic Approach to Healthcare in Canada” is called “from suffering, through death, embracing resurrection.”

Death, in this context, does not solely allude to the expiration of the physical body. It also alludes to the “ending of hopes, of dreams, of a sense of self or of a specific sense of identity” amid suffering, wrote Lasair, as such endings “can be experienced as kinds of deaths.”

As for resurrection, Lasair said it stands for human flourishing in a health-care milieu.

By adopting a “from suffering, through death, embracing resurrection” compassionate care mentality, Lasair suggests Roman Catholic health-care institutions could offer a healing ministry evoking the Good Samaritan’s example so “patients, family members and caregivers alike (have) opportunities to experience the power of the Resurrection in their own lives.”

Alluding to how Christ descended to the place of the dead so that the formerly dead can become alive again through His saving power, Lasair advocated that “those who seek to further Jesus’ healing ministry must, like Jesus, join with those they want to liberate from death’s strongholds.” He elaborated that it’s “through the depth of connection between caregivers and care-receivers that care-receivers can be liberated from the ontological and existential shackles produced by their illnesses, disabilities or deaths, and enter into a new and revitalized way of living.”

Ultimately, it all comes back to accompaniment. While there are already aspects of walking together incorporated in the provision of care at Roman Catholic health-care facilities, Lasair urges these organizations to bolster their caregiving cultures so that this spirit of kind-hearted solidarity is evident in every point of service interaction.

“By being accompanied by various caregivers through suffering and both literal and metaphorical deaths, patients, families and other loved ones can therefore experience a hastened and renewed engagement with life once the intensity of a medical crisis has subsided,” said Lasair.

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He also advocates for a further adoption of spiritual care and arts-based services for palliative care patients to achieve a true team approach to palliative care. While physicians, pharmacists and nurses take care of physical needs, the spiritual care and arts-based practitioners can tend to a patient’s emotional, relational and spiritual health.

Finally, to secure potential secular or governmental funding, Lasair declared that Roman Catholic institutions offering compassionate accompaniment-based care must be able to articulate and demonstrate how the distinctiveness of their approach leads to superior clinical outcomes. This requires hospitals and clinics to have a firm command of why they do what they do and for the entire staff to embody these core values.  

(Amundson is an associate editor and writer for The Catholic Register.)

A version of this article appeared in the September 06, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "In appreciation of Catholic health care"