European Network of Health Care Chaplaincy

All Hallows College, Dublin

Thursday 2nd September, 2004

President of Ireland, Mrs Mary McAleese

Dia dhíbh a cháirde. Is breá liom bheith anseo i bhúr measc inniu ag an ócaíd speisialta seo, agus ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a chur in iúl díbh as an chuireadh agus as fáilte fíorchaoin.

Good morning and welcome to the Eighth Consultation of the European Network of Health Care Chaplaincy. I have Kathleen O’Connor to thank for the privilege of being with you to open this gathering of men and women whose unique vocation takes them deeply and often precipitately into the lives and the suffering of complete strangers. You are a remarkable and crucial part of the heath care team but the one who arrives without medicine or machines, the one who addresses not the illness itself but the fears, the anxieties, the doubts, the anger, the cynicism, the distress, the multiplicity of concerns that illness provokes that no drug or surgery has an answer for.

The existential and spiritual dimension of suffering, illness and death is as real as the physical pain. It creates a very testing and challenging set of needs and you are the people who have responded to that challenge. Your skills offer the chance for peace of mind, for healing of a different sort, for empathy and company on the lonely journey that illness can be. You can nudge people to courage, support their family and friends when their spirits wane or come close to wearing out. You bring a holistic dimension to medical training, broadening the spectrum of experience and insight of medical professionals. That is why you are such an important part of the health-care teams serving patients.

As children we were always taught that one of the great corporal works of mercy was visiting the sick. Your vocation is that work of mercy and through your distilled professional experience and wisdom you have brought new levels of skill and effectiveness to health care chaplaincy.

You understand more than most that imperative of showing to every person an unconditional life-affirming respect for their dignity and worth as human beings. In your daily work you do much to assert and reveal the capacity we have for compassion and for care, daily witnesses to the reality that we are not indifferent to the suffering of others and that their pain is our concern no matter who or what they are.

The skill of consoling calls for very special gifts and we are grateful that you have them and that you choose to use them in the way that you do. I applaud the ecumenical spirit in which you meet together. Your commitment to providing services of divine worship according to one’s traditions in a non-intrusive, non-invasive, way is admirable and rooted in that utter respect for the person at the centre of the chaplaincy service, the questioning, uncertain suffering human being. Everyone’s needs are different, and, more to the point, people’s beliefs can be very different. I am reminded of the words of Ulster poet John Hewett, who said:

For now I scorn no man’s or child’s belief
in any symbol that may succour grief
if we remember whence life first arose
and how within us yet that river flows:

I hope that this 8th Consultation of the European Network of Health Care Chaplaincy will be a great success and a satisfying experience for all who attend. I hope that here you will share the great resource that is your individual experience, that you will learn from each other and teach each other and that you will feel renewed and re-energised in what is a very tough, demanding and draining profession. Ultimately no one has to let you share their grief, their brokenness and it is a huge privilege to be invited into such a profoundly difficult part of human life. That privilege brings its rewards but also its tests its difficulties. Here in Dublin may you be refilled, refuelled for the journey ahead. We have a saying here – two shortens the journey and that is what you each do.

I wish you well in your deliberations and every success in your wonderful work in the cause of others.

Go n-eirí go geal libh. Go raibh míle maith agaibh.
 

Coordinator of ENHCC welcomes President McAleese

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