Ministers of Life: A Call to Mission for Healthcare Workers

In its new charter, the Vatican calls on healthcare workers to be ministers of life. This is a challenging task and a most noble mission. The mission field itself is the vast, complex and mysterious field of suffering (Pope John Paul II). For Catholic healthcare professionals, it is not so much to have a mission, but to be a mission on this earth, as Pope Francis often reminds us. The daily mission needs to be nourished by a commensurate spirituality. Each deed can be offered to the Lord as part of our response. Healthcare professionals may feel called to specific mission fields too, such as working to reduce the culture of gun violence or to promote the culture of life. The ongoing formation of conscience is a vital prerequisite, so we can continually respond to the novel ethical challenges that progress in technology and medicine inevitably bring. May we each respond enthusiastically to the call to mission: “Here I am Lord, send me!” (Isaiah 6:8).

Brain–Machine Interfaces as Commodities: Exchanging Mind for Matter

Brain–machine interfaces (BMIs), which enable a two-way flow of signals, information, and directions between human neurons and computerized machines, offer spectacular opportunities for therapeutic and consumer applications, but they also present unique dangers to the safety, privacy, psychological health, and spiritual well-being of their users. The sale of these devices as commodities for profit exacerbates such issues and may subject the user to an unequal exchange with corporations. Catholic healthcare professionals and bioethicists should be especially concerned about the implications for the essential dignity of the persons using the new BMIs. Summary: The commercial sale of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) generates and exacerbates problems for end-users' safety, psychological health, and spiritual well-being.

Women’s Reproductive Health Education in Catholic Academic Healthcare Institutions: Time for Transparency, Authenticity, and Reflection

This article illustrates the tensions between the precepts of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Healthcare Services and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education as they apply to education in obstetrics and gynecology, and argues that moving forward, Catholic sponsorship of obstetric and gynecologic residencies now requires transparency, authenticity, and reflection in order to mitigate these inherent tensions.

Testing for Down Syndrome in Catholic Health Care: Complicity in Eugenic Abortion

Catholic healthcare institutions, physicians, and midwives routinely employ testing for Down syndrome as a part of prenatal care. This testing is an essential part of eugenic abortion and often leads to it. Catholic teaching clearly forbids such testing when undertaken with abortive intent if the baby has Down syndrome or other abnormalities. This article discusses (1) the evolution of prenatal genetic testing and abortion, (2) how this testing may involve complicity in eugenic abortion, and (3) offers proposals to avoid and end Catholic healthcare’s cooperation with this evil. Summary: This article discusses why prenatal genetic testing as practiced in many Catholic healthcare institutions is ethically problematic and then proposes solutions.

Pope Francis and Catholic Healthcare Ethics

This article examines the influence of Pope Francis on Catholic healthcare ethics. The first section offers an analytical summary of his ethics. The second section reviews a “Franciscan” approach to Catholic healthcare ethics, which situates that field within the broader context of Catholic social teaching. The third section analyzes the implications of three of Francis’s most powerful metaphors: his injunction to “go to the peripheries”; his contrast between a throwaway culture and a culture of encounter; and his comparison of the church to a field hospital.

Transhumanist Medicine: Can We Direct Its Power to the Service of Human Dignity?

The medicalization of transhumanist technologies demands our prompt and undivided attention. This article surveys the principal body/mind enhancement goals of transhumanist medicine and the means it would employ—genetic, robo, info-, and nanotechnologies—to accomplish those ends (Part One). Second, it engages Christian anthropological and natural law principles to evaluate the populist and essentialist concerns these therapeutic/enhancement interventions provoke (Part Two). And, third, it proposes formation of a Catholic medical think tank to appraise whether transhumanist biotechnologies can serve human dignity and, to the extent they can, to formulate wise clinical/administrative guidelines for their inclusion in US Catholic healthcare settings (Part Three). Nontechnical summary: This article explores the body/mind enhancement goals of transhumanist medicine, evaluates the biotechnological means to accomplish those therapeutic/enhancement goals, and suggests the formation of a Catholic medical think tank to formulate wise clinical/administrative guidelines for the inclusion of genetic, robo, info-, and nanotechnologies in US Catholic healthcare settings.