Medicine and Religion

When I received your Secretary’s invitation to address the Midland Catholic Medical Society, I was moved to accept by the fact that the very title of your Society showed that you expressly associate medicine and religion, or rather medicine and a particular outlook on religion; and I felt that, if it could be done without impertinence, it might be helpful to trace some of the consequences of such an association.While you are medical men and women engaged in medicine, but so engaged with a definite theological and religious outlook, I would open my remarks by referring to the converse case of a theologian who approaches his theological work from a standpoint fixed towards science. At the time when your invitation reached me, I had just come across a passage in a Protestant theological work which I had had occasion to consult, in which the writer shows how certain of his convictions in the sphere of modern medical science have patently affected his theology. Discussing Christ’s reference to the possession of individuals by evil spirits, this theologian assumes that Christ was accepting beliefs now outworn, the general beliefs of His time in regard to demon-possession, that ‘in fact, in matters of human science, our Lord’s information did not extend beyond what a man, born and educated as He was, might naturally have acquired.’ The theologian has drawn that conclusion through his acceptance of modern medical views of disease. He is regarding Christ’s interpretation of the origin of particular types of disease as unsound on the assumption that the modern medical interpretation of such disease is sound. Granted that either Christ or modern medicine must be right, the theologian whom I am quoting comes down on the side of modern medicine. Now I assume that Catholics would conclude, on the contrary, that if one of these two must be wrong, then modern medicine must be that one.