The conviction that Christ makes clean what was unclean animates the Christian tradition and urges on us the duty to visit the sick. This conviction also links, in the Catholic tradition, two sacraments in particular as the “sacraments of healing”: reconciliation and anointing of the sick. The connection is already present, of course, in the words of our Lord: “They that are sick need the physician,” he said, noting that he had come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance (see Mark 2:17).
Once again, the image of sickness of body and sickness of soul were linked, but once again sickness was not identified with sinfulness. Similarly, in each of these sacraments the relationship of sin and sickness is noted, yet the Church also does not make the mistake of conflating them, as though sickness were a surefire proof of God’s wrath. That’s why there is a distinction between the sacraments—Reconciliation for the sinner, Anointing for the sick—yet the sacrament of Anointing, while certainly directed at physical healing, is also intended primarily for spiritual healing.
It should be noted that beyond the sacramental life of the Church, what the tradition commends as a work of mercy is visiting the sick, not curing the sick. The goal was not the development of the science of medicine (though that became a happy side effect as the Christian tradition invented the hospital system and encouraged the growth of the sciences). Rather, visiting the sick brings the human dignity of the sufferer into view. Being around illness means being around vomit, pus, running sores, blood, stool, mucus, ghastly injuries, tears, misery, fear, anger, pain, and death. All the corporal work of mercy asks of us, at its most basic, is to screw our courage to the sticking point and have the guts to enter a room, sit down, and hold somebody’s fevered hand. And even that is often more than we can muster.
There are, of course, good reasons for that, especially if we happen to live in a time of plague when nobody knows what causes a disease. Part of the reason the Black Death broke the back of medieval Europe is that it decimated the very classes of people (doctors, priests, and other educated people) who lived out this corporal work of mercy—and thus contracted the plague. It takes real courage— and often a strong stomach—to visit the sick.
It can also require moral courage. The Veronica legend reminds us of the stigma that can attach to those who reach out to sufferers. Veronica had the face of the sufferer impressed on her cloth—and her soul—forever. No small part of that is because she had the raw courage to stick out of the crowd. While everybody else either watched Jesus stumble by or, worse still, joined in screaming at him that he would be better off dead (a sentiment as contemporary as our euthanasia culture), Veronica was moved to do this small yet immense act of kindness for the sufferer. She thereby became emblematic of the courage to visit those who suffer not only from bodily illness but from moral disease as well. Veronica had not the slightest idea who this condemned criminal was. He was just part of the rabble Rome had sentenced to die. Judging from the screaming crowd, he might have been a very bad man indeed. Yet she saw his bloody face––and he gave her that face to remember forever. In that moment she became the mother of every saint willing to visit the sick and the sinner, embracing the defilement that conventionality shuns.
Here is one such saint, Catherine of Siena, writing of her care for the condemned criminal Nicolo di Toldo, who asked her to be with him at his execution and whose death she describes:
I have just taken a head into my hands and have been moved so deeply that my heart cannot grasp it…. I waited for him at the place of execution…. [H]e arrived like a meek lamb and when he saw me he began to smile. He asked me to make the sign of the cross over him…. I stretched out his neck and bent down to him, reminding him of the blood of the Lamb. His lips kept murmuring only “Jesus” and “Catherine,” and he was still murmuring when I received his head into my hands…. [M]y soul rested in peace and quiet, so aware of the fragrance of blood that I could not remove the blood which had splashed on to me.
The urging of our Lord to visit the sick is, at bottom, the insistence that we see the sick—including those suffering from the sickness called sin—as Catherine of Siena did. It is the call to put faces to names, to honor their human dignity. Instead of calling them “the appendectomy in Room 8” or “that loser that everybody hates” or “that burden on society,” we are to call them by their proper names and look them in the eye. The statistical bent of our culture is against this. In our culture without mercy, much can be excused but nothing can be forgiven. So sinners are to be thrown away, not redeemed. As Malcolm Muggeridge observed, to say that God cares more for the one lost sheep than for the ninety and nine who are not lost is “an anti-statistical proposition.”
In a cash-strapped culture full of aging Baby Boomers who are only going to cost more as they age and sicken, this will soon be a subversive and anti-American remark. For as we deal with the morally sick mercilessly, so we shall soon deal with the physically sick and especially the aged. What else can we expect from a culture that kills a million and a half perfectly healthy babies every year for their sin of being inconvenient? The push, which is already well under way, is not to visit the sick but to hurry them on to the grave, lest they destroy what is left of our economy with their selfish desire to not be murdered by efficient cost-cutting bean counters. Christians who oppose this will soon find themselves the subject of intense legal pressure to play ball and kill off the expensive and used-up geezers, just as they already find themselves the subject of intense pressure to play ball and kill the unborn. When that day arrives, we may again find an appreciation for a Veronican spirituality that looks at the face of the sufferer instead of turning away and babbling happy talk about how he or she will be better off dead. Or we may cave to the culture. Our choice. But whatever we choose, we will still, sooner or later, face the verdict of the King who teaches (and warns) that whatever we do to the least of these, we do to him.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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