Body and Spirit: How Jesuit Chaplains Are Giving Hope to the Sick

By William Bole

About five years ago, Father Mark McGregor, SJ, was wrapping up a nearly decade-long stint as an Air Force chaplain, and he decided to take a quick pilgrimage in Spain, retracing the footsteps of St. Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century. One of the steps on that solo tour was a hospital where the Jesuit founder lived and served for a while in the Basque country. Ignatius, who grew up there, had been struggling with health problems himself while in Paris, but when he arrived in his homeland, he chose not to stay with family members nearby and convalesce in comfort. Instead, the saint cast his lot with the poorest of the poor at a charity hospital, feeding them, cleaning them, living among them and providing spiritual care, as Fr. McGregor relates.

“He got caught up in other people’s healing,” the priest says. “That sense of humility, generosity and solidarity—I felt it right there in that hospital.” The experience led Fr. McGregor to make a request about his next assignment: He wanted to be a health care chaplain.

Hospital ministry is not the first thing that comes to mind when people think about the Jesuits, who are far better known for their high schools and colleges. But caring for the sick and dying has been part of Jesuit life since even before the Society of Jesus was officially founded in 1540. “Wherever the Jesuits went, they eventually found their way to the hospitals,” tending to the physical and spiritual needs of patients, wrote the eminent Jesuit historian Father John O’Malley in his book The First Jesuits. “This became almost routine for members of a Jesuit community of any size.” To this day, the early stage of Jesuit formation (the novitiate) usually includes ministry in a health care setting. And some Jesuits go on to make this their permanent ministry.

In Jesuits West, there are at least 10 priests, including Fr. McGregor, serving full-time as health care chaplains. They can be found in the emergency room, helping people without health insurance get the care they need, as well as providing spiritual comfort; at the veterans hospital, ministering to former soldiers who often suffer from addiction and post-traumatic stress and have high rates of suicide; in the hospice, caring for those who are dying alone; and in less favorable conditions abroad.

They’re doing that and more in places ranging from Los Angeles and Seattle to Phoenix and Belize, where Frederico Gianelli, SJ, a Jesuit in formation, is working in palliative and hospice care, in one of the poorest sections of Belize City. Gianelli makes clear his inspiration, speaking of health care chaplaincy as “our founder’s first ministry. I believe it was in the heart of St. Ignatius, in the heart of the first Jesuits, as they founded the Society of Jesus.”

These days, it isn’t enough for Jesuits and others in the health care chaplaincy to be saintly. They usually need to go through hundreds of hours of specialized training in Clinical Pastoral Education programs accredited by the interfaith Association of Clinical Pastoral Education. They also participate in a formal process of assessments that lead to board certification as chaplains. Clearly, these Jesuits aren’t taking it easy—and they aren’t looking to play it safe either.

Fr. McGregor began his hospital chaplaincy with a residency at a veterans hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in the early throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recalling those frightful days in 2020, he says, in all seriousness, that there was “no finer time” to arrive on the front lines of health care because the need to give hope and comfort to the sick was never greater.

Likewise, Father Mark Ciccone, SJ, got his start in this ministry during the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis while in theology studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of his Jesuit formation. Someone from an AIDS outreach group approached him in 1983 about serving as a volunteer minister, and, as Fr. Ciccone recalls, “I didn’t think about it. I just said ‘yes’.” The priest also recalls that a minute later, he asked himself, “What did I just say?”

But he says he realized immediately that Jesuits “needed to be there very early in that pandemic,” ministering to people living with HIV/AIDS who were being treated at the time like lepers and outcasts. He continued as an AIDS minister for 15 years, more than half that time as a chaplain at an AIDS hospice in Los Angeles.

For more than 18 years, Fr. Ciccone has carried on what he calls “priest-craft” as a senior chaplain at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Los Angeles, tending to the physical and spiritual needs of a variety of patients. When he steps into a hospital room, he doesn’t go straight to the blessings. He leaves the spiritual talk for later and starts off the conversation by asking the patients how they’re feeling and what they need in general. They might say they’re uninsured and are worrying about paying for the care, in which case Fr. Ciccone could link them up with a social worker. They might have concerns about their pain medication, and the priest will tell them that he’ll talk with their nurse or doctor.

“It’s like a concierge service,” he says, adding that he, like all Jesuits, takes care of the whole person—mind, body, heart and soul—not just the part of a person that gets the “spiritual” label.

“Hospitals are scary places. You get poked, prodded, questioned, woken up in the middle of the night” to have your blood pressure taken or for some other reason, says Fr. Ciccone. “It’s a hard place to be. Any way we could ease their way here, we do it. And when the time comes, if the patient so chooses, we get into the nitty-gritty of spiritual life.”

The inner life can be a place of turmoil for patients, and the men and women who have served in the armed forces often find themselves on this emotional and spiritual battleground. Many of them suffer from what psychologists call “moral injury,” which is when someone does something that violates their own sense of right and wrong, or when they fail to do something they should have done, according to their moral code. “They can experience enormous amounts of guilt and shame, to the point where they feel unforgivable, especially extending to God,” says Father Charles Barnes, SJ, a chaplain at VA Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle, where he works with his fellow Jesuit, Fr. McGregor, who arrived there after his residency in Sioux Falls.

This sense of injury goes hand in hand with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, says Fr. Barnes, who previously worked as an airport chaplain in several cities and led teams that prepared for emergency responses to air disasters (which fortunately did not occur). He gives the example of soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and faced harrowing choices about whether to shoot at children who may or may not have been wearing suicide vests as they approached convoys of American soldiers. Fr. Barnes says children were brainwashed into doing that, and it was often hard to see if they were wearing the vests under other clothing or if they were just walking home from school. There were times when the Americans shot at children who, as it turns out, weren’t about to blow up the convoy, and times when they didn’t shoot—and the convoy blew up, taking the lives of fellow service members. Sometimes they had orders to fire; sometimes they had to act quickly and shoot on their own. And in the wake of tragic miscalculations, moral injury sets in, wreaking havoc on their emotional and spiritual health.

Fr. Barnes is studying evidence-based practices for treating such conditions as part of his doctoral work in mental health chaplaincy at Vanderbilt University. As a chaplain and a Jesuit, he works with veterans on rebuilding their ability to trust, giving them space to talk about their trauma and leading them to an understanding of the moral injury they have suffered. If they say they want to reconnect with God, Fr. Barnes then leads veterans through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, an adaptation that draws on military metaphors. He helps them take on the spiritual enemy that is causing their feelings of desolation and move toward a sense of how God is serving together with them in that battle. Along the way, Fr. Barnes is “mirroring God’s unconditional love” and letting them know they’re “loveable,” which is something they desperately need to hear, he says. They’re starting to repair their relationship with God.

“There’s a myth that people have—that they could go back to who they were before the trauma happened. They want to do that but it’s not possible. An experience like this becomes part of your identity, so the role of a chaplain is to help them find meaning in the trauma, and in doing that, they could make the suffering easier to bear,” says Fr. Barnes, who does this work both in-person and remotely, with inpatients and outpatients.

Though it’s often a challenge to bring a sense of peace to people in their care, chaplains in the United States at least have the advantages of modern health infrastructures and resources at major hospitals, including fellow chaplains and others they collaborate with. That’s not the case in Belize City, where Gianelli ministers to hospice patients and wears other hats that include fundraising and administering palliative care (which has the purpose of easing the pain and stress of a serious illness).

Gianelli had his first glimpse of what compassionate care could be when he was a high school student in Uruguay. At the time, he came down with a serious eye condition and was admitted to a rundown public hospital with peeling paint, missing windowpanes, and no bed linens or other minimal comforts. While his mother scrambled to find what he needed, other patients and their families made sure to bring him dinner, and throughout his stay, they and some staff members “showed me the beauty of kindness and solidarity in a very bad place,” he recalls. “That experience of human love in the mix of human suffering changed my life forever.”

Still a teenager in the mid-1990s, Gianelli entered a minor (high school) seminary and began ministering as what he calls a “semi-chaplain” at a hospital in Montevideo. He later immigrated to the United States and entered the Jesuit novitiate in Culver City, California, in 2017, before serving as a campus minister at Verbum Dei Jesuit High School in Los Angeles.

Now in Belize, he ministers to hospice patients exclusively in their own dwellings, people who don’t have anyone to care for them. He does that because the lay-founded and Jesuit-funded Belize Hospice Palliative Care Foundation, where he works, doesn’t have a facility of its own, just the first floor of a Jesuit parish rectory where they have an office and storage space for medicines, wheelchairs and other supplies, but no room for patient care. So he is leading an effort to raise money to build a hospice “where we could take care of those, like in St. Ignatius’ time, who don’t have material or human resources to take care of them, the poorest of the poor,” Gianelli explains. “That is my mission in Belize, to open a facility for those who are dying alone.” It would be the first hospice facility in Belize and would have an educational mission as well, teaching health care professionals about palliative and hospice care.

Other Jesuits West ministers in health care settings include Fathers John Galvan, SJ (Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California); Manuel Chavira, SJ (Providence St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, California); Kevin Clarke, SJ (Providence Portland Medical Center and Laurelhurst Village in Portland, Oregon); James LaCasse, SJ (Nazareth House Assisted Living in Fresno, California); John Rashford, SJ (Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington); Richard Cobb, SJ (infirmary chaplain, Sacred Heart Jesuit Center, Los Gatos, California); and Kevin Dilworth, SJ (Creighton University Health Sciences Campus in Phoenix).

These and other Jesuits in the health care chaplaincy will often speak of the privilege of being present with the sick and all others in hospitals, including families and health care personnel to whom the chaplains also minister.

“They say that in a hospital each day you encounter those whose life on earth is just beginning and those whose lives are coming to an end,” says Fr. Dilworth, who serves as a chaplain to medical students and others on Creighton’s Phoenix campus as well as to patients at Dignity St. Joseph’s Hospital, which Creighton partners with. “It’s a humbling gift to share those experiences with patients and families. There’s such a need for hope in our world, and to be able to bring Christian hope to our brothers and sisters—that’s one of the greatest gifts we can give them.”