The author focuses on the potential for many healthcare institutions currently called ‘Catholic’ to lose their genuine Roman Catholic identity, and he offers suggestions for the future of the Catholic identity of Catholic healthcare institutions. The author then considers one particular task of the Catholic hospital, that of showing a preferential option for the poor. Some of the threats to this task are highlighted. The author concludes with some suggestions for the renewal of Catholic identity in Catholic healthcare institutions.

In The Anticipatory Corpse, Jeffrey Bishop claims that modern medicine has lost formal and final causality as the dead body has become epistemologically normative, and that a singular focus on efficient and material causality has thoroughly distorted modern medical practice. Bishop implies that the renewal of medicine will require its housing in alternate social spaces. This essay critiques both Bishop’s diagnosis and therapy by arguing, first, that alternate social imaginaries, though perhaps marginalized, are already present within the practice of medicine. (...) And second, the essay argues that alternate social imaginaries in medicine can be reclaimed not through separatist communities but in the re-narration of conceptually underdetermined practices. Given Bishop’s invitation for theology to engage medicine, this essay then draws from theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the kind of diagnosis and therapy currently needed, concluding with a contemporary example of how an alternate social imaginary is being instantiated in modern medicine. (shrink)