Tomasovich, John

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The Linacre QuarterlyVolume 33 | Number 4 Article 20November 1966Doctor, Is There a Father in the House?John TomasovichFollow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/lnqRecommended CitationTomasovich, John (1966) "Doctor, Is There a Father in the House?," The Linacre Quarterly: Vol. 33 : No. 4 , Article 20.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/lnq/vol33/iss4/20Doctor, Is There A Father In The Ho �? REVEREND JOHN ToMASOVICH The twist in the title of my talk this afternoon reminds · me of an­other situation with an unusual ending. One day a teenage girl came into church during confession time. It was evident she was extremely nervous, and her prayers went some­thing like this: "Dear Lord, I kissed a boy last night and I'm so ashamed of myself. I'm embarrassed and don't know how to tell this to father in confession. I'm afraid and I'm nervous. What am I to do?" In the meantime, sitting in the confessional was a newly ordained priest who was getting ready to experience his first · afternoon of hearing confes­sions. He was also praying some­thing like this: "Dear Lord, I'm nervous because this is the first time I will hear confessions. Help me not to say the wrong thing or give the wrong advice. Lord, don't let me forget the formula for confession. Don't send any difficult penitents today. Please help me because I am so nervous." Finally the young girl went into the confessional box and was waiting, with fear in her heart, for the slide to open. When father finally did open the slide, she blurted out immediately: "Kiss me father, for I have sinned." To which he replied immediately, "How many times?" However, this title does indicate that there exists a serious basic con­flict of obligations in the life of every dedicated medical man. On one hand, by reason of his profes­sion, he has an obligation to his 370 patients. Having freely 2.: ingly chosen a medical er must dedicate himself to and cure of all those who help, who place themselve hands and· seek him out C: ingly, time after time. Ont_ hand, he has an obligatio: not only entails the prov1 food, clothi;ng and educa1 them, but, as head of the hi owes the complete giving of � his love, affection and assist his wife together with the ca·. and training of his children. will­:, he care -_( his 1 his :.and­::>ther vhich _g of � for e, he 1self, -: , to , for The problem stems from -�· .::. sad fact that it is difficult to fulf ·. the obligation of a husband and .ther adequately, if he is absent frc the family a greater part of th day practicing his vocation of hr · ing. Here the conflict lies - Hov an he fulfill both these equally s. us time and self-demanding obliga ms? Let us examine some examp: � of this conflict in practice. A : rnn knows that dedication to the c use of medicine is certainly a voca · - n. He knows further that this vocf:t �on will make many demands on !1is time and his talents, that he - -:ill often have to defer his persc. .ml wishes and desires for the gooc· of his patients. But, before he has zn finished medical school or inte,n­ship, he makes another choice f vocation - that of marriage. So, �1e has assumed further obligativ,1s which are even more sacred a:-1d solemn, namely: to love and care f- r LIN ACRE QUARTER Y his wife and children and to prepare them for eternity. Both of these obligations are assumed in circum­stances where their fulfillment is most difficult. The young medical student must give every minute of .his time to prepare himself for the art of medicine; · both in theory and in practice. As a resident he is "on call" frequently. In many instances, he will seek out as many added sources of income as possible in order to further support his family. This means his wife is home alone most of the time and her task becomes boring and even bother­some because she has no one to share her thoughts and feelings. When the doctor-father is home, he usually needs his rest or he must be. left alone to study and read. This results in strain and tension which aggravates each other's feel­ings and leads to mutual blame and misunderstandings. After a man arrives at an exten­sive practice, his position· is in no way improved. He is so busy he is still not home much. His hours are irregular. It is difficult to make family plans and much needed rec­reation and social life are always in jeopardy of cancellation. This has a tendency tC? increase bickering which leads the doctor to seek escape in his practic�. Now, we have a vicious circle. His colleagues and patients consider him a top man in his field, but his wife is unhappy, his children hardly know him and he spends most of his time either at the office or the hospital or the club. What is the solution? I don't presume to present you with a sim-NovEMBER, 1966 ple answer, fo · r " 1.1spect that there is an .analogy h•'twcen the lives of priests and doc-tm.:: .I secretly have the opinion that t lie> Church enjoins celibacy on her pi j,, t_:sons because she knows they ,vould make terrible husbands. Please don't conclude that I think all doctors make poor husbands. Rather, only if the prob­lem is clearly understood and recog­nized as a problem both by the doctor and his wife, and can be discussed without anger, with patience, understanding. and good will, some practical solution can be achieved. You know this because all of you here have wrested with this problem at one time or another: I think there are two main con­siderations needed for the reconcil­ing of this two-fold obligation of the doctor and the father. First, he must completely understand his role of father and husband and, second, he must establish a correct sense of values in relation to his profession and his family. What is the role of the father and husband? Well, the father can be .considered a creator: The example of all Fatherhood is God, the Cre­ator of His children to whom He continually manifests His loving providence. The mark of a �rue father is found in the consc10us sense of his responsibility for the physical and spiritual well-b:ing of his wife and children and his con­stant concern and loving solicitude for them. Further, his task is the creation of a Christian home-life for his family. He must decide where the family must live, how he shall provide for it, create the cor­rect atmosphere that shall pervade 371 the relationships of all those who are bound to his care. The father can be considered also as a lover. St. Thomas gives the best working definition of what love is when he said, "to love is to will the good of the other." True love is not turned inward but is directed to others. The father must realize that he must act and live in such a way that the good and happiness of his wife and his children are his primary concern. This love must be a profound commitment for their good. This love must know no limit. The father will soon discover this as it must open up to the children born of his love for his wife. The child; in his earliest years will know only one thing - whether or not he himself is loved. This knowledge which flows into the baby's con­sciousness with the very milk it drinks, by the air that it breathes and the way it is ha.ndled, is crucial to the infant. We are told by psy­chologists that the· physically and mentally healthy child is the child. secure in the love of its parents and this pertains especially to the father. Love must be the motivating force of the husband's authority. His position as ruler of his home must be used always to achieve the fam­ily's highest possible good and not just his own good. The man who does not see his authority as essen­tially a means whereby he serves those under his rule neither knows what authority is nor deserves to have it. A husband can be considered in the role of Christ. In the fifth chapter in St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians we read "the man is the 372 head to which the woman's Jdy is united, just as Christ is the ·�ad of the Church, He, the Savic on whom the safety of his bod de­pends; and the woman mus )We obedience at an points to thei : us­bands as the Church does to C: st." This obedience of the wife not based upon fear but flows fro: her relationship with her husbanc· fhe husband has a responsibili of guarding and caring for his ·ife; she is dependent upon him fhe ultimate meaning of the wife: Jbe­dience and the husband's he[ .3hip is that the marriage of ma1 and wife images the eternal uni of Christ and His Church. Wifel· Jbe­dience is nothing else but · fely love. A woman who can rely pon her husband is a woman lib< 1ted from a man's responsibility a l is free to be more fully a wife. Ir:. �ed, if a woman does not know his submissiveness then she is urn ·are of wifely love, :remains unfulfil: { as a woman and her husband, for ant of a wife's love, will remain st' .ted in his growth as a man. The ms­band is .Christ-like by being un­hesitatingly selfless. Remember his, the material things of this , ,rld are far less important to a we .ian than the knowledge that sr is loved, wanted, needed by her ,us­band. Only in the security of ·Hs knowledge can she give totall of herself. The more perfectly a .us­band identifies the headship of his family with the headship of CL ist, the more he strives to protect l ,:m­self, to pattern himself and his 1Jv­ing after Christ, the more perfc tly will his marriage image the union of Christ and His Church. LIN ACRE QuARTfrL Y The father can also be considered as a P�!est a�d his fa�ilr, can �ecalled · ecclesia domest1ca . . . a family church" to which he minis­ters. Although you are aware of a sharing in the Priesthood of Christ .by reason of baptism and confirma­tion, this is also· true in a particular manner through your sacrament of matrimony. The father is the spir­itual leader of his family-community and shares, in common with the priests of the church, the responsi­bilities of teacher and caretaker of the souls within this community. This ministry of teaching and care is to be manifested not only in words but pre-eminently by attitude and action. At this point, may I suggest a simple and beautiful cus­tom for you, fathers, the custom of giving the parental blessing to your childr_en each night after their eve­ning prayers. This can be done simply by making the sign of the cross on the forehead of each child and saying words to· this effect: "I bless you and may God keep you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen." This simple pri;i.ctice certainly will have a double salutary effect, on the father because it will be a constant reminder to fulfill his role ever more perfectly,. and, on the chil­dren, because it will dignify his image in their own lives. This is certainly a wonderful exercise of the lay priesthood. The father is also the breadwinner of his family. Everyone usually understands this evident aspect of fatherhood. It is my opinion that most doctors sin in this manner more from excess than from neglect. NOVEMBER, 1966 Maybe it is psycl'..clogically resultant from so many years of striving and sacrifice. N �verthe less, it can quite easily happen that the doctor, as a father, can become only the person who pays the bills. While a father is morally bound to provide for his family, to meet their real needs, he must not so exert his talents, to exhaust his powers, to strive for all the unneeded luxuries and, therebv, neglect the spiritual welfare of tho;e to whom he is irrevocably bound. A father must not attribute to money a power it does riot have - the power to fill the emptiness created in the human soul when love is absent. These thoughts on fatherhood, if remembered, certainly will help to ease the tension that exists between the roles of doctor and father. In the second place, I mentioned above there is a need to set up a right order of values of what comes· first in your life. Is there an order of precedence? There certainly is -GOD-FAMILY -MEDICINE. God comes first because He. is the ulti­mate end and goal of the Christian life. The family is second to God. The father will achieve his union with God in relation to how well he fulfills his vocation as father. The vocation of medicine, a vocation within a vocation, then follows as a means of helping him to attain the first two goals. Therefore, the practice of medicine must be a help rather than a hindrance in his .ori­entation to God and to his family. To understand this order of values will not automatically solve this problem in practice, but it will solve this conflict in the mind and this is 373 important for peace of mind. How­ever, how to solve it in practice?· Each one must seek his own solu­tion. For one, it may mean that he may have to cut down on his patient load; for another, he may feel con­strained to refer more frequently to younger physicians; for yet another, it may mean less socializing and recreating alone and more family­centered recreation; and for another, it may simply mean developing the courage to say no to many other extraneous commitments. There is no doubt that ther mst be a father in the house, m lear doctors. In order to rise to a lfill-ment of this vocation, yot ust often reassess the meaning of her-hood and its importance, an ray for the courage, wisdom anc ;race to incarnate that meaning ir our­self for your family. This is an address given by Fati To­masovich to the Catholic Physiciar: ::;uild of New Orleans at a Brunch follm ,g the White Mass last year. ADVICE TO AUTHORS Articles on topics of potential interest to the Catholic physician as a Cat lie and as a physician are earnestly solicited. A goodly portion of THE LINACRE Q ,R­TERLY readers are not members of the medical profession but are engaged in a ed health fields, teach moral theology, or serve in hospitals, and material for 1 �ir benefit would also be welcome. The subject matter may be predominantly p lo­sophical, religious, or medico-moral in nature. Material should be typewri ·n, double-spaced, with good margins and on one side of the paper only. Manusc )ts (original and one copy) should be submitted to the Editorial Office of Tm, LIN RE QUARTERLY, 1438 South Grand Blvd., St. Louis, Missouri, 63104. One additi< ·al copy should be retained by the author. Full editorial privileges are reserved. Rt 'r­ences if used should appear at the end of the article and should conform to the u, ge of the Index Medicus. (This format is that employed in the Abstract Section of' rn LINACRE QUARTERLY.) A brief but pertinent curriculum vitae of the author(s) shr ,Id accompany the manuscript .. The Thomas Linacre Award is made annually to he author(s) of the original article adjudged to be the best to appear in THE LIN/, RE QuARTERL Y during each calendar year. 374 LIN ACRE QUAR1 J:RLY Medicine And The New Programs For Catastrophic Illness MICHAEL J. BRENNAN, M.D., F.A.C.P. Sometimes in looking at the fu­ture it helps a little to look at the past, inasmuch as one can think of the future as a projection or out­growth of the past. Dualisms have a way of ansmg out of every kind of analytical dis­course. Something fundamental in the mode of operation of the ra­tional intellect appears to make them inevitable; self and non-self, spirit and matter, matter and anti­matter in modern physics, health and illness, life and death, statism and freedom, stimulus and response, good and evil. These are all ex­amples of that polarization toward which logical analysis, beginning with the observation of disparateness in nature, seems inevitably impelled. Among the Greeks two gods of the mind were recognized. Apollo was the diety of thought, of the ra­tional intellect; Dionysius was the god of the instinctual, the aesthetic, the intuitive, manifestations of the mind. Greeks, .carrying in their veins from Indic origins a certain large tolerance for appa,rent oppo­sites, worshipped both, practiced rites and regimens of life aimed at giving play now at one time to one .way of behavior, and now to the other. AEsculapius was the son of Apollo, born in tragedy when his father delivered him by cesarean section from the womb of his dead mother, NOVEMBER, 1966Coronis. Medicine as such was con­ceived of, then, as an Apollonean art from the very beginning, a work of the practical, rational intellect. However, it was not the disciples of Apollo alone who gave us the medicine of the modern world. The mind of Galen may have been rea­sonable, indeed, when he made his reputed departure from Rome during an epidemic of bubonic plague. But it did not contain, nor had that of Hippocrites before it, the full glory of what we can see in the lives of Reed, Ricketts, Zinsser, and a host of others from the past; or of Schweitzer and Dooley in our time. These men inherited something from the mother of AEsculapius as well as from his father, and she was a child of Dionysius, a nymph and lover. Guy de Chauliac, unlike Galen, never left his post when the plague took 25 million lives in Europe in the mid-fourteenth cen­tury in a period of three years. He had learned his conception of duty not only from Hippocrates but from Benedict as well, whose loving re­sponse to sickness and poverty had been the foundation of the first houses of hospitality. Not physi­cians, sons of Apollo, but sons of Dionysius, men of religious and com­passionate commitment, gave us hos­pitals. And the Lord knows that the best of these institutions faithfully preserve in many of these ways, 375 

Doctor, Is There a Father in the House?

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Doctor, Is There a Father in the House?

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