Healing the sick is an essential element in Jesus’ ministry of “good news.”
His parable of the Good Samaritan provides a paradigm-shifting understanding of our neighbor as anyone in need, even strangers and foreigners. It also shows that care has many dimensions: direct care, funding and facilities and accessibility.
Health care is a moral imperative
Addressing the March 2026 “Who Is My Neighbour Today?” conference of Church and WHO leaders in Rome, Pope Leo XIV declared
“Universal health coverage is not merely a technical goal…it is a moral imperative for societies that wish to call themselves just…Health cannot be a luxury for the few…it is an essential condition for social peace.”
It is also crucial for experiencing all the goods of life.
Health care in undeveloped nations is unable to respond to even basic care and disease prevention, especially in Africa where approximately 57% of the population live in extreme poverty.
Jubilee 2025 called for debt cancellation for countries never able to repay them and “for a new international financial architecture, based on solidarity and harmony among peoples.”
Affluent nations are experiencing unlimited demand for expensive technological interventions in a culture of commercialization, commodification, secularization, and an ethics privileging autonomy and choice.
Their focus has been on financing and the respective roles of public and private, for-profit funding.
What good is health care?
Public policy is an essentially moral enterprise, as it decides for others. It should be based on the nations foundational values and vision.
The call for universal health coverage raises deep questions for debt-ridden and profit-driven nations and cultures. Health inequalities exist for many reasons; health inequity is the result of attitudes, policies and practices.
As Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas concludes “justice concerns every phase of economic activity, from resource acquisition to financing, and from production to consumption; every choice has moral consequences.” (162)
The key principles of Catholic social doctrine, the inherent human dignity of every person, solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good, and the preferential option for the poor provide a path for urgently needed assessment of the consequences of failing to reform universal health care.
Challenges
Pope Francis courageously identified widespread avarice and greed as “a sickness of the heart.” It needs healing in nations where the big business of health care dominates.
Solidarity has been called “the soul” of universal health coverage. In our fractious and polarized world, it presents a real challenge to universal health care.
Pray our global experience of embedded and embodied vulnerability to sickness may bring us together.
- Nuala Kenny is a Sister of Charity in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a pediatrician. An officer of the Order of Canada since 1999, she has published several books, including Healing the Church (Novalis, 2012) and Rediscovering the Art of Dying (2017). She is co-author of Still Unhealed: Treating the Pathology in the Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis (Novalis and Twenty-Third Publications, 2019). She most recently published A Post-Pandemic Church: Prophetic Possibilities (Novalis and Twenty-Third Publications, 2021).