Salus Forum December 3, 2025

Jeremy

As Jack intimated, there’s both the historical reality of hospitals being built and being run and managed. There are large organizations.  Walt is retiring from Common Spirit, which is a massive amalgamation of faith-based health systems. So, there’s a huge presence, I guess, maybe not of the clergy, but of the religious organizations engaged in healthcare.

And yet, Jack, I’m hearing you point out that the situation for these hospital systems is much like the rest of healthcare. They have been somewhat neglectful of the ambulatory element of their role, potentially, in training their people. One might speculate that Common Spirit institutions would be the ones out there training the clergy on how to identify health-related issues early on and intervene with mental health. They get basic lay training, or professionalized lay people are recruited.

It’s kind of ironic to be using the “lay” term with priests and pastors since they use that for their congregants. But for us, they’re lay professionals in mental health, physical health. We’re the secular progeny of the clergy. I think we physicians originally came from religious institutions.  Most of the early doctors in Western cultures were clergy.  And then we separated from the churches. So, now we’re trying to figure out how to have clergy involved in our domain. This is an interesting dilemma.

Walt

I think there is an opportunity here. You mentioned Common Spirit Health, which is the largest not-for-profit health system right now with 150 hospitals in 24 states. And it’s an amalgamation. Two-thirds of the hospitals are Catholic, a third are associated with other Christian religions. But we really have an opportunity here to integrate that for which Jack is planting marvelous seeds and the history that we’re talking about.

But you think back when HIV came around in the 80s, late 70s, 80s, we were biological in terms of our approach towards medicine. We were barely psychological. And we were, I mean, medicine was leading the charge in saying biophysical, biomedical, and psychological, and social crept in. And then spirituality. And now in the 2020s, there’s increasing evidence that all of these things and beyond concern matters that need to be addressed by the community. Only 10 to 15% of all health is really related to what we do as doctors or even as hospitals.

A huge portion of health is what Jack’s opening doors to right now. So, could we just foster this through the emerging model that science is perpetuating? This model is based on the belief that we do need to attend to the physical, mental, social, and spiritual aspects of health. And where does that come from? There’s this alleged group of leaders and clergy who view health from the spiritual dimension. But how do they integrate that with all the other factors? You have a surgeon with great intentions who’s focused on the spiritual part of things. How could the clergy relate to that surgeon? It’s really exciting to consider what the conversations could be like in 10, 20, 50 years, if this moves on to what Jack is introducing or pushing.