Minutes from the SJCMG Meeting on December 10, 2018
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The purpose of the South Jersey Catholic Medical Guild is to profess and uphold the principles of Catholic faith and morality as related to the science of medicine. It does this by offering opportunities for prayer and for education. It also serves to enable Catholic physicians and other healthcare professionals to know one another better and to work together with a deeper mutual support and understanding.
Spiritual and professional support on both a local and national level
Access to information regarding Catholic values on pertinent issues (i.e., use of feeding tubes, physician assisted suicide, Pro-Life and stem cell research).
CME credits for attending many of the regional and national conferences.
Opportunity to volunteer for healthcare projects through Medical Missions programs.
Receive an updated newsletter and invitations to South Jersey Catholic Medical Guild sponsored events such as the Annual White Mass and Communion Breakfast.
Why am I a member of the Camden Guild of the CMA? Because membership permits me to work with other professionals who also recognize and value the primacy of our relationships with our patients. We see health care as an opportunity to serve our fellow man as patients in a truly professional relationship that is rarely found elsewhere in our society. Medicine, when practiced as a “Profession” and not a “Service Industry,” champions core values that are truly Catholic Ideals; affirming the specialness of each person, a specialness and status that each possesses as a child of God. By approaching people in their entirety, body, mind and soul, we gain the wonderful and unique opportunity to see and experience Jesus in the eyes of each patient we treat. We are committed to our patients as people, real human beings. They are so much more than “clients” or diseases to be processed. We recognize the needs our patients, as real people, have and try to help them fulfill these needs while under our care. And beyond this, the Camden Guild of the CMA gives me the opportunity to reach beyond the exam room to further help the patients I personally serve and all those that I will never have the opportunity to meet by helping influence and shape our society in a way that maximally benefits each of these individuals. Membership in the Camden Guild of the CMA offers great opportunities for everyone to participate and serve, in a capacity for which they are called.
Abortion
When a person confides in me that she is contemplating an abortion, or has a friend who is, I always use the opportunity to discuss the very personal realities of not just abortion, but the gift of life that hangs in the balance. While the woman may have multiple “friends” affirming the rightness of her choice of abortion as “the way” to address her “problem”, they won’t be there in the years to come to remind her of how great exercising her “right to choose” was every time she feels the knife-like pain piercing her heart when she sees a child that is the age that her aborted child would be. This mother will never know the joy of raising a child that will quickly become such a part of her life that she couldn’t imagine a life without her child, no matter her situation in life. They will never know the joy of exclaiming that “I wouldn’t know what I would ever do without my child.” And finally, if the mother is unable to give her child the love and care all children need, she is denying her child the opportunity to experience the overwhelming love, security and joy that only a family created by the gift of a child to a childless couple can experience. And the mother denies herself the opportunity to know that she so loved her child that she gave her child this gift. Abortion really is a bad idea!
