The traditional roles of Christian chaplains in aiding patients, physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators in repentance, right belief, right worship, and right conduct are challenged by the contemporary professionalization of chaplaincy guided by post-Christian norms located in a public space structured by three defining postulates: the non-divinity of Christ, robust ecumenism, and the irrelevance of God’s existence. The norms of this emerging post-Christian profession of chaplaincy make interventions with patients, physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators in defense of specifically Christian bioethical (...) norms and goals unprofessional, because the chaplain is now directed as a professional to support health care services held to standards articulated within a secular morality. These changes are exemplar of the profound recasting of the dominant moral culture with wide-ranging implications for bioethics. (shrink)

Hospital chaplaincy, in its exposure to clients, colleagues, and care-takers from different faith backgrounds, can be understood in either generic or catholic terms. The first understanding, often merely implicit in denominationalist approaches, assumes that some “Absolute” can be prayerfully invoked through the medium of diverse rituals, confessions, and symbols. This position combines the advantage of unprejudiced acceptance of other creeds and traditions with the disadvantage of lacking resources for discriminating among the spiritualities that may be operative within those other creeds (...) and traditions. Catholicism, in linking true spirituality with the one true church as the mystical body of the Tri-une God, secures such a criterion but fails to satisfy the tolerance-of-acknowledgement in the secular sense, which is canonical in contemporary ecumenism. The Orthodox understanding of Catholicism is portrayed as imposing a non-judgemental humility and repentance which provides a solution to that spiritual-human dilemma of inter-faith cooperation in the hospital. (shrink)