How Catholic Institutions Are Responding to the Physician Deficit

Last year, the Association of American Medical Colleges warned that the United States will face a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036, including a shortage of between 20,200 and 40,400 primary care providers in family medicine, general internal medicine, general pediatrics, and geriatric medicine. Variables driving the deficit include the fact that more than a third of active physicians will likely retire in the next ten years.

Stepping forward to stand in the breach are an increasing number of Roman Catholic institutions. In June 2024, the board of directors of Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, approved plans for a college of osteopathic medicine in the spirit of forming physicians to provide care in rural and other underserved communities. “A Catholic medical school faithful to the teachings of the Church and committed to emphasizing Christ-centered medical care can help transform American health care,” said college president Stephen D. Minnis.

The new college will join forty-two other colleges of osteopathic medicine nationwide, including a new osteopathic college at Duquesne University. At its ground-breaking in 2022, founding dean John Kauffman Jr. said: “The impact is huge . . . even on day one, [our students will] be embedded into the community, in our federally qualified health centers, really seeing what it’s like to take care of underserved populations and hopefully seeing themselves there as their future career.” Founded in 1878 by the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, Duquesne welcomed its first students to the new medical college last fall.

In December, Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, broke ground for its nascent College of Osteopathic Medicine. Xavier’s new college will soon become the fifth college of medicine at a Jesuit university in the United States and the first Jesuit college of osteopathic medicine. “Xavier’s medical school will establish a reflective and discerning medical community that educates osteopathic physicians in the Jesuit Catholic tradition to be fully alive intellectually, morally, and spiritually in their individual journey,” said founding dean Steven J. Halm.

The time is ripe. Americans enjoy what is arguably the best health care in the world; and yet, consumers hold reasonable fears about accessibility and costs. The average family health insurance premium has increased 47 percent since 2013, and the December murder of corporate executive Brian Thompson sparked additional headlines regarding persistent problems in health care funding and reimbursement. These problems vex patients and providers alike.

Today, many physicians and trainees face additional concerns regarding freedom of conscience protections. Although 2024 Supreme Court rulings in Moyle v. United States, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo appear to have curtailed federal agencies’ power to undermine conscience protections, many medical students and physicians face ongoing school, workplace, and societal pressures with regard to elective abortion, contraception, sterilization, gender dysphoria, and euthanasia.

With all this in mind, the move toward holistic medical education—rooted in respect for the human person as a unity of mind, body, and spirit—befits this Jubilee Year of Hope. Recently, Catholic Healthcare International announced its intention to launch a St. Padre Pio Institute for the Relief of Suffering in Howell, Michigan, along with a new school of osteopathic medicine. The project will be modeled after St. Padre Pio’s Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, established in 1956 in southeastern Italy.

In his study of The Jesuits and Italian Universities, 1548–1773, Paul F. Grendler observes that the Society of Jesus made sixteen attempts, from Turin in northern Italy to Messina in Sicily, to found new universities or become professors in existing institutions. The Jesuits succeeded in launching four new universities and becoming professors of mathematics in three others, but suffered nine total failures in the face of opposition from fellow academics and from civil authorities—which included, Grendler writes, “profound differences about what universities should be.” 

To this day, differences about what universities should be ultimately reflect profound differences of thought on what a human being is—and is created to be. Ideally, education in our nation’s newest medical schools will be more than holistic, more than humanistic, but ultimately teach our future physicians to recognize the divine image in each patient. In a 1949 letter to The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. John Jerrold Applegarth, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, U.S. Army physician, and Fellow of the American College of Physicians, wrote:

The science of medicine is one thing. The profession of medicine is another. The business of a practicing physician is undeniably linked to the Christian virtue of Charity. This implies the truth of man created by God. Herein lies the inherent dignity of man. From where else comes the logic of the argument against the practice of euthanasia? The hydrocephalic or the [child with Down syndrome] may not be apparently “useful to society,” but he is “useful” to God by virtue of being His creature. Unless doctors abandon their subtle omnipotency, and realize that the values that define their profession are Christian values, their art will be reduced to a mere technic. . . . As a recent graduate, I can vouch for the difficulty of a medical student’s viewing man as anything more than viscera, muscle groups, and “integrated reflexes.” The honest respect that he has for his instructor’s learned outline of anatomy and physiology is easily shifted to an identification with his materialistic innuendos and—the “organism.” In all the wealth of his clinical teaching, where is he told of the practice of medicine and the values underlying it? Exhortations to “treat the patient as a whole” are not enough. He must gain an idea why the patient is worth treating at all.

The medical profession could use more physicians animated by respect for the sacred humanity and value of their patients. Hence, the launch of new medical schools at Benedictine College, Duquesne University, and Xavier University is uplifting news indeed.