Eugenics in New Zealand
Hilary Stace
Eugenics is a pseudo-science concerned with improving the quality of the human race. It underpins the discrimination of those who are disabled or culturally or ethnically different by those who consider themselves to be morally and physically superior. Eugenists borrow the language and concepts of science, particularly evolutionary theory of ‘survival of the fittest’, to legitimise this discrimination. The flawed hypothesis underpinning eugenics is that some individuals, families and population groups are tainted with hereditary physical and intellectual defects causing consequent moral deficiency, making them less ‘fit’ than others.
Eugenic attitudes and public policy were particularly significant in the early decades of the twentieth century in many countries, including New Zealand. A common perception in Britain and much of the ‘western’ world at the beginning of the twentieth century was that evolutionary theory of 'survival of the fittest' had not caused society to rid itself of problems related to crime and poverty. Being part of the British Empire, it was not surprising that the eugenic debate here was influenced by the British one.
In the nineteenth century many migrants left Britain and Europe for a better life in New Zealand. Although infectious illness and accidents were common, disability was unwelcome as it conflicted with the ideals of a new society. Disability support was left to the benevolence of families or groups providing charitable aid. The immigration acts that restricted people from China (an ‘unfit race’) also banned ‘cripples, idiots, lunatics, infirm, blind, deaf and dumb’. The 1882 Imbecile Passengers Act required a bond from the person in charge of the ship before one of these ‘undesirables’ was discharged, and the 1899 Immigration Restriction Act went further banning the idiot, the insane and the contagious.
By the beginning of the 20th century the middle class white birth rate was dropping in New Zealand. The blossoming ‘scientific’ justification of eugenics was taken up by both white liberals and conservatives concerned about consequent fears of losing their moral supremacy. In 1903, W. A. Chapple, a Liberal MP in New Zealand and later in Britain, published an influential booklet, The fertility of the unfit. Sterilisation of the wives of ‘degenerate’ men was his preferred option for reducing the numbers of ‘the unfit’. His pamphlet was welcomed by many prominent men and women. Eugenics became a political cause. ‘Negative’ eugenists sought to limit fertility while ‘positive’ eugenists supported interventionist pro-natalist policies to increase population ‘fitness’.
The 'unfit' encompassed a whole range of 'other' including the following groups described in the language of the time: alcoholics, imbeciles, illegitimate children (and their mothers), prostitutes, criminals, the feeble-minded, lunatics, epileptics, deaf-mutes, the unemployable, the tubercular, the immoral (e.g. homosexuals), anyone from another race, those with incurable diseases such as Syphilis or tuberculosis, and even ‘mouth-breathers'. What they had in common was that they were all 'other' and were apparently breeding faster than the eugenists. Eugenists constructed a monster that gobbled up taxes, and provided images of the 'unfit' for people to measure themselves against.
French-born religious sister Suzanne Aubert had a personal experience of disability and was one of the few to speak out against eugenics in New Zealand. She founded her Home for Incurables in Wanganui in 1899 and, in 1907, opened her first Home of Compassion for all ‘needy’ or disabled adults and children in Wellington.
The 1907 founding of the Plunket Society with its slogan to 'help the mothers and save the babies’ both reflected and propagated eugenic fears about the ‘unfit’. 'The destiny of the race is in the hands of the mothers', wrote founder Truby King. He believed the body was a closed system with a limited amount of energy. The education of girls, in anything other than domestic skills, used up their energy and could make them unable to breed or breastfeed. From his observations of patients as Superintendent of Seacliff Asylum near Dunedin he believed mental degeneration was caused by poor mothering. If only women could be taught the 'science' of mothering the racial decline of the Empire could be arrested. Instead they would breed fit soldiers for the Empire. The less than perfect health of many soldiers enlisting in the First World War increased the Society’s influence.
The Plunket Society popularised the prescriptive ideology of a regime designed to build 'character'. It involved four hourly breast feeding (but not at night), toilet training from two weeks of age, fresh air, rest and no 'spoiling' as playing with or cuddling the child could weaken 'his' character.
But the Plunket Society was just one of many reactions by New Zealand society to those whose difference threatened the majority. Fear of the unfit and wishes to contain the disabled and undesirable had already led to New Zealand’s first public ‘lunatic’ asylum in Karori in 1854. A larger one on the hills above the town of Porirua opened in 1887 and by 1896 its site covered 100 acres. Typically for the time, the Porirua asylum mixed several categories of ‘other’: those with mental health issues, intellectual impairment, alcoholics, elderly and homeless people. For decades, these ‘inmates’ provided large captive communities for doctors and specialists to practice theories and interventions.
Some groups, such as those with vision and hearing impairments, were seen as ‘habilitable’, meaning they had potential as worker citizens if they could be taught to speak or otherwise function in the ‘fit’ world. Hence the establishment of residential schools which separated those with potential from their suspect families.
But certain types of intellectual impairment continued to be linked with ‘immorality’. Girls’ and boys’ homes and farm schools were founded mainly to keep the genders apart and prevent criminality, deviant behaviour and, above all, reproduction. The 1911 Mental Defectives Act carefully classified groups of ‘other’ into a hierarchy of idiots, imbeciles and feeble-minded. Special schools and special classes were provided for those deemed educable. The school medical service was founded to identify ‘defective’ children so they could be sent to the appropriate institutions and the 1914 Education Act made it obligatory for parents, teachers and police to report ‘mentally defective’ children. A residential school for ‘feeble-minded’ girls, Salisbury, was opened in Richmond, near Nelson in 1916.
The new science of IQ testing was enthusiastically embraced by the authorities when it became available. Labels such as high functioning, low functioning and mental age all added to the taxonomy and helped to classify and assign those so assessed.
In the 1920s the government consulted the public in two separate inquiries. A Committee of Inquiry into Venereal Disease reported in 1922 and the Committee of Inquiry into Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders reported in 1925. The first inquiry concerned the role of 'feebleminded' women in infecting men and causing debauchery and corruption. The second considered 'mental defect' and its link with immorality, as well as prevention and treatment. Segregation, sterilisation, castration, and marriage certificates were remedies suggested for the perceived problems.
A short-lived Eugenics Board was established in 1928 to keep a register of 'mentally defective persons'. Theodore Gray was Acting Inspector General of Health and the Board was under his control. A member of the public wrote a ‘Mother’s Lament’ expressing concern at the proposed travelling clinics which would examine and classify ‘mentally defective' children
"Oh Mother, save me from Dr. Gray
'Cause teacher says he's coming to-day
And if I'm stupid he'll take me away. Oh, Mummie save me from Dr. Gray!"
"I cannot save you, my little child,"
His mummie said and her eyes were wild.
"You belong to the State, you're no more my child!
But Oh, my darling, don't stupid be
Or he'll say we've tainted heredity,
And must be eradicated - you and me!"
There was some discomfort in the community over the Inquiry's recommendations. Most of the more extreme suggestions, such as sterilisation of, and banning marriage with, the 'mentally defective' were dropped from the Mental Defectives Bill of 1928, much to the anger of those like Nina Barrer of the Women's Division of the Farmers' Union. Barrer was an enthusiastic eugenist, using stock breeding metaphors for the perceived problems. She published a pamphlet in 1933, The problem of mental deficiency in New Zealand, where it is written: 'There is increasing in this Dominion a grave national danger that, from the material standpoint alone, is costing the country hundreds of thousands of pounds, while, from the racial or biological standpoint, it is menacing the purity of our national stock. The present depression and its consequent problem of unemployment have been the means of awakening more people to the fact of the increasing unemployable, and the alarming rate of multiplication of the mentally deficient'.
Support for eugenic policies was widespread globally so it was not surprising that in 1939 when a German father asked the state authorities to kill his disabled baby the request was granted. That was the start of the Nazi euthanasia policies. The Nazi doctors killed more disabled children, then the policy spread to other groups which threatened ‘racial hygiene’, including Jewish people. It is estimated that over 200,000 disabled people were experimented on or killed in what is known as the ‘silent holocaust’.
Following the Second World War and the establishment of the welfare state in New Zealand, overt support for eugenic public policy lessened. But many people, including children and adults with an intellectual disability (ID), remained a target of eugenic public policies with a network of state institutions across the country. Busloads of children were delivered to these isolated communities and other adults and children arrived in curtained-off, locked train compartments. Families were advised to not reveal the existence of their sibling for fear of this ‘bad blood’ scaring off prospective spouses. The ‘inmates’ were thus often forgotten by family.
But eugenic assumptions remain today and can be heard anew in calls for the sterilisation of people with disabilities and beneficiaries, pre-birth screening for conditions such as Down Syndrome and in the development of genetic technology. Official discrimination against groups such as refugees can also be considered eugenic.
Perhaps it is time for reflection about why this flawed hypothesis continues to influence public policy.
Dr Hilary Stace is a disability researcher and Research Fellow at Victoria University. She is the author of Gene dreaming: New Zealanders and eugenics Wellington: Professional Historians’ Association of New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1998.
The Troubling Persistence of Eugenicist Thought
Michael Dougherty describes both early and more recent eugenic ideas in the United States, noting the how hard it might become for parents of Down Syndrome babies to allow these children to be born. He suggests the ‘new eugenics’ is unlikely to be overtly racialist like in the past, but will come to us in terms of ‘quality of life’ and ‘health and safety’.
Available online at:http://theweek.com/article/index/268986/the-troubling-persistence-of-eugenicist-thought-in-modern-america
Eugenics wasn’t always a dirty word
Calum MacKellar names some famous English and Scottish figures from the past that promoted eugenic policies. He reflects on past eugenic practices and how it took only a small shift in attitude about ‘worthy lives’ to lead to the crimes of Nazi Germany. He warns us to remain vigilant and to uphold and protect ‘the important inherent equal dignity and value of all human beings.’
Available online at: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/eugenics_wasnt_always_a_dirty_word
A World Cleansed of Imperfections?
This article by Max Wind-Cowie dismantles the ‘choice’ argument used by those who promote abortion and euthanasia for the reason that individuals should have the right to decide for themselves. He suggests that ‘what starts out as a ‘right’ soon becomes an expectation and the ‘tradition of the sanctity of life is replaced with a new tradition of utilitarian eugenics.’
Available online at: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2014/08/21/dawkins-has-done-us-a-favour-by-highlighting-how-dangerous-our-culture-of-choice-really-is/
Compassion as a moral duty
Gerard Aynsley
In his extensive study, 'A Theology of Compassion', Oliver Davies describes compassion as "the voluntary sharing of the fate of others in order to be present with them in the time of trial"1 and as involving the "interweaving of self and other"2. Also, drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum, he points out the three-fold nature of compassion as a combination of the cognitive (seeing another's distress), the affective (being moved by it) and the volitional (doing something about it)3. These descriptions help place compassion within the realm of ethics – as a response and quality that ought to be exercised and displayed. Placing 'compassion' within an ethical framework is required if compassion is to be regarded as an important and necessary force in our lives. The alternative is to regard compassion as simply a psychological disposition, or, worse, entirely subject to circumstance and chance and, as such, excuse ourselves from responding with the proper kindness to another person's suffering.
In recent years there have been numerous studies that show up the fickleness of human behaviour; proposing, for example, that being in a hurry or not, or having a little bit of good luck will have more bearing on behaviour than ethical principles4. Similarly, Auckland-based psychologist, Nathan Consedine, takes the rather pessimistic view that compassion is "part of our evolved psychological make-up" and that "caring for people who don't deserve it is inefficient from an evolutionary perspective" (North & South, September 2015, p.61). It may well be that human beings are fickle, but to excuse the requirement for compassion on the grounds of temperament or circumstance seems to diminish something important about our humanity. Human beings are moral beings and, as such, have the capacity to rise up to what ought to be done. This is what ethics teaches us.
The idea that compassion is an ethical characteristic has, traditionally, been rejected. It was seen as too closely aligned to our emotions, and so too irrational. Plato considered feelings of pity to be undesirable and the Stoics saw pity as "a weakness of the mind"5. Kant insisted that acting from sentiment – even if it leads one to do a good deed – has no moral worth, and Nietzsche takes things a step further, regarding compassion as a vice, believing that "suffering is spread through compassion"6. Nevertheless, that we have a duty of care for others is supported by most ethical traditions and with some rethinking it is possible to construct an understanding of compassion – incorporating the cognitive, affective and volitional dimensions – as an important ethical category.
First, as noted by Davies, there needs to be a place for affectivity. There have been some important recent works that develop this theme. Justin Oakley, for example, in "Morality and the Emotions"7explains how the affective dimension does have a place in moral decision-making and because of the relationship between our affective and cognitive capacities we can exercise some control over our emotions.
Secondly, there needs to be a rethinking of the self; a "radical de-centring of the self"8and a letting go of a notion of the moral agent who is traditionally "presented as though they were continuously rational, healthy and untroubled"9. This includes abandoning the notion of the 'sovereign' self who sees him/herself as the source of all knowledge and the source of the moral law and action. From this 'superior' stance the other person is too easily seen as a mere 'object' of my pity. Compassion, on the other hand, requires of me to begin with the other person in his or her uniqueness and to enter into their vulnerability; all the while recognizing that it is their suffering and not my own. As Alasdair McIntyre points out, human vulnerability goes hand-in-hand with our dependence on each other and this is the moral landscape in which compassion is experienced10. This shift in thinking about the self and the other is required if compassion is to be a legitimate ethical standpoint.
To take the other person in their vulnerability as the starting point is to take an imaginative step and so, as David Hume puts it, "to feel a sympathetic motion in my breast, conformable to whatever I imagine in theirs"11. The imagination enables us to grasp what is before us and to also 'see' more than what is materially present – e.g., we may first see a person drop a pile of papers, but the imagination enables us to also 'see' the person's distress and so 'see' the situation as one that requires a compassionate response.
Finally, ethics involves the conscious decision to transcend inclination and to do what is right. To be moral is to rise up and do what is right regardless of whether or not we like the person who requires our help, or we are in a hurry, or whether or not we happen to be having a good day. Unless compassion is something we aspire to as a matter of moral obligation we will never be capable of responding with the kindness and care that is so often needed.
Rev Dr Gerard Aynsley is a parish priest in the diocese of Dunedin. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Monash University in Australia.
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[1] Oliver Davies, A Theology of Compassion (London, SCM Press, 2001),12
[2] ibid. xix
[3] ibid. 18
[4] Google, for example, “The Good Samaritan study” or “The dime in the phone booth study”.
[5] cited in Oliver Davies, 235
[6] cited in Oliver Davies, 239
[7] Justin Oakley, Morality and the Emotions (London, Routledge, 1992)
[8] Oliver Davies,17
[9] Alasdair McIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago, Carus Publishing Company, 1999),2.
[10] Alasdair McIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals
[11] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 386.
“When we walk to the edge of all the light …”
Sinéad Donnelly
I am a palliative medicine doctor and recently I have returned to practice acute hospital medicine. As professionals serving others, doctors train to be aware of their human reactions to events, interactions and people. It is part of the discipline of being a doctor. From my years of experience I believe this is fundamental to good healing practice, resilience and growth. As Dr Tom Mulholland says in the article: “You have to live in the moment and practice mindfulness.” (North & South, September 2015, p. 62).
One might expect that Palliative medicine would be one of the principal areas for “compassion fatigue”. Yet it is also potentially a nurturing place for staff, aware of each other and kind to each other. Although compassion is called from us as doctors, nurses, chaplains and allied health staff, we also receive from each other. This mutuality sustains us. This does not automatically happen in a palliative care team, community or unit. It needs to be a conscious value of the team, attended to on a daily basis. We cannot be compassionate and kind to the patient if we are not kind to one another. A buoyancy of life is thus created which sustains us. In this space, although serving those who are dying and witnessing untold grief, we support each other.
Mr W (89) came to the Emergency Department during the night. The night registrar summarized the patient’s story – shortness of breath, attributing it to exacerbation of chronic obstructive airways disease. I met Mr W Saturday morning with Ella the registrar for that day. He was returning from the toilet, sitting now on the side of the bed and breathless. I was unsure how different this was from the time of his admission 6 hours before. I thought he had heart failure. We asked the nurse to give him frusemide. I thought the tracing of his heart (ECG) suggested ongoing damage to his heart. We continued on seeing other new patients.
About an hour later, an alarm bell rang in the Medical Assessment Unit - Bed 23 - Mr W’s bed. The nurse was there. He had just died. I decided immediately that CPR was not appropriate. Ella consoled the nurse who was upset that she had left him just before he died. I phoned his daughter as the identified contact person. She cried, clearly surprised and distressed. She said her mother was just then getting his clothes ready, preparing for him to come home that day.
They arrived about two hours later. His wife in a wheelchair, crying. She was afraid to go into the room where he lay. I encouraged them all to enter the room. Mrs W lifted herself out of the wheelchair by his bedside, leaning over him, almost lying on him, weeping, hugging him, talking to him. My heart was breaking now. The image of this small lady leaning over this man, her husband of 65 years.
I could not understand why I was so upset after 22 years in Palliative Medicine. I think it is because in acute medicine, unlike Palliative Medicine, you are so close to the front line; because in acute medicine you do not have your Palliative Medicine armour on. The chaos and uncertainty, the surprise factor of acute medicine, render me exposed and vulnerable. “Palliative” comes from the word “pallium” to cloak or shield. But now I know “pallium” used to shield me.
The poignancy intensified. I sent them a card offering my condolences. Mrs W responded, phoning me to request a meeting. “Oh dear,” I wondered ... A week later we sat again in the same room where she had hugged her dead husband. Mrs W said “The nurse phoned me that morning, said S wanted to speak to me”. As the nurse brought the phone to his bedside, “the battery died”. So they never spoke. She presumed he wanted to tell her to bring in his clothes, that he was going home. So she started to get his clothes ready. Now she wonders did he want to say he loved her. “Is that what he wanted to say…?”
Mrs W thanked me. They all thanked me. My heart was breaking. Acute Medicine – no place for the faint hearted.
Would repeated encounters like that with Mr and Mrs W wear me out and lead to compassion fatigue? Not necessarily. In this story there is a mutuality in the exchanges between us, a give and take, an ebb and flow, an emptying and a filling. I am called to be aware, be alert to all that is happening to the patient, the family and to myself. In that space of being fully present, I am emptied and I am filled.
“When we walk to the edge of all the light you have and take that first step into the darkness of the unknown, you must believe that one of two things will happen: There will be something solid for you to stand on, or, you will be taught to fly.” “Faith” by Patrick Overton - “The Leaning Tree”
Dr Sinéad Donnelly is a Palliative Medicine and Internal Medicine Physician in Wellington.
Compassion Fatigue in Nursing
Jo Walton
There is a sentimental idea in many of our minds that nurses are the epitome of caring professionals: gentle, kind, friendly, compassionate, empathetic, capable and calm. Certainly this is an ethos that the profession attempts to live up to, and many of us would also add that nurses need to be skilful, articulate, courageous, ethical and resilient. The expectation that nurses will provide compassionate, respectful and trustworthy care is spelled out in the profession's Code of Conduct. The Code is framed around core values of respect, trust, partnership and integrity, and although the word 'compassion' is not used, it is inherent in the whole code, and nurses know they have a professional responsibility to live up to this standard.
In spite of expectations and codes sometimes nurses slip up and may behave in ways that are less than ideal. Sometimes their heart simply isn't in their work. As human workers and human beings, nurses, like everyone, are fallible. The very idea that nurses might lose compassion, become tired of caring, be at any time unable to give unconditional regard to patients and families is actually a rather frightening one. Nurses are people on whom any of us might (and do) depend in times of extremis, when sick, frightened, in pain, vulnerable, perhaps alone, whether as patients or as relatives or friends of those in need of care and protection.
Why would things go wrong in this way? I suggest there are three factors at play when compassion fatigue appears amongst nurses: the nature of nursing work itself, work demands and overload, and systems and institutional values that operate at odds with the values of nurses themselves.
Nursing work involves extensive elements of emotional labour. In their everyday work nurses deal with sensitive and intimate aspects of life, much of it in the domain of the private, often invisible and unspoken. While it is quite normal to discuss the fact that patients and families are troubled by fear, grief, sadness, it is less common for nurses to talk about the abject emotions they experience themselves. Anger, surprise, fear, dread, sympathy, joy are acceptable topics, but revulsion, repulsion, disgust, horror, terror, and libidinous arousal are not so easily slipped into a conversation, even an earnest one.
The mechanisms nurses employ to deal with the abject, and the fear and the anxiety that their work entails, have been explored both psychoanalytically and sociologically. Over several decades the received wisdom that nurses ought to conceal all their emotional reactions has been changing, and nurses now may (at times) laugh or cry with patients and families in their care. Nevertheless a full range of emotional expression would derail professional comportment and be counter to the value systems that hold the profession together. To work at their best nurses must hold their emotions in.
At the same time, nursing work itself is emotionally laden, driven as it is by the desire to help, to serve, to tend, to be compassionate (a voluminous literature backs this idea), in combination with an interest in things medical and mysterious, psychological and deep, bizarre and exotic and dangerous.
But it is not just disease and disability, sickness and health that nurses must deal with. There are also different needs and expectations of patients and the increasingly production-conscious environment in which nurses work. As financial pressures squeeze our health systems tighter, and the pressure for increased work volumes increases, nurses often feel they must ration care. Care rationing means that they must decide whose needs are most urgent and what care can and must be left undone. It means deciding what words can be left unspoken, what comfort can wait until later. It is a dreadful situation for nurses, patients and families to be in. While nurses are balancing unseen demands, patients and families are experiencing things rather differently. Time drags for those who are ill or waiting, but not for the staff who are preoccupied with getting everything done, who know that they must balance this patient's needs against that one's, this emergency over that potential problem.
In situations such as this nurses can feel overwhelmed by helplessness, frustration, tiredness and tedium. Lack of insight develops and ordinariness takes over. People who do not feel valued, who do not have the resources they need, who feel helpless to change things do not make good, compassionate, care workers. Emotional control can break down, and a desire not to care can creep in, when the load becomes too great to bear.
Nursing is hard work. Physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually. A firm sense of one's own values, driven and backed by a strong spiritual faith is some defence against failure, provides some insurance, some inoculation in terms of what is right and proper and why we chose this work. Compassion fatigue is a sign that health workers themselves need some help, care and relief. It is also a 'canary in the mine' signal that a larger system is in serious danger.
Jo Walton is Professor of Nursing in the Graduate School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health at Victoria University of Wellington and Deputy Chair of the Nursing Council of New Zealand.
Compassion Fatigue: an institutional issue
Michael McCabe
‘Most young doctors enter medicine with quite a profound desire to help other people. Somehow, across the first decade or so of training and work, that diminishes.
We call it compassion fatigue – the idea that doctors have a finite reservoir of caring that drains away over time, leaving some of them a cynical, couldn’t-give-a-damn husk of inhumanity.’
Nathan Consedine (North & South, September 2015, p.60)
The Greek word for compassion ‘splagchnizomai’ literally means ‘to be moved’ in ‘one’s bowels.’ Emotions were viewed as ‘residing’ in the bowels – literally ‘in the guts.’ Thus, a person without compassion was essentially unmoved by the plight of another and could be described as being ‘hard’, ‘heartless’, or ‘harsh’ with ‘no reach’ inside them.
Compassion fatigue is not limited to the healthcare professions. It is part and parcel of any professional role that involves advocacy for or care of others – it is potentially the Achilles’ Heel of all professions. Professional life is marked by the complex interplay between personal well-being, workload, role expectations, rapidly changing social and cultural norms, and by systemic issues, such as the strengths and particular shortcomings of the institutions in which the professions reside. Frequently the professional is caught in the crossfire of one or more of these dynamics with the result that his or her energy and passion for the profession and its goals dissipates. That feeling, described by many today, ‘of getting through the night’, is most notably marked by a reduced ‘reach’ of compassion, and, frequently, by cynicism.
Given its multi-dimensional nature and causation, compassion fatigue requires addressing on several levels – at a personal level, and at a communal or institutional level.
At a personal level compassion can only be sustained if the professional ‘tends to the soul.’ Being an advocate and caring for others drains the advocate and empties the caregiver. Whatever a person’s faith dimension or motivation, such roles demand ‘Sabbath’ time – times of refreshment and re-creation, times of rest and review in which we ‘listen again’ to our souls and nurture them in healthy and life-giving ways.
While bread-winners may well recognise this need for rest and recreation, such a ‘Sabbath’ break is not always possible given financial pressures on families and individuals and the demands of the profession. That is why the culture of the particular institution, be it healthcare, medicine, law, or religious faith, also requires refreshment and renewal if it is not to exacerbate or even be complicit in compassion fatigue amongst its personnel.
However, institutions themselves can demonstrate compassion fatigue, evident above all in the ways in which they respond to those who are most vulnerable, including the demands placed on personnel, the language used, and the prevailing attitudes and mind-sets of those vested with power. Nowhere is this insight being illustrated more profoundly than in the leadership and vision of Pope Francis.
In the recent Synod on the Family, Pope Francis gave a clear illustration of the need for the Church to return to the ‘compassionate reach’ of the gospel. In doing so he challenges those who would tie mercy and compassion to obedience to the law. For example, in his closing homily, commenting on the story of the healing of Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, he said,
“This can be a danger for us: in the face of constant problems, it is better to move on, instead of letting ourselves be bothered. In this way, just like the disciples, we are with Jesus but we do not think like him. We are in his group, but our hearts are not open. We lose wonder, gratitude and enthusiasm, and risk becoming habitually unmoved by grace. We are able to speak about him and work for him, but we live far from his heart, which is reaching out to those who are wounded. This is the temptation: a ‘spirituality of illusion’: we walk through the deserts of humanity without seeing what is really there…a faith that does not know how to root itself in the life of people remains arid and, rather than oases, creates other deserts.”
At the conclusion of the Synod Pope Francis then offered a number of antidotes to compassion fatigue, at both a personal and institutional level, including
- Attempting to see the ‘issues having to do with the family’ in the ‘light of the Gospel’ without ‘falling into a facile repetition of what was obvious or has already been said.’
- ‘Seeing difficulties and uncertainties which challenge and threaten the family in ‘the light of the Faith, carefully studying them and confronting them fearlessly, without burying our heads in the sand.’
- Portraying, once again, the vitality and vision of the Catholic Church, ‘which is not afraid to stir dulled consciences or to soil her hands with lively and frank discussions about the family.’
While Pope Francis was speaking specifically about the family, his wisdom and courage gives fresh heart to all caregivers and advocates of compassion and mercy and reminds us not to neglect the ways in which ‘compassion fatigue’ may permeate the very institutions within which we practice our respective professions.
Rev Dr Michael McCabe is the founding director of The Nathaniel Centre and Parish Priest of Our Lady of Kapiti Parish, Te Whaea o Kāpiti.