Yuri Bilinsky, New Pathway – Ukrainian News.
The chaplaincy mission of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is developing. A Ukrainian Catholic priest, Fr. Ruslan Pyasta of the Ivano-Frankivsk Archeparchy, has recently been appointed President of Ukraine’s Association of medical chaplains. Fr. Pyasta has long been a medical chaplain at the Ivano-Frankivsk perinatal centre. He studied medical chaplaincy within the Clinic Pastoral Education program in Salzburg (Austria) and later initiated the Certified Educational Program for medical chaplains in Ukraine. The Canadian office of Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA) was the main donor of this program which took place in 2021 in Lviv.
The Ukrainian health system has long been underfunded and is currently crumbling under the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic. In these challenging circumstances, medical chaplains of the UGCC, coordinated by the UGCC Commission of Health Care, have stayed shoulder to shoulder with the doctors, nurses and patients, providing them with psychological and spiritual support. The Church is also helping hospitals and medical personnel in other ways, such as with transportation means or by providing Church’s facilities for lodging of COVID-19 doctors to prevent outbreaks.
Currently, medical chaplaincy is not officially recognized in Ukraine. Medical chaplains of the UGCC (as well as of other Christian denominations) provide their services on a voluntary basis and their presence in hospitals depends on the free will of the hospital administration. The UGCC is now working on providing the medical chaplains with legal status that would allow them to become part of medical personnel. As a part of this process to get the state recognition for the medical chaplaincy, UGCC Commission on Pastoral Health Care has been educating medical chaplains for the past several years.
The Commission has formed a working group to develop and introduce an education program in Ukraine for education of medical chaplains in theological, psychological and medical spheres, including bioethics. The Certified Educational Program, which was delivered last year, will be proposed to other denominations and to the Ministry of Health Care of Ukraine to be used as a pattern for the education of medical chaplains.
In 2021, the program trained ten medical chaplains in the following themes: Theology of suffering; ‘Jesus and ill, life, death and resurrection’; and Psychological hygiene: Working place and place in a group, burnout.
After the completion of the program, a medical chaplain is expected to gain the following qualifications:
- Personal characteristics: the ability to express attention, openness, goodwill to be by the side of a suffering person, empathy and tolerance to various emotions of suffering persons, emotional resilience, the ability to take care of self as a precondition to take care of the others.
- Professional characteristics: responsibility and consistency in service, ability to build cooperation with medical personnel, ability to constantly learn, to build contact with a suffering person, to listen correctly and react during spiritual/psychological conversations, to set the frames and limits of the service, to take a step back if a patient is not ready for pastoral support, to understand own limits.
It is the Church’s plan that all medical chaplains of the UGCC (120 persons) will receive this kind of training.
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