Catholic Church and health care

The Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of health care services in the world.^[1] It has around 18,000 clinics, 16,000 homes for the elderly and those with special needs, and 5,500 hospitals, with 65 percent of them located in developing countries.^[2] In 2010, the Church's Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Health Care Workers said that the Church manages 26% of the world's health care facilities.^[3] The Church's involvement in health care has ancient origins.

Jesus Christ, whom the Church holds as its founder, instructed his followers to heal the sick.^[4] The early Christians were noted for tending the sick and infirm, and Christian emphasis on practical charity gave rise to the development of systematic nursing and hospitals. The influential Benedictine rule holds that "the care of the sick is to be placed above and before every other duty, as if indeed Christ were being directly served by waiting on them". During the Middle Ages, monasteries and convents were the key medical centres of Europe and the Church developed an early version of a welfare state. Cathedral schools evolved into a well integrated network of medieval universities and Catholic scientists (many of them clergymen) made a number of important discoveries which aided the development of modern science and medicine.

Albert the Great (1206–1280) was a pioneer of biological field research and is a saint within the Catholic Church; Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) helped revive knowledge of ancient Greek medicine, Renaissance popes were often patrons of the study of anatomy, and Catholic artists such as Michelangelo advanced knowledge of the field through sketching cadavers. The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) first proposed that living beings enter and exist in the blood (a precursor of germ theory). The Augustinian Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) developed theories on genetics for the first time. As Catholicism became a global religion, the Catholic orders and religious and lay people established health care centres around the world. Women's religious institutes such as the Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Mercy and Sisters of St Francis opened and operated some of the first modern general hospitals.

While the prioritization of charity and healing by early Christians created the hospital, their spiritual emphasis tended to imply "the subordination of medicine to religion and doctor to priest". "Physic and faith", wrote historian of medicine Roy Porter "while generally complementary... sometimes tangled in border disputes." Similarly in modern times, the moral stance of the Church against contraception and abortion has been a source of controversy. The Church, while being a major provider of health care to HIV AIDS sufferers, and of orphanages for unwanted children, has been criticised for opposing condom use. Due to Catholics' belief in the sanctity of life from conception, IVF, which leads to the destruction of many embryos, surrogacy, which relies on IVF, and embryonic stem-cell research, which necessitates the destruction of embryos, are among other areas of controversy for the Church in the provision of health care.