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Elder care: global rethink needed

10th February 2021 By GerryBurke

The Vatican is calling for a new paradigm of care for older people after what it calls the “massacre” wrought by the pandemic, which has disproportionately killed people living in nursing homes, AP reports.

The Vatican’s Pontifical Council of Life has issued a position paper that makes the case for a global rethink of how to care for people in their final years, including resisting any rush to institutional care in favour of adapting home environments to the needs of people as they age.

The council’s president, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, noted at a press conference that more than half of Italy’s elderly dead during the initial coronavirus outbreak lived in nursing homes. “The death tolls are brutal in their cruelty,” Paglia said. “A real massacre of the elderly.”

Pope Francis has frequently spoken about the wisdom and richness that older people provide younger generations and denounced how they are often shut away in institutions. That tendency, he says, is part of what he calls today’s “throwaway culture” that treats older people, weak and infirm as nonessential.

At the same time, families are having fewer children who can tend to parents as they age, creating the need for a new way of thinking about how to care for older people while valuing the benefits they bring, even in their eventual sickness and frailties. “It is therefore very appropriate to begin immediately a careful, far-sighted, and honest reflection about how contemporary society should grow close to the elderly population, especially the weakest,” the paper said.

“What we need is a new vision, a new paradigm that helps society as a whole to care for the elderly.”

The document praised new models of assisted living that provide companionship and care where needed but, in preserving autonomy and independence, fall short of an institutional facility. And it called for greater assistance to families who are able to care for their loved ones at home for as long as possible.

Source: AP

Read the announcement from Vatican News

And here 

Filed Under: NEWS

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Speaking Out

There are some things which just have to be said.  We have to speak out because at the heart of the Christian message is our belief that God is not silent.  God has spoken through creation itself and the evolving universe; through the human story; through the dwelling of Jesus Christ in time; through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Church and in each believer; through the inspiration of the scriptures; and through the wisdom and the teaching of the Church through the ages.

We use words all the time.  Words of welcome.  Words of wisdom.  Words of warmth.  Words of warning.  Words of wistfulness.  Our words are wasted if words are just words.   In the beginning was the Word.  And the Word was with God.  And the Word was God.  Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him.   The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The Word made things happen.

As Christians, as followers of the Word, we do something about what we have heard.  Our own best words are our actions.

Please tell us what you would like us to Speak Out about by contacting:  info@ccoa.org.uk

 

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Reflect and Pray

Help me to journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown. Give me the faith to leave old ways and break fresh ground with you. Christ of the mysteries, I trust You to be stronger than each storm within me. I will trust in the darkness and know that my times, even now, are in your hand. Tune my spirit to the music of heaven, and somehow, make my obedience count for You.”

St Brendan the Navigator   484-577

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