SEATTLE — The opening session at the 79th annual Catholic Medical Association conference in Seattle was delivered by Dr. Josef Seifert and was entitled “Christian Anthropology, Connecting a Proper Anthropology with Proper Medical Practice.”
Dr. Seifert is the author of over 40 books and grew up in Salzburg, Austria. The philosophical foundations laid out by Dr. Seifert pursue the goal of a new foundation of what constitutes the value of human life from a Catholic, anthropological, metaphysical and ethical basis. The decisions physicians, indeed all of society will make, depends completely on whether society understands and accepts what it means to be human.
Dr. Seifert has authored over 300 articles in 12 languages, received an honorary doctorate from Franciscan University at Steubenville and is a full member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
After a three-hour lecture, I asked him to touch on three questions for our Integrated Catholic Life audience. Are Catholic medical providers getting enough training in medical school on how to practice medicine and keep their faith intact? Why wouldn’t we want to end suffering in the world even it meant ending the lives of others (through embryonic stem cell research) for miraculous cures? And my first question, isn’t the real reason there is pressure to find cures using human embryos because of the money that can be made by drug companies who isolate the components and patent them?
