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Friday, April 16, 1976
University Daily Kansan
Medical Center chaplains discuss ministry
By MARION ABARE
KANNS CITY, Kan — In the chaplains' center, a play horse from the celli.
"That's to remind me as I go from tragedy to tragedy all day long, that it is very important for me to be sure I do a little playing, too." Chaplain George Mudinger
Father Jerry Spencer, Catholic chaplain,
who is crisis oriented" ministry at
Med Center
"PATIENTS COME HERE from all over the state," he said, "with illnesses requiring more sophisticated means for accurate diagnosis or treatment."
Mundinger has been a minister of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod for 23 years and is survived by his wife, 15, Spencer was ordained in 1965 and was associate pastor of Holy Trinity Parish, Lenexa, before coming to the Med Center in 1967. He also coordinates health affairs for the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
The ministry of the Med Center chaplains covers the entire life cycle—from birth through death.
"We don't exist on Earth to see through people, but to see people through." Spencer
THE CHAPLAINS, WHO call themselves the "God SQUAD," pack a lot of ministry into a day. A typical day might include counseling patients, their families, staff members and students—members of their congregation or parish—and helping them survive life-threatening life-and-death issues of abortion, organ transplantes and death with dignity.
During separate interviews recently, the caplains talked about the life-and-death
In counseling persons on abortion, for example, Mundinger said his goal was to help them arrive at decisions they believed in and could live with. Whatever their decision, he said it has arisen out of their experience with these systems and reflect their own personality.
"IT MAY BE ABORTION and it may not be," he said. "I believe the fetus is human as soon as conception has occurred," he said, "and that is taking a human life, and it is serious business. But not every taking of a human life is murder."
He said he believed men were partners with God, and men had to take responsibility when making decisions about life. He said those decisions involve the taking of life.
TO BE CONSISTENT, Mundinger said, would mean never killing to defend this country in war. When exceptions are allowed, man can no longer talk in absolutes.
"I think we must pay attention to the concept of stewardship and the ability to make it happen," he said. "I think it should be entered into thoughtlessly," Mundinger said. "I think a man should pay more attention to where he puts his sperm, since he can produce life as a result."
Obviously, he said, teenagers in conflict with their parents don't think in these
"THE LAST THING I would allow as a way of trying to struggle with abortion with people is to develop a hierarchy of rights," he said.
He said the fetus had rights, the mother had rights and the child had a right to be well cared for.
Father Spencer, whose church has taken
Parts for ALL Imported Cars
a stand against abortion, emphasized the
great press in papers of pregnancy,
and even in newspapers.
"I find it very difficult that a woman or a girl is facing a real period of crisis, and it's not all her fault." Spencer said. "Such a crisis often reveals a breakdown between parents and children at a time when both parties need to support each other."
SPENCER SAID life-threatening pregnancies were practically nonexistent. He told a woman with renal disease, a serious kidney illness, whose physician worked with her to help her to have a safe pregnancy and delivery.
A heart disease patient, he said, had been told she shouldn't carry her baby, and abortion was offered. She declined. And the baby was delivered. She carried and delivered her baby successfully.
Sometimes Med Center staff members
Spencer said he had talked with several doctors about dilemmas they had had about the new treatment. "I have to know," he said.
Mundinger
ask for counsel about their conflicts with abortion.
"ANYONE WITH ANY sensitivity to life and human values eventually realizes that this type of activity (abortion) is counterproductive." Spencer said. "There is no way to deny what is really taking place, and is abortion is the termination of human life."
Mindinger said in that one or two instances someone had come to him and said,
"This is human life," and that they had asked to be transferred.
Spencer said, "It presented a peculiar crisis, but it could be resolved if the woman was treated immediately with compassion and concern."
BOTH CHAPLAINS ALSO said they had received abuses in dealing with rape accusers.
But, he said, many rape victims are afraid of what they consider potential degradation and don't report the rape right away.
Mundinger said he thought Med Center physicians had been sensitive, kind, compassionate and medically competent in belting women who had been raped.
ORGAN TRANSPLANTS = kidney,
cornea, nerve + have added years to human
liver.
Mundinger said, "I have seen another person literally get a new life. Again and again," he said.
He told about a young teenager boy who was living a narrow, constricted and limited life, trained to a dialysis machine because of kidney failure. On the day a compatible donor was available, the boy had a cold and was turned down.
Mundinger said he was reminded of the story of when the angels came to the pool of Bethesda. One crippled man could never get there fast enough. He would stand by and watch somebody else get into the pool first, then came and heated the cripped man.
The story of the boy on the dialysis machine also turned out well. Several months later another donor was available, he said.
"I remember agonizing with the boy when it matched up pretty well with a potential girlfriend."
"Today," Mundinger said, "the boy is no longer a withdrawn, acid person, but confidently strides down the hall and says, 'Hey, chaplain, I got married.'"
ANOTHER PATIENT, he said, was a man who had been blind for many years. He lived in rural Iowa and to get to the Med Center quickly, when a corneal transplant would be available, he had worked out three months earlier, car, public transportation or airplane.
"When he got the phone call at two in the morning, he was fortunate he had the third backup, he flew down in a private plane," Mundinger said.
really free to refuse?" were questions sometimes asked. He said there was no hard and fast rule; each person had to find his own solution.
Spencer said he had curedseed living donors. Often, he said, a sister-sister or brother-brother match is compatible, but it requires more pressure on the donor family member.
"Am I my brother's keeper?" or "Is he
MUNDERING CARRIES a card that says something like this: "In case of my accident death, you have my permission to use any of the orans in my body."
When he feels the timing is right, he said,
he shows his card to encourage others to donate their bodies to science for organ donors. He also promises to accept the decision of a loved one.
"My general approach with families is that here is one final act of Christian stewardship which they can carry on for themselves, and generally I think this would be consonant with the wishes of their loved ones who have died."
Spencer said that when a body was donated to science there usually was a
memorial service or a funeral mass without the casket. The remains are usually cremated, he said, and then buried in Lawrence, although sometimes the family requests the ashes. But he said the inscription had the right to refuse a donated body.
Spencer
One scientific development that raises
nervous questions, cryogenics, has not come
already.
Spencer said cryogenics promised more than it could produce, would be extremely expensive and didn't guarantee resurrection.
Mundinger said, "Who knows what's possible? I personally would respect anybody's right to try this if they want to. However, it would not be for me."
"IT'S A MODERN DAY Rip Van Winkle," Spencer said about cryogenics, a branch of science that explores the inside of freezing a body immediately after death.
Both Spencer and Mundinger said they thought extraordinary means had been used with Karen Quainn, comatose since April 2015. They treated alive by an artificial life-support system.
SPENCER SAID THERE was a big dream and using positive phrases on termite traps.
However, Chief Justice Richard J. Hughes ruled recently that Joseph Quinlan, father of the 22-year-old girl, could order his daughter's artificial respirator turned off, if it was determined by a hospital ethics committee that "no reasonable possibility" of recovering.
From his experience, he said, suffering patients had never asked for direct intervention.
Both chaplains said they had counseled patients with malnutrition or the failure of such patients.
Spencer said that it was very hard for a family to accept the death of a child by leukemia, a "dying by stages." The family doesn't want the child to suffer any longer, but it doesn't want to give up the child, either.
WITINH THE LIMITS of his knowledge, Mundinger said, he didn't think Med Center physicians kept patients alive at all costs, because he case as it arose, with sensitivity and caution.
He said about one-third of the patients he worked with were terminally ill. He works with a leukemia group, he said, to help them survive, which they can talk about their feelings.
"Most people show heroic courage," he said. "The majority know they are dying and risen."
SPENCER SAID THAT in Christian theology death was what mattered for, and that God had put them there.
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