A Life Devoted to the Dying
by Al Sandner
MOSAIC, Summer 2009

  
"The great teachers in my life, the great mentors, the great witnesses of faith, were the sick and the dying, the people who used me in the last stages of their lives."

Fr. Donald Worthy, a child of the tiny Catholic community in Imlay City, pioneered the Archdiocese of Detroit's ministry to the sick and dying. He entered Sacred Heart Seminary at age nineteen, when he squeezed into a high school desk to begin his seminary training with second-year Latin. Father was ordained in 1962 and found himself caught up a few years later in the foment of the Second Vatican Council.

In seven years of parish work, Father Worthy, who achieved senior priest status in 2003, found that some of his most satisfying experiences were hospital visitations. He decided to volunteer to be Catholic chaplain for the Detroit Medical Center. "Doing ministry in a scientific milieu, working with Wayne State University, was
tremendously exciting," he says.

"And Cardinal John Dearden believed in us, trusted us, encouraged us to innovate. He gave me the opportunity to be a key person at a critical time in a church that wanted to widen and enrich its care for its suffering people," Father recalls about those heady days.

Auxiliary Bishop Walter Schoenherr assigned Father Worthy to clinical pastoral training at Harper Hospital in Detroit. Cardinal Dearden then allowed the young priest a year's residency (1971-72) at Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, a gigantic hospital with thousands of
patients. That experience "gave me a notion of mental and emotional illness, a notion of healthy development and of the place where religion fits into all of that."

He returned to Detroit to be met by the dynamic and charismatic Sr. Mary Leila of the Sisters of Mercy of Farmington. She "gave me the wherewithal to set up a center at Mt. Carmel Hospital to train candidates—mostly Catholic at that time, priests and nuns—in the explicit spiritual care of the sick and dying, out of a Catholic context, out of a Catholic theology." The center was the first Catholic institution in the country to be accredited by both the National Catholic Chaplains Association and the largely Protestant Association for Clinical Pastoral Education.

The highly educated and motivated nuns (many with multiple advanced degrees but suddenly liberated from the classroom and looking for new ministries) and the nurses he dealt with "brought the feminine into healing and understanding. Doctors came and went, but the nurses
stayed and nurtured. Some of the greatest theology I learned was from nurses manuals. And many of the nuns became significant  caregivers."

The avalanche of social change, drugs and changes in finance turned Mt. Carmel into Detroit's largest receiving hospital. Its "inner city furnace" of a trauma room was fed and served by people of every race and culture, with differing languages and theologies and totally different
perspectives on death and the afterlife. Often a doctor whose view of death pivoted on the transmigration of souls would gladly defer to the Catholic priest in consoling survivors.

The Sisters of Mercy also bestowed "one of the great blessings of my life" when in the late 1970s they asked Father to help create Michigan's first hospice, a concept that was unfamiliar to lawmakers in Lansing and opposed by Michigan's largest health insurer but backed by the United Auto Workers. After helping to get legislation passed, Father
Worthy served on the hospice's first board.

Mt. Carmel trained up to one hundred ministers before changes in society closed its doors on Easter Sunday 1991. But now those numbers are dwindling—without enough priests to meet the need.

That makes the future of hospice volunteer training "problematic," says Father Worthy. "But the Church has had many seasons. Its first two thousand years were only a prelude."