We Can Cure Bodies

Guest Post – Gabriela Robles, Chief Executive

In a recent podcast episode, Sister Marian Schubert, CSJ, Assistant General Superior, Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, said something so intrinsic to our work that I haven’t gotten it out of my head. She said, “We can cure bodies. True healing happens when people are respected.”

I’ve worked in Catholic health care and philanthropy for more than two decades. I know the difference between curing and healing the way you know a phrase from a formation session. But I heard it differently when she said it. Sister Marian has spent a lifetime with people at their most vulnerable, and she wasn’t offering a framework. She was telling me what she’d seen.

She said, “respected.” Not comforted or served. Respect requires believing the person in front of you knows something you don’t.

Early in my career, I worked at Latino Health Access, a nonprofit based in Santa Ana, CA and many of our patients were living with diabetes. They were told that the cause of their disease was eating too much Mexican food. While the advice to eat less of it wasn’t entirely wrong, it didn’t offer our communities anything substantive, and it completely demonized their culture and history.

It was not only the food they could afford, but also the food they knew how to cook, and in many instances, the recipes that honored generations before them. We were also direct in suggesting our clients go for a walk more often. Yet, nobody asked whether the streets were safe or if the neighborhood park had lighting. The people getting this advice weren’t failing to follow it. They were being handed instructions written for a neighborhood they didn’t live in.

There was one more thing, and it’s the part that really hits home for me as I navigate caring for my dad. When we asked people about caring for themselves, so many were prioritizing someone else first, like me. Their own bodies were somewhere down the list. That’s not noncompliance. That’s love, and it was being recorded as a failure.

The Fund’s community-building work is slower and less satisfying to report, but it changes something for the people. Instead of telling people what to do without considering the constraints of the communities or the importance of their cultures and histories, we listened. And we supported leaders in their communities, using their lived experience to teach others how to advocate for themselves. They began to see themselves as people whose situations were worth explaining.

That’s what Sister Marian is describing. The cure was available the whole time. What was missing was respect. The assumption used to be that the barrier was willpower, when, in fact, it was their environment.

This is why I love Catholic health care. It doesn’t pretend the spiritual health part is separate. The person at the front desk, the nurse, the physician — each encounter either leaves someone more whole or less. And health isn’t only what happens in a doctor’s office. It’s everything that affects body, mind, and spirit. It’s the food you can reach, the street you can walk, the fear you’re carrying, and whether anyone has ever asked what you already know.

Sister Marian understood that before I did.

We can cure bodies. Everything else depends on whether we treat people as though they matter.