I recently heard a radio ad for an online casino that captures the American zeitgeist. After describing his life of physical chaos, professional wrestler Drew McIntyre delivers the pitch: “When life feels like a battle, kick up your feet, have some fun, and place a bet with [Casino name omitted to protect the innocent].”
I’ll grant the first premise. I am a former athlete on the far side of forty, and every morning my back and knees remind me of it before my feet hit the floor. The ad identifies something true about the human condition: pain is pervasive. Life can feel like a battle.
The Culture of Escape
It is the suggested response to the pain that fails. As a practicing Catholic, I am confident that a wager on the Twins game will not heal my knees, my anxiety, or my soul. Yet secular culture increasingly promotes escape as the answer to every form of human pain. Numb it. Mask it. Dispose of it.
Too often, public policy follows the crowd instead of leading it. In an era of bitter division, some of the Legislature’s most significant bipartisan efforts have involved marijuana legalization, psychedelic pilot programs, and attempts to legalize sports gambling—each offered as relief for some type of pain, whether physical, mental, or economic.
Policymakers want to be heroes in the war on pain, and the fastest route is to hand people the escape of their choice. This is not compassion. It is expediency wearing compassion’s clothes. At its logical terminus stands the gravest escape of all: the proposition that when a person is judged more burdensome than useful, and pain cannot be dulled, the sufferer should be given the means to dispose of themselves.
A Different Vision of Healing
The Church has a different answer because she begins with a different anthropology. A person is not merely a machine that hurts, a body to be repaired, or a bundle of symptoms to be managed. The human person is body and soul—physical, mental, and spiritual—and pain can touch each dimension. A society unwilling to acknowledge the spiritual will remain ill-equipped to understand suffering or offer the fullness of healing.
Modeling her care on the Good Samaritan and on Christ himself, the Church built ministries of healing long before health care became an industry—and before insurance became its organizing logic. She built them on a premise the industry has never supplied: human dignity does not rise or fall with health, independence, productivity, or convenience. The Church’s healthcare mission recognizes the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions of each person.
Honoring the spiritual dimension of the human person does not mean romanticizing pain, withholding medicine, or telling a suffering person simply to “offer it up.” The Church’s Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Healthcare Services identify effective pain relief and symptom management as essential. But they also insist on personal and spiritual accompaniment—care that addresses the conditions that so often drive self-medication and escapism: isolation, fear, powerlessness, alienation, and the search for meaning.
That is the inspiration behind Righteous Relief: Addressing Pain and Suffering From the Heart of the Church, a study day for medical professionals, clergy, caregivers, and Catholic leaders, co-hosted by the Catholic Health Association of Minnesota and the Minnesota Catholic Conference.
Along with a great lineup of speakers and panelists, keynote speaker Dr. Aaron Kheriaty—psychiatrist, bioethicist, and author of Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine—will address the recovery of an integrated vision of the human person in medical practice. Dr. Anthony Isacco of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota will moderate a panel on mental health, and Minnesota’s Catholic bishops will join us for reflection and prayer.
Together, we will consider how the Church can respond to physical suffering and emotional pain in both its healthcare work and public policy advocacy without surrendering either medical excellence or the truth about the human person. The Church cannot promise a life without pain. She offers something more honest—and ultimately more hopeful: relief where relief is possible, accompaniment where suffering remains, and the conviction that no wound places a person beyond the reach of God.
Join us Tuesday, September 1, from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Mendota Heights. Registration is $25 and includes lunch. Register at mncatholic.org/fallstudyday2026.
Ryan Hamilton is the Legislative and Member Liaison of the Catholic Health Association–Minnesota, a Minnesota Catholic Conference advocacy partner.