SPIRITUALITY IN CARE by Carlo Alfredo Clerici and Tullio Proserpio (San Paolo)

“Spirituality in care” by Carlo Alfredo Clerici and Tullio Proserpio (San Paolo)

With preface by Pope Francis

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by Helena Molinari

An authentic and passionate dialogue on spirituality in care, for the San Paolo publishing house; between a doctor, Carlo Alfredo Clerici, and a presbyter, Tullio Proserpio, who meet every morning in the corridors of one of the most important Italian hospitals, the National Cancer Institute of Milan.

Suffering and hope.

The humanization of relationships in skills, in roles.

The desperate search for trust.

The beautiful obstinacy to life and to life itself. The dark and the light. Our Holy Father Francis says well in the preface when he reports for himself and all of us that there are no full and convincing answers to the great and ultimate questions of those who fight or of those who know perfectly well about his painful extension to life, of hours, days, years for the lucky ones, to expire.

Sickness is also a form of poverty, it thunders!

It is possible to equal physical and spiritual care and must, he continues.

You can stay next to that bed, the pontiff shows us as thin and effective as always.

Illness as an opportunity for those who have gone through it and for those who help it.

The disease with all its frailties facilitates the fall of walls and prejudices and makes a journey between our two authors and an alliance is made with them in the ward and on a daily basis, with all health workers.

The development of this book becomes diaristic, almost epistolary, which I highly recommend for the effort without excuses to heaven, from the deepest roots of his land. The hard clod of recidivism that harshly tests the faith up to that point unshakeable and that of palliative care even more inseparable from the spiritual one.

A practical, scientific and yet so human book that it is fully merited among those detailed here for Literature.

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The card of the book: “The spirituality in the cure” by Carlo Alfredo Clerici and Tullio Proserpio (San Paolo)

Between a doctor and a presbyter who meet every morning in the corridors of one of the most important hospitals in Italy – the National Cancer Institute of Milan – an authentic, passionate, lucid dialogue is born on the theme of spirituality in treatment. What does the sick person who suffers and who glimpses the approach of the last threshold need?
Is there the possibility of an alliance between medicine and spirituality, in an increasingly technological and standardized healthcare reality on large numbers and efficiency of services?
With a rigorous analysis of the systems but also of the deep needs expressed by patients and families, the authors underline that it is possible to inaugurate new training paths, new models of collaboration and new routines in healthcare teams, in which listening and taking in charge of the patient’s spiritual dimension they become an element capable of supporting in the most difficult moments and of offering perspectives to the question of meaning that accompanies every human being.

Carlo Alfredo Clerici, Tullio Proserpio, Spirituality in healing. Dialogues between clinic, psychology and pastoral care, Edizioni San Paolo 2022, pp. 208, € 18.00

CARLO ALFREDO CLERICI he is a medical specialist in clinical psychology, psychotherapist. He works as a II level professor of Clinical Psychology at the Department of Oncology and Hemato-Oncology of the University of Milan and as a first level medical director at the IRCCS National Cancer Institute Foundation in Milan. He is the founder and animator of the site:

TULLIO PROSERPIO he is a presbyter of the Archdiocese of Milan, since 2003 he has been hospital chaplain at the IRCCS National Cancer Institute Foundation in Milan. He is a project consultant for Palliative Care for the Pontifical Academy for Life and a member of the project group for the Health Pastoral Office of the Italian Bishops’ Conference. He is the founder and animator of the site:

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[In collaborazione con Radio Aldebaran e con la trasmissione radiofonica Book-ing curata e condotta da Helena Molinari. I testi della rubrica “Parole: tra cielo e terra” saranno riproposti nella puntata di Book-ing domenica prossima, a partire dalle h. 12, sulle frequenze del suddetto programma radiofonico]

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