Benedictine College’s plans to create a medical school are advancing as the school seeks to develop an accredited institution based on top-tier medical science while combating the spread of political ideology in the field.
The Saint Padre Pio Institute for the Relief of Suffering, School of Osteopathic Medicine is still waiting to be accredited, but its aim is to fill a vacuum that critics of the medical landscape say has been created by adherence to racialization, bodily experimentation, and achieving ideological, rather than scientific, ends.
“Instead of sound science and ethics based in Hippocratic medicine and natural law, many who do enter medical school are faced with a barrage of anti-life, anti-science ideological indoctrination that conflicts with their faith and makes it virtually impossible to maintain or practice their pro-life, pro-family values,” Chris Faddis, president of Solidarity HealthShare, a faith-based healthcare organization, told the Washington Examiner.
“Faith-based healthcare professionals are under increasing pressure to conform to a far-left agenda, which demands they provide medical services and procedures that run against their deeply held religious beliefs,” Faddis said. “The fact that medical training is now riddled with woke ideology and lacks scientific rigor has kept many promising young Christians and Catholics from even considering going into the practice of medicine.”
The Saint Padre Pio Institute, which would be located at Benedictine’s Atchison, Kansas, campus, has generated interest among would-be applicants already, Stephen Johnson, the college’s marketing and communications director, told the College Fix.
Applications, however, are not yet open, as fundraising and accreditation are still underway. If both were successful, Dr. George Mychaskiw, the proposed president of the new school, said plans to open are set for fall 2027.
The school will not be exclusive to Catholic applicants but would require students and faculty to pledge to follow Catholic ethical and moral teaching on medical care, based on Saint Pope John Paul II’s “Ex Corde Ecclesiae,” which Mychaskiw said explains “what a truly Catholic university should be … so obviously strongly pro-life, from conception until natural death. Strongly pro-family, strongly pro-biological identity,” according to the College Fix.
The curriculum would be structured with a focus both on medical science and medical ethics to have graduates obtain both a medical degree and a master’s in bioethics and medical theology — something Mychaskiw, an osteopathic physician and board member of Catholic Healthcare International, said he hopes will allow graduates to be “thought leaders” in the field. CHI first proposed the new school in 2022.
“Many Christians likewise have lost trust in today’s medical establishment and are looking for physicians whose values align with their own,” Faddis said. “It has become increasingly difficult to find such physicians, and there is an urgent need to educate and train enough life-affirming physicians to serve the massive number of people seeking their care.”
Catholic healthcare facilities make up roughly one-third of healthcare offerings in the United States, Mychaskiw said. There are multiple Catholic medical schools already operating in the United States, and more are being planned.
A growing number of medical schools are pushing adherence to critical race theory and the concept of “racial concordance,” which posits that patients receive better care from doctors of the same race.
Professional organizations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have chosen to stand firm in their support for medical interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital surgeries for children who claim transgender identity, despite studies suggesting those options can be dangerous and irreversible.
Likewise, prominent medical journals appear to have used their platforms occasionally to advance political agendas, such as by publishing articles that promote greater abortion access.
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The Washington Examiner reported that the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article in January that claimed an exorbitant number of rapes result in pregnancy to attack states that have restricted abortions sought as a result of rape. Experts said the article amounted to a “very poorly researched, poorly done piece of just advocacy work” on behalf of the abortion industry.
Last week, Sage Journals, another highly respected publisher of medical academic articles, decided to retract three studies critical of the abortion drug mifepristone in an unprecedented move ahead of a Supreme Court case challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the chemical. Authors of those articles said the retractions were further evidence of medical journals being a “political arm” of the abortion industry.
