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“After my Ph.D. defense,” Fr. Bill Stempsey relates, “my
dissertation director came back and said, ‘Congratulations
Father Doctor Doctor.’”
The list of honorifics was wholly appropriate. By the time
he earned his Ph.D., in philosophy, from Georgetown University
in 1996, he was 18 years beyond the M.D. he had earned from
the State University of New York, Buffalo. In the interim,
he had been ordained a Jesuit priest and picked up a masters
degree in health care ethics at Loyola University in Chicago,
only the third person to earn the degree there.
Fr. Stempsey tells this story with a twinkle in his eye,
still entertained by the complex arc of his intertwined careers—medical,
philosophical and spiritual.
He grew up in an observant, Polish Catholic household. He
did his undergraduate work at Boston College. And his experience
with the Jesuits there, in the early 1970s, was positive.
“They were available,” he remembers. “They
were real. They were good teachers. They were willing to
listen. They were interesting, and they were doing a lot
of interesting things.”
He went on to medical school anyway, rather than into the
priesthood at that point, and then went through the requisite
internships and residencies. But ultimately, he didn’t
find where he ended up as satisfying as he had thought it
would be.
“I knew I didn’t want to be a pathologist,” he
says, of his medical specialty. “The more I got into
that the more I got into managing laboratories … I knew
I didn’t want to do that.”
But as to what he did want to do, that wasn’t entirely
clear. Figuring it out took time.
Even after becoming a priest, the prospect remained that
he could still be a medical doctor; nationwide, there are
a handful of Jesuit physicians, surgeons and psychiatrists,
who have combined medical practice with spiritual calling.
Fr. Stempsey could have retrained in a different medical
specialty. But, ultimately, that was not the direction in
which he felt called.
As medicine and the bio-sciences continue to expand, questions
that have been abstract become, sometimes painfully, concrete.
In some countries, for example, it is now legal for people
to sell “spare” organs—we only need one kidney,
after all. Fr. Stempsey’s response to this, to what
has generally been referred to as “the commodification
of the body” takes recourse to church teaching but also
to moral philosophy.
“My kidney is part of me,” he says. “It’s
part of who I am. And I think we say something pernicious
about who human beings are when we start to put prices on
parts of ourselves.”
While the field of medical ethics has seen significant growth
in the last decade or two—and issues associated with
cloning, genetic manipulation and advanced reproductive medical
techniques promise to accelerate this trend—Fr. Stempsey’s
work deals with related but subtly different issues.
“My real specialty,” he says, “is the philosophy
of medicine, which constitutes more foundational things,
like concepts of health and disease, the philosophical basis
behind how we structure medical care. Not so much what we
should do but what are the metaphysical and the epistemological
issues.”
He could have taught medical students or graduate school,
but over time—through prayer, reflection, and consultation—Fr.
Stempsey came to the conclusion that he would have a stronger
impact on undergraduates, particularly on premeds.
“Aristotle in the Metaphysics says that philosophy
begins in wonder,” he explains. “And that’s
really what I am trying to get at with students here, to
have them develop a philosophical attitude, to wonder about
things, whether it be medicine, or the meaning of life or
anything in between.”
Donald N.S. Unger is a free-lance journalist from Worcester,
Mass.
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