Campus Notes

As Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, looks forward to graduating the first class from its nursing program this coming academic year, The National Catholic Register took a close look at the program’s unique focus on training Catholic nurses well-formed in Catholic faith and morals.

From the Register report:

Benedictine’s year-old program is designed to prepare future nurses to work effectively in a field potentially fraught with many challenges. …

The college’s president, Stephen Minnis, agrees that the nursing program belongs at Benedictine College and believes that the nursing profession is one of the Church’s great contributions to the world.

“Catholic health care is on the front lines of the battle for Catholic identity in public life,” Minnis said. “Ultimately, our answer to Catholic health-care identity fights is to produce young men and women who are savvy, unapologetically Catholic, and put them on the ground in good careers.”

“Our mission is to educate within a community of faith and scholarship. Nursing unites those three things — community, faith and scholarship — in a unique way,” Minnis added.

Benedictine College’s nursing program is housed in the Mother Teresa Center for Nursing and Health Education.

“When our students walk into the Mother Teresa Nursing Center, they know what we expect of them,” Minnis said. “Mother Teresa was 100% committed to the sanctity of life and the teachings of the Church. That is what we expect of Benedictine nurses. Mother Teresa was also 100% committed to every person in her care. Her motto, ‘Give your hands to serve and your heart to love,’ is our program’s motto too — and the words that our soon-to-be nurses walk by every day on the way to class.”  …

“Benedictine College’s nursing program focuses on serving each patient as a person with dignity, a person who is created in the image of God,” Danner said. “All nursing programs focus on restoring health, but our program has a unique spiritual aspect. I think Benedictine is educating nurses who will care for patients, body and soul, as if they were Christ himself.”

The college requires nursing students to take courses in bioethics and courses on professional, legal and ethical issues in nursing, as well as philosophy and theology, providing nursing students with a strong Catholic foundation, said Lynne Connelly, director of nursing at BC.

“What I am hoping is that, with this foundation, our students will be able to take what they’ve learned and apply it to case-related situations,” Connelly said. …

The nursing program at Benedictine College seemed to come into being at just the right time, considering the debates about Catholic identity and health care. While a Catholic nursing student can get excellent training at a state school, Benedictine’s program goes one step farther, said Shankman.

“We can focus much more clearly on the morality of health care and can focus on the spiritual needs that should be addressed as part of a holistic approach to health care,” Shankman said. “We ground our nursing program in the same Christian anthropology that animates the entire Benedictine community, so students know that their fundamental duty is to respect the dignity of the person who comes to them as a patient. “All human beings, no matter how weak, sick or helpless, are made in the image and likeness of God. Our students learn that explicitly; at a state school that can’t be part of the curriculum.”

Nursing student Danner agreed: “It’s incredibly important to have a nursing program at a Catholic college. The Rule of St. Benedict says, ‘Before all things and above all things, care must be taken of the sick, so that they will be served as if they were Christ in person.’ I think it is a strong statement to say that caring for the sick comes ‘before all things and above all things.’ It is a central part of our mission as Catholics.”

Read the rest of this article from the Register here.

Benedictine College is featured by The Cardinal Newman Society in The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College for its strong Catholic identity.  Read Benedictine’s profile here.