Hospital chaplains bring spiritual care, comfort to the sick

Editor’s note: This article was written before the Archdiocese of Chicago suspended public liturgies and the schools it operates in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

When Marie Coglianese walks the halls of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, she has a smile and a greeting for everyone.

Nearly everyone offers a “hello” or “good morning” in return, even when their brisk pace never slackens.

Coglianese has been on the pastoral care staff at Loyola since 1981 and directed the department for more than 20 years. She is now in charge of what is called the spiritual care department at Trinity Loyola and its two nearby community hospitals, Gottleib Memorial Hospital in Melrose Park and MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn.

She and her staff, as well as the clinical pastoral education students they teach, work to offer the spiritual care that people in the hospital need, whether they are patients and families or hospital staff.

The spiritual care department also coordinates more than 50 volunteers who bring the Eucharist to patients and others who come to sit with the dying who have no one else, and helps make sure the hospital is acting in accord with the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.

“What we do is fulfill all the needs that lie below the medical needs,” said Coglianese, making her way to the spiritual care offices, which are in the basement, next to the chapel. “They put all the important people down here because we’re the foundation. We hold everything else up.”

After checking on staffing for the day, Coglianese sits in on the first part of the department “huddle,” a new management-mandated form of staff meeting held in every unit every day. The unit has the equivalent of nine full-time certified chaplains to cover 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is one priest on the staff full-time, and one who works part-time.

Coglianese goes from her unit huddle to another, larger huddle for the medical staff, and then to the top-level management huddle, which also includes administrations from the two community hospitals by videoconference.

“We’re here, at every level,” Coglianese said of the hospital chaplains. “And we need to be involved at all levels to make sure we get the access we need. We’re very integrated into the daily operations of the units.”

The chaplains spend about half their time in Loyola’s 11 intensive care units, Coglianese said.

That means being notified of new admissions as well as impending deaths. It means having nurses do a quick assessment of whether patients are in spiritual distress. It means making the rounds of hospital wards, but always being available to answer a page.

“Every hospitalization is a crisis of meaning,” said Adrian Dominican Sister Xiomara Mendez-Hernandez, who joined the staff full time after doing clinical pastoral education at Loyola. “That’s like CPE (clinical pastoral education) 101, but it’s true.”

On a day in February, Sister Xiomara had most of the inpatient cancer wards, as well as some other areas to cover. A native of the Dominican Republic, she also serves as a Spanish-language interpreter.

She stopped on a floor where cancer patients are treated and chatted with patients getting activity by walking the halls. One said she might be going home the next day.

“Sometimes that’s all our interactions are,” Sister Xiomara said. “But it’s important to be there, to care.”

Another patient, a young woman to whom doctors were providing comfort care after running out of treatment options that might save her life, had requested daily Communion. Sister Xiomara washed her hands and donned a gown, gloves and mask to visit her.

When she entered the room, the patient turned off the television and closed her eyes, feigning sleep.

“I’ll come back later,” Sister Xiomara said quietly, then left the ward, stopping to remove the gown, gloves and mask and wash her hands again.

“It’s a privilege to care for the spiritual needs of those who are sick,” Sister Xiomara said.

A third patient, still recovering from a wound after an accident, was concerned about a family member, also in the hospital. The patient was friendly and welcoming, but worried. Sister Xiomara assured her that she would visit the relative as well, even though the relative was not on Sister Xiomara’s floor. Then she offered her a prayer of blessing.

Later, she comforted the young relative, who was lonely and sad.

“It’s okay to cry,” she told her. “It’s okay to be sad. But not for too long.”

Then, she told her, she will offer same prayer of blessing her sister got.

When she left, she stopped at the nurses’ station. Perhaps, she suggested, the patient could be taken upstairs to visit her relative?

“We don’t just show up and smile and say a prayer,” said Jerry Kaelin, the supervisor of clinical pastoral education. “We do smile and say prayers, but we do more than that.”

That can include hel ping connect a patient to someone from their own faith community, or facilitating religious practices that are important to patients and staff, whether that means setting aside an area of the chapel for Muslims to pray or helping a Navajo patient and his medicine man hold a ceremony to bless the chemotherapy drugs that would be given to him.

Rebecca McDaniel, a chaplain at OSF Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Evergreen Park, said she and her colleagues are there to bring the presence of God to people in the hospital.

“We are with them when they are most vulnerable. They are vulnerable because they are sick or dying, or someone they love is, or they’ve gotten a bad diagnosis,” she said. “A lot of times, we are their advocate to make sure the doctor hears them and understands what is important to them”

At Loyola, Coglianese recently was paged to see an oncology patient who had just received a difficult diagnosis and was pacing and agitated.

“She was kind of frenetic,” Coglianese said. “I asked her what she was most worried about in that moment, and she said, ‘Who’s going to pick up my kids from school?’”

That question was a practical matter for that day, and for the days going forward, Coglianese said. “She wanted to know how she was going to make sure things continued as normally as possible for her family.”

McDaniel said that she prays before visiting each patient.

“Before I enter a room, I ask the Holy Spirit to come with me,” she said. “This isn’t about my skills or anything. This is about what God’s got for me today.”

Chaplains at both hospitals said they are there for staff members as well as patients, especially in the wake of a patient death.

“That’s part of what we do,” McDaniel said. “We have what’s called the Potter Pause (named for the founder of the Little Company of Mary sisters, Mary Potter). Every time there’s a code, when it’s over, we pray for every person on the medical team to know that God is with them and they did everything they were supposed to do. We all need to be reminded that God decides who lives and who dies. We can do everything right, everything we are supposed to do, and sometimes the patient dies.”

McDaniel, who was a teacher and principal before becoming a hospital chaplain, said that it has to be a calling.

“I don’t know if we all come into it for that reason, but we all stay for that reason,” she said. “It’s not an easy vocation, and if it’s not a call, you find your way out of it. Knowing you’re working with the Holy Spirit — it’s what allows you to go home and be all right.”