Pastoral Care

Abstract

If people who are dying or bereaved are processed through largely secular institutions, how do clergy and others go about the task of offering spiritual care? What does spiritual or pastoral care mean both to those ministering and to those ministered to?

While clergy are still in demand at death beds and funerals, the burgeoning number of experts opining upon death and dying in this new age of thanatology are psychologists, sociologists, nurses and doctors; theologians have mostly retreated to the sidelines where they preserve a slightly awkward silence.

(Pattison, 1994, p. 31)

Preparation to die today seems to concentrate more on the survivors and on unfinished business on earth than on assuring passage to heaven.

(Kalish, 1980, p. 307)

We are unlikely to get very far today … by talking too readily about heaven and hell, purgatory or judgement. These are outworn categories of thought. The insights of love, relationship, and human significance may raise much more deeply in the end the issues for which we stand.

(Tyler, 1970, p. 33)