St. Mary University in London has announced plans to open a modern pro-life medical school in 2026 — the first Catholic medical school in the United Kingdom.
Since its inception in 1850, the school has pursued a “distinctive Catholic identity” with a goal to “develop the whole person and empower our community to have a positive impact on the world.” To that end, it intends to establish a “forward-thinking centre of medical training” that will “contribute to the workforce development demands in the UK for more doctors and medical professionals, but it will also train global professionals able to work anywhere in the world.” Training medical professionals with the best practices to treat the whole person, including preborn children, is desperately needed.
According to the World Health Organization, there is a critical and alarming deficit of medical professionals, including midwives. Approximately 4.3 million doctors and nurses were needed as of 2014 to meet the existing medical needs of a global population. The crisis is especially dire where there are insufficient human resources to meet even basic needs. According to the study, there were 57 countries that failed to meet minimum workforce criteria. A shortage of doctors is not just an international problem; the United States was predicted to have a shortage of 85,000 doctors by 2020 and 260,000 nurses by 2025, undoubtedly exacerbated by COVID.
READ: PBS slams Catholic hospitals for refusing to intentionally kill preborn children
The announcement by St. Mary University follows a 2022 announcement by Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, to seek to facilitate a faithful Catholic medical school on their campus. The St. Padre Pio Institute for the Relief of Suffering, School of Osteopathic Medicine would train doctors on their campus with the help of Catholic Healthcare International (CHI).
In response to that announcement, Dr. George Mychaskiw, a board-certified pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist and chief academic officer at CHI, stated that “The genocide of 65 million children could not have been accomplished without the ready, willing and able cooperation of physicians,” and a medical school should “stand for the life and dignity of every human being, regardless of age or disability” and “train generations of physicians who will take back the culture of death….”
