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Pope Francis on January 19 applauded the designation of 2020 as the “Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.”
He suggested that “midwives carry out perhaps the noblest of the professions.”
And nurses, he said, are not only the most numerous of health care workers, but also those “closest to the sick.”
The Holy Father has often mentioned his esteem for health care professionals, especially nurses, one of whom he credits with saving his life.
In 2018, he departed from a prepared text to praise this nurse:
With your permission, I’d like to pay tribute to a nurse who saved my life. She was a religious nurse: an Italian Dominican sister, who was sent to Greece as a professor, highly educated … But as a nurse, then, she arrived in Argentina. And when I, at the age of twenty, was at the point of dying, she was the one to tell the doctors, even arguing with them, ‘No, this isn’t right, we need to give more.’ And thanks to those things, I survived. I thank her so much! I thank her. And I’d like to say her name here, in your presence: Sister Cornelia Caraglio. A great woman, brave too, to the point of arguing with the doctors. Humble, but sure of what she was doing.
The pope invited prayers for all nurses and midwives.
“Let us pray for all of them, that they may do their precious work in the best possible way,” he said.
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And today we celebrate...