Personal Consultations Launch Message

Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, in Whom are all treasures of wisdom and knowledge, Thy Kingdom Come!

On June 24, 2022, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in our 50th anniversary year, the NCBC officially launched a new Personal Consultations Department!

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision—a major victory for the dignity of the human person—this date will be long remembered in history. What a providential alignment of events!

In an increasingly impersonal era, NCBC is elevating personalized moral guidance to the forefront. Modern health care can be cold, bureaucratic, distant, technologized, automated—and a truly caring, human voice can be hard to find, much less one that is faithfully Catholic.

We have the training, expertise, and magisterial fidelity to help you form your conscience with trustworthy resources and confidential, person-to-person interaction.

I am thrilled to lead this new department and am pleased to announce that all those who provide, support, or benefit from NCBC's personal consultations have now been entrusted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus!

As the Personal Consultations Director, I offered this Act of Consecration to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus on June 24th and will regularly renew it.

Over the years, NCBC has helped tens of thousands of Catholics navigate challenging health care decisions through our free consultation service, available 24/7. Our one-on-one explanations of Church teachings and their applications assist many people in different situations, including:

• Family members aiding their loved ones with questions about assisted nutrition and hydration, palliative care and hospice, brain death and organ transplantation, or ordinary and extraordinary means;

• Nurses, doctors, or other health care workers questioning their level of involvement in the immoral actions of their colleagues, such as abortion, sterilization, or gender transitioning;

• Priests, religious, or pastoral care workers who need expert support when asked to offer moral guidance on medical decisions or to explain the Church’s teachings to health care professionals;

• Women wondering about the morality of procedures that will cause sterility or therapeutic uses of the contraceptive pill;

• Married couples grappling with Church teachings on reproductive technologies;

• And many, many more!

Although we’ve fielded personal consultations free of charge for decades, the service has never been formally managed by a dedicated ethicist director.

This has made it challenging to curate our resources, cultivate relations with those who contact us, ensure adequate staffing, provide training for new ethicists, and implement tools that will allow us to handle greater volume without compromising our high standards or personal approach.

We are often working hard just to make sure we respond to all the questions—and sometimes hard-pressed to keep up on top of our other projects and activities.

But a kind of “happy calamity” struck in August 2021.

COVID-19 vaccine mandates caused a drastic spike in consultation requests. The number of unique visitors to our website increased by 850% in one month!

The temporary overload was a massive challenge that resulted in backlogs. But our even-keeled guidance, rooted in the moral tradition of the Catholic Church, helped record numbers of people to make faith-informed judgments in a short time.

It also made us realize how many people out there need our help but don’t know that we’re here or what the NCBC does.

We heard a call to improve our ability to handle many more questions, more effectively, on a regular basis.

This led us to create a Personal Consultations Department.

The following key goals of the Personal Consultations Department involve new initiatives and substantial improvements to our longstanding and highly reputable consultation service, including:

• Expanded access to the NCBC’s personalized moral guidance and reliable resources, faithful to the Magisterium of the Church, for people seeking to form their consciences and live saintly lives;

• Training for new Catholic ethicists through hands-on, real-life experience fielding consults under the guidance of seasoned NCBC ethicists, including fellowship and internship programs within the Personal Consultations Department;

• More personal engagement with those who’ve used our consultation service and others who are interested in the service for constructive feedback, testimonials, ideas and suggestions, and financial or other forms of support.

But we aren’t stopping there!

We are also launching a Personal Consultations Fellows & Interns Program – a completely new undertaking.

Students finishing our National Catholic Certification in Health Care Ethics, Master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in Catholic bioethics or related fields regularly ask the NCBC about opportunities for consultation experience.

They would love the assurances of NCBC’s expertise and fidelity to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church!

So for the first time ever, under the auspices of the Personal Consultations Department, NCBC is offering internships and fellowships to build up consultation expertise among future Catholic ethicists and to address some of the needs for increased staffing.

Are you ready to help?

There are three easy ways to support us!

• Please pray for the NCBC, the Personal Consultations Department, and all those we serve. I encourage you to invoke the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus! Mass offerings and prayer enrollments are very deeply appreciated, and if you like, let us know so we can thank you!

• Offer your feedback on personal consultations, or any thoughts, suggestions, comments or ideas you have for us. And spread the word: let others know what we do and that we’re here for them!

• Donate to cover the costs of fellows’ stipends, ethicists’ time, and other expenses of providing ethics consultations completely free of charge!