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Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life

September 17, 2025

Providing Dignified Care for Persons with Disabilities

Contributions from Catholic Teaching

A young girl in a doctor's office with her father and a female doctor during a routine medical visit.

Catholic principles call medical practitioners to act with dignity and justice when treating patients with disabilities, and the Gospels offer many examples of Jesus showing particular attention to people who are disabled. Today, this witness should inspire our efforts to address the ways in which those who live with various disabilities are marginalized, including barriers to employment, disparities in health care, limited access to spaces, communication, and information, and challenges in other essential aspects of everyday life. At the same time, Catholic social teaching encourages us to move beyond simply avoiding discrimination and to instead advance a positive vision of dignified care, both clinical and social, for the whole person.

This conversation will explore how the principles of Catholic social teaching can shape the approaches of both religious and secular health care systems to medical care for persons with disabilities, and how political and medical efforts could be combined to provide high-quality and dignified care for persons with disabilities.

A social time beginning at 6:30 p.m. will precede the conversation. Dinner will be provided.

This in-person gathering is co-sponsored by the Georgetown University Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life and Magis GUSOM, a student group at Georgetown University’s School of Medicine.

Participants

A photo of Amy Kenny, a disabled, white Australian woman with blonde hair, sits on her mobility scooter in front of a wall with blue and white geometric shapes.

Amy Kenny

Amy Kenny is a disabled scholar-practitioner, writer, and advocate, and serves as the inaugural director of Georgetown University’s Disability Cultural Center. Kenny’s award-winning book, My Body is Not A Prayer Request (2022), mixes humor, personal narrative, and theology to invite faith communities to rethink their ableism and learn from the embodied wisdom of disabled people.

A photo of Robin Shaffert, a white women with gray hair, and clear framed glasses, standing in front of a wall of glass windows, wearing a black blouse with drop earrings and a beaded necklace.

Robin Shaffert

Robin Shaffert is a senior policy associate and adjunct instructor at the Georgetown University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities, where she focuses on District of Columbia policy issues that impact people with and at risk for developmental disabilities and their families.

A photo of Bill Sullivan, a white man with light hair, standing in front of a white wall, wearing a white button down shirt with a blue checkered sweater vest on top and a lanyard.

Dr. Bill Sullivan

Dr. Bill Sullivan serves as the Joseph P. Kennedy Senior Chair in Bioethics at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics. His clinical and academic work integrates ethics and primary health care for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).

Accessibility

This event is wheelchair accessible. Please email cathsocialthought@georgetown.edu by September 10th with any accessibility requests. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date.