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Like the cardinal’s doctor, Fr. John Siberski, SJ, MD,
specializes in geriatrics, though his field is psychiatry.
He sees patients two days a week at Georgetown University
Hospital, otherwise serving as associate professor
of psychiatry and assistant dean for student life at
Georgetown’s medical school. He celebrates Mass regularly
at both the school and the hospital chapel, and his bedside
manner extends to hearing confession.
At 58, Fr. Siberski was one of three men ordained as
Jesuits in the New England Province last June. He says
he never knowingly met a Jesuit until 1989, while in
Georgetown—that’s Guyana, not Washington, D.C.
At the time, he had closed a family medical practice
founded by his late father in Plymouth, Pa., and he was
volunteering at a Sisters of Mercy hospital in Guyana,
before beginning a psychiatric residency at Temple
University Hospital in Philadelphia. In Guyana, he got to
know Jesuit chaplains and novices who were nurses’ aides,
working with them during the day, playing Scrabble with
them at night.
“Looking back, what inspired me was their lived
spirituality,” the priest recalls, speaking of how these
Jesuits carried the Ignatian spirit of service and friendship
with them, whether in the hospital, at the altar or on the 
rugby field. Three years later, he saw
the same qualities in Jesuits working
at Massachusetts General Hospital,
where he pursued advanced psychiatric
training.
      Asked how the Ignatian spirit
follows him on his medical rounds,
Fr. Siberski mentioned something
that had just happened that day. After
11 grueling hours at the hospital, the
daughter of one of his Alzheimer’s
patients called to say her father had passed
out at a supermarket and was being rushed by ambulance
to the emergency room. Fr. Siberski could have easily
dispatched an intern to the ER, as many specialists do.
But he said to himself at the time, “I know Ignatius is up
there thinking, ‘You better go over there’.” He did, and the
patient was okay.
In moments like that, Fr. Siberski said he also hears the
words of Jerome Nadal, a member of St. Ignatius’s original
band of brothers, who urged fellow Jesuits “to pray as if
everything depended on God, and work as if everything
depended on you.”
In Chicago, Fr. Sheehan, 50, says he has buried more than
a few of his geriatric patients, and he has anointed many of
them during house calls that he makes in his “free time.”
Boston-born and ordained in 1994, Fr. Sheehan doesn’t
dwell on being a Jesuit physician, as distinct from any other
sort of Jesuit.
    “I love being a doctor, but I don’t think this ministry is
any more exciting than teaching high school,” he said. “As
Jesuits, we go all-out for the Lord and the Church, using
the gifts that are given to us.”

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