Pastoral Relationship with People with Intellectual ... - Theses

141relationship which, although still of a professional type, nonetheless seeks regardfrom a mutually caring perspective.4.1.5 The Capacity of Professionalism to Shape an Understanding ofPastoral CarePastoral carers seek to claim a unique caring role within the institutionalcontext in which they exercise their care, but when they assume a role such asthat of a professionally-employed chaplain, the question can be raised as to thecapacity of such pastoral care to maintain its uniqueness and effectiveness. Itcould be argued that such pastoral care places the pastoral carer in a similarprofessional/client relationship to that which defines the relationship of medicalprofessionals to the institutional clients to whom they offer their specialist care.After all chaplains and medical professionals are both employed in theinstitutional context on the basis of suitable academic qualifications andappropriate financial reimbursement. In principle this immediately distinguishesthe care which chaplains can offer to the institutional individuals from that whichcan be offered by pastoral volunteers who can engage in institutional personal,pastoral relationships, not on the basis of financial motivation, but ofwholehearted unconditional love that simply wants to be with the accommodatedindividual in the institutional environment for the sake of wanting to be inrelationship with a fellow human being and child of God.At the same time professionally-offered pastoral care cannot beprincipally understood in terms of whole-hearted friendship. As pastoraltheologian John Swinton points out, such friendship includes a fundamentalvoluntary component with the associated freedom that is derived from anuninhibited, yet respectful, desire to engage in a caring relationship with a fellowhuman being. 388 This relationship is uninhibited by institutional criteria for caringthat include accredited qualifications and appropriate financial remuneration.There cannot be, as pastoral theologian Don Browning indicates in citingKant, a relationship of truly equal regard, because “equal regard is limited by thespecific socio-economic and ecological constraints that it confronts in specific388 Swinton, John. From Bedlam to Shalom: Towards a Practical Theology of Human Nature,Interpersonal Relationships, and Mental Health Care. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc,2000), 79.