One Physician’s Takeaway from the 2025 AEC

By Thomas Jensen, M.D.

One article can never capture the true movement and grace of the Holy Spirit experienced in person at the 2025 Annual Educational Conference. With about 700 attendees, plus another few hundred participants from the Catholic Bar Association, this year’s AEC was another one for the books. Daily Mass and adoration coupled with outstanding presentations by experts in the field is a winning combination to renew, inform and inspire the medical professionals in attendance.

The AEC theme, Tradition: Ever Ancient Ever New, reminds us that the heart of medicine is the human person, however, as speaker Joseph Vukov noted in his talk about Artificial Intelligence in Health Care, the more we advance in technology and efficiency, the more we reduce the human person to data. What makes us precious is not the perfectionism of transhumanism, which claims we can become like gods apart from God, but that we are already like God because we are made in His image. “We were never made to simply generate data, we were made to generate in ourselves the Divine,” Vukov noted.

I see women in the Natural Family Planning world craving for a physician who listens, who gets what they truly need; not toxins and band aids to their health, not narratives that promote the broken relationships of abortion and revolving love interests that ‘safe sex’ says it can protect them from. The vulnerable elderly and sick are looking for a reminder of their dignity and accompaniment that is not stealth euthanasia or loneliness promoting physician assisted suicide. The immigrants and uninsured are looking for respite to find the strength to seek the American Dream like we all want. But how does this happen? How does health care change?

Here is the true question for us in our medical career today: “Are we going to let medicine change Sus, or are we going to change medicine?” Are we going to follow broken guidelines of the medical societies, forget the dignity of how we were made male and female, and the right of health care for all because the system does not support us? Speaker after speaker at the conference was a courageous witness in their own field of pushing back against the current transhumanism wave over taking the practice of medicine while offering a Christian response that promises renewal.

Recently, Pope Leo XIV canonized SS. Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati saying they “are an invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upward and make them masterpieces.”

Carlo Acutis did not say, “when I am older and have more time, I will make a website about eucharistic miracles or help serve the poor.” Pier Giorgio Frassati did not give up on himself after failing his school exams but instead joined Catholic Action and the St. Vincent de Paul Society to serve the poor. He noted that “charity is not enough, we need social reform” and that led him to establishing a newspaper at a young age based upon Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum – the pope’s teachings on social work. They died at ages 15 and 24. They did not squander their short lives. They made every moment count. They did not know they would die young but set out to become saints because God was calling them in the present moment.

We can make that same excuse not to be involved in the larger work of the CMA because we have obligations with work or family. But God never takes away our time when we offer it to Him, He multiplies it as keynote speaker Sr. Dede Burns, M.D., POSC, a Family Medicine Surgeon and US Army Colonel, so aptly reminded us. As St. Paul says in 2 Cor 6:2, “In the time of my favor I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you. I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation.”

Now is not the time to say maybe next year. Now is the time to say TODAY! Today I will learn how I can be the medical professional God needs me to be. Today is the day I am going to find ways I can help carry forth the mission and work of the Catholic Medical Association and be more actively involved. Pier and Carlos said change in the world began with them and it began today, so what are you going to do with your today?

Dr. Thomas Jensen is the president of the Denver Guild of the CMA and the CMA State Director of Colorado.

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