Faith Community Toolkit - Pallium Canada

Integrating faith and spirituality into compassionate care

Faith and spirituality play important roles in the lives of many Canadians and supporting the spiritual needs of people who are living with serious illnesses, dying or grieving is an important part of palliative care for them, their families, and those who provide caregiving support.

Through our work to support the Compassionate Community movement in Canada, Pallium is collaborating with faith groups to strengthen our collective understanding of serious illness, caregiving, death and grieving to help ensure Canadians have access to appropriate and timely support for all of their palliative care needs, including spirituality and faith.

Horizons of Hope: A Toolkit for Catholic Parishes on Palliative Care

The Horizons of Hope: A Toolkit for Catholic Parishes on Palliative Care helps parishioners understand the medical and spiritual aspects of serious illness, caregiving, death and grieving while building capacity within Catholic parishes to support compassionate care within and beyond the parish community for individuals who are receiving palliative care or approaching end-of-life. Central to the creation of this toolkit is the Compassionate Community theory of practice that helps communities provide important physical, emotional, social, spiritual and practical support to patients facing serious illness as well as their families and caregivers.

This project is the result of a multi-year partnership between Pallium Canada, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), Dominican University College, Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute, Catholic Health Alliance of Canada and the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph in Canada.

Access the toolkit

What's included in this guide?

The toolkit includes six modules that cover:

Understanding the experience of dying and death.
Discerning and making decisions at the end of life.
Accompanying individuals at the end of life
Supporting and integrating into the wider community.
Introduction to the facilitator’s guide.
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Learning outcomes:

This toolkit seeks to:

Empower and educate parishioners by addressing questions surrounding palliative care, dying, death, suffering, accompaniment, and bereavement in a holistic fashion.
Present high-quality content that explores how palliative care is understood from a perspective of Catholic moral and pastoral theology, medical expertise and the Compassionate Community model.
Facilitate meaningful conversations together so that parishes and families become Compassionate Communities.