A chaplain who uses words only when necessary

For 35 years, Father Doug Brougher, who will turn 84 on June 1, has navigated the maze of hallways at Touro Infirmary with his eyes closed and his ears open, knowing that just around the corner, in his hospital “parish” on Prytania Street in New Orleans, there is another person riddled with fears that have no clear answers.

Father Brougher is using a cane now, the result of an episode of vertigo last year that triggered a wicked fall and did a terrible number on his head.

Whether his return to four-days-a-week chaplaincy ministry at Touro is testament to his hard head or his Catholic faith – or both –  he says he has been blessed by the grace always to view life with gratitude.

“The mantra I try to live by is to focus on the blessings – because we always have blessings – and not on the losses,” Father Brougher told a small group of Touro officials last week at a surprise announcement – that he has been named the 2021 Judah Touro Society Award recipient,  bestowed on a person in the hospital community who models “compassion, empathy, respect and care for the welfare of others.”

“Even if you end up in a bed of pain, you are always blessed,” Father Brougher said. “There was a nun I met once who couldn’t leave her bed. She was blind, but she was happy. I asked her, ‘How?’ And she said, ‘Well, there are people who come to take care of me. There are people who bring me a meal. I have a roof over my head. I have a bed.’

“She had a ministry of prayer and a second ministry – the ministry of hospitality. You welcome the people who come to take care of you. I’ve never forgotten that. It’s hard to do, and sometimes I flunk at that, but I think that mantra is the secret to aging.”

 
When COVID-19 hit last year, Father Brougher was asked, for his own safety, not to come to the hospital because of his vulnerable age.

“It was very, very tough because I missed the ministry and I missed the patients and I missed the family of the community,” he said. “It made me realize I probably would not like to retire in a rocking chair.”

But after his bad fall, he recovered enough last summer to return. Since then, just about every working day, he gravitates to the third-floor ICU, where he visits with patients and chats with the nurses, who always prepare a fresh pot of coffee and offer homemade cakes for their spiritual father.

“There’s one nurse, and she’s in the ICU unit handling a heart patient,” Father Brougher said. “And she asks, ‘Father, can you hear my confession? How about right here?’ She fixes the machine, and I hear her confession. I’ll do confessions in a hallway because they can’t get away to come to an office.”

Rev. Dr. Jane Mauldin, the interfaith chaplain at Touro, said Father Brougher displays Christian empathy for patients and hospital staff simply through his actions.

“When he walks in – and now, he’s walking with a cane and showing a bit of age – he has such peace of heart, joy and spirit all the time, no matter what’s going on in the aches and ills of his body,” she  said. “He doesn’t even have to say, ‘May the peace of God be with you,’ which he does. They feel that peace of God when he walks in the room.”

Father Brougher will never forget one woman, who was unconscious for weeks in the ICU. Although she was nonresponsive, he held her hand  every day and prayed audibly with her, his habitual practice.

One day, he walked into her room, and the woman was  sitting up, talking to the nurse. 

“You don’t know me, but I’ve been seeing you every day,” he told the woman.

“I know you,” she replied. “You came to see me every day, and you touched me and prayed with me.”

“I still get chills over that,” Father Brougher said. “That’s one of the most powerful stories in my life.”

pfinney@clarionherald.org