After a five-year hiatus Clinical Pastoral Education is back at Bellevue. Bellevue, the oldest
public hospital in America was established in 1736 before the Revolutionary War. The first chaplain, John Stanford, a priest of the Church of England arrived on the scene in 1816. The Episcopal Church supported the Bellevue Chaplains till five years ago when the Rev. Glendon Jantzi, CPE Supervisor, retired. The Carmelite Fathers came from Ireland at the turn of the last century to fulfill their apostolate as hospital chaplains to Bellevue. They continue as the Roman Catholic chaplains to this day.
Clinical Pastoral Education began at Bellevue in 1940 with the Rev. Ralph Bonacker as the first supervisor. He was followed by many leading lights in the CPE movement: The Rev. Thomas Morris, The Rev. Arthur Elcombe, The Rev. Armen Jorjorian, The Rev. Fredrick Keuther, The Rev. A.P.L. Prest, The Rev. Alvin Hart, and from 1967 – 1999, the Rev. Glendon Jantzi.
The Bellevue Chaplains Clinical Pastoral Education program was renewed January 1, 2005 as a satellite of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, New Brunswick, New Jersey. The Rev. Paul Steinke is the ninth CPE supervisor in Bellevue’s 60-year history of offering clinical pastoral education.
Bellevue is a microcosm of the Third World – a hospital for the undocumented, impoverished and disenfranchised. No one is turned away. Bellevue’s emergency room is the largest in the USA. Lewis Thomas, M.D., the distinguished physician and essayist once remarked, “If I were to be taken in a taxicab with something serious or struck down in a New York street, I would want to be taken to Bellevue.”
Bellevue with its 750 beds and many clinics for addictions and victims of torture could not be adequately served without a clinical pastoral education program. Chaplain interns provide the bulk of bedside pastoral caregiving. The sixty-year tradition of clinical pastoral education at Bellevue continues to keep the circle unbroken.
The Rev. Paul D. Steinke, 01-06-05
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