Faith, Healer Eight Years Of Seminary And Eight Years Of Medical Education Produced Stan Malnar; Priest And Physician
Dr. Stan Malnar delivers about 100 babies a year. The Rev. Stan Malnar celebrates about 70 Masses a year.
Put them together and you get Stan Malnar, 51, one of the few people in America who can deliver babies and baptize them, too.
Malnar has just celebrated his 25-year jubilee as an ordained Roman Catholic priest, and his 20th anniversary as a family physician.
“I’m a full-time priest who expresses priesthood through medicine,” he says, as if it were the most natural combination in the world.
Fr. and Dr.: It took him eight years of seminary to earn the one title, and another eight years of medical school and residency to earn the other. Now, he is what you might call a full-service care provider, administering to people’s spiritual and physical needs.
On one recent afternoon, he was on duty at Sacred Heart Medical Center’s Maternity Clinic, which provides care for pregnant women who can’t afford it elsewhere. Malnar, the clinic’s director, had just finished a routine pregnancy checkup on a young mother, who was accompanied by her husband and small child. Now he was dispensing care and nurturing in his gentle, soft-spoken way.
“You’re a very lucky girl,” he said to the couple’s 3-year-old. “Do you know why? (The girls shakes her head) Because you picked your parents well. It’s very important to pick your parents well.”
Both parents and child beamed with pride.
Two days later, he was using the same soft-spoken voice (a voice that makes Mr. Rogers sound overbearing) to read the liturgy during Sunday Mass at Holy Family Hospital. The message of his homily wasn’t far different from the message in his clinic: We must celebrate the goodness in people.
Chances are, many of the people in the basement of Holy Family did not even know he is a doctor, just as many of his patients may not be aware he is a priest.
Who would guess? A priest-doctor is an unusual combination. Malnar knows of only two other priest-physicians, both psychiatrists. But Malnar believes that his twin professions complement each other in ways that benefit both the patient and his own soul.
“Being in medicine and being in the priesthood gives me a window into people’s lives, ” he said during a rare quiet moment at the maternity clinic. “I’m able to see the goodness and generosity and care in ways that I would not necessarily see.”
For instance, as a doctor who delivers lots of babies, he sees “the gift of new life, the wonder of that, the mystery of that.” As a priest, he enters people’s lives during other equally profound moments.
“You pray with them in times of celebration, in times of suffering, times of struggle, times of dying and serious illness,” said Malnar. “So I think I’m a better priest because I’m a physician, and I think I’m a better physician because I’m a priest.”
Others agree.
“Stan embodies everything that Sacred Heart stands for,” said Johnny Cox, the staff ethicist at Sacred Heart. “The Sisters of Providence have always recognized that there are two forces in the healing ministry: the power of faith and the prowess of medical science. Stan, in himself, brings those two together.”
He has designed his medical practice so he can do the kind of community service that matters most to him. In the mornings, he has a Group Health practice in family medicine. Then he spends two afternoons a week at the East Central Community Clinic doing family practice for low-income and uninsured patients.
“He’s very dedicated to the success of that clinic,” said Peg Hopkins, executive director of the Community Health Association of Spokane, which runs the clinic. “These clinics are difficult to keep afloat, as you can imagine, and he has been very active in helping to keep the doors open.”
He spends the other three afternoons at week at Sacred Heart’s maternity clinic.
“This gives meaning to medicine to me,” said Malnar. “We deliver between 110 and 125 babies a year from this clinic. I would find there would be an emptiness without that kind of involvement and participation in Sacred Heart and its mission.”
As for his salary, much of it is donated to various Catholic charities and institutions, including Sacred Heart and the dioceses of Spokane and Helena.
Malnar could hardly have picked a more potentially controversial specialty than obstetrics, with its issues of abortion and sterilization. Yet he says he is usually not placed in situations that would conflict with his beliefs. In medical school, instead of taking abortion training, he arranged to deliver babies. He said he has always had the support of the bishops and priests in the diocese.
He takes his role of priest very seriously, saying Masses at Holy Family most Sundays as well as at an occasional Spokane parish. He also sometimes drives to Kalispell, Mont., where he first practiced his dual roles.
His vocation as a priest came first. When he grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, he was inspired by a “very fine priest,” the Rev. Leo Lyons. So coming out of high school, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. He went to St. Thomas Seminary in Denver.
But just before his final year of theology, he discovered another vocation. He had spent a summer doing clinical pastoral education at the Menninger Clinic, a world-famous psychiatric hospital in Topeka, Kan., as part of his seminary training.
Many priests-to-be get this kind of training, but few take to it with such relish and such aptitude. His clinical director was so impressed that he encouraged Malnar to go into medicine. Malnar didn’t need much prodding.
But there was one big question mark. Was it possible?
“Whether or not that would be allowed, or a reasonable kind of thing, had yet to be discerned,” said Malnar.
The question was still up in the air when he was ordained in the Diocese of Helena in 1972 and assigned to the Rosary Parish in Bozeman, Mont. However, medicine kept beckoning, and he discussed the issue with Bishop Raymond Hunthausen, who was bishop of Helena at the time. “Bishop Hunthausen encouraged me along the way,” said Malnar.
Two years later, he was granted permission to go to Carroll College in Helena for a premed degree and then on to medical school at the University of Washington. After a residency at the University of Colorado, and a fellowship in obstetrics that first brought him to Sacred Heart, he began his dual career as a doctor in private practice in Kalispell and an associate in that city’s St. Matthew’s Parish.
He still remembers how nervous he was when he saw his first patient. He carefully put the stethoscope to a patient’s chest and, to his alarm, heard nothing.
“A nurse came up and whispered, ‘It works better if you put it in your ears,”’ said Malnar.
He stayed in Kalispell for four years, performing both duties, until 1989, when he came to Spokane. He lives at Mukogawa-Fort Wright, along with his mother, who moved in with him after his father’s death. In his leisure time he likes to read theology, current events and the classics (Hemingway and Steinbeck are favorites). He also likes to garden and bicycle.
However, a man who belongs to two priesthoods - medicine has been called a modern priesthood - doesn’t exactly have a great deal of spare time.
“His only fault, and I’ve told him this many times, is that sometimes he ignores his own needs,” said Dr. Steve Brisbois, an obstetrician-gynecologist and the president of the medical staff at Sacred Heart. “He’s very involved in other people’s needs. I tell him he needs to take care of himself.”
Yet a boundless regard for others is part of his makeup.
“He does extra things a regular doctor might not do,” said Donna Caplan, a registered nurse at the maternity clinic. “He gives patients hugs. He gives out little presents to people.”
“For me, it’s a half-gallon of ice cream,” said Cox. “He’s always demonstrating to people their value in the community.”
He is wary of too much attention being focused on him. He said there are all kinds of people in the hospital, in the community and in the world at large who are hard at work “building up the human family.” Yet they are never recognized. So he thinks there’s a certain unfairness in getting recognition just because he is a priest and a physician.
Yet those who know him best believe that this is not the reason he deserves recognition.
“I think Stan is a special person not because he’s a priest, and not because he’s a physician,” said Brisbois. “He’s a special person simply because of who he is.”
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