"Rebuild My Church"
In September of 2025, the Marian University Tom and Julie Wood College of Medicine (MU-WCOM) will accept first-year osteopathic medical student applications and inaugurate the first class of MU-WCOM San Damiano Scholars (SDS).
The selected MU-WCOM San Damiano Scholars will join a four-year program focused on creating a community of medical students who can, in the spirit of Saint Francis, help to renew and sustain the ministry of the Catholic Church. This program seeks applicants who wish to devote 45-55 hours a year to learn how to integrate their religious vocation with their medical training.
The San Damiano Program began at Marian University in 2003 at the undergraduate level as a response to the call of Jesus to Saint Francis on the San Damiano Cross: “Rebuild My Church.” Since its inception, the program has aimed to form missionary disciples whose education is rooted in the Christian faith and guided by strong values and ethics. It fosters academic excellence, leadership development, spiritual enrichment, and faith-based fellowship. Through these experiences, students, like Saint Francis, are encouraged to discern and answer God’s call to help rebuild the Church.
In 2017, these missionary efforts were expanded to high school students through the creation of the Missionary Disciples Institute.
The MU-WCOM San Damiano Scholars initiative now seeks to bring this mission to medical students through a four-year program designed to cultivate missionary discipleship in the field of medicine.
The MU-WCOM SDS will offer a robust program of spiritual activities, leadership and ethics training, service opportunities, mentorship by a Catholic physician, and fellowship in a Christ-centered community, along with several dinners and social events.
Requirements to become a MU-WCOM San Damiano Scholar:
Phillip M. Thompson, J.D., Ph.D., LL.M.,
Senior Chair of Ethics
Phillip M. Thompson has law degrees from the University of Georgia (J.D.) and DePaul University (LL.M. Health Law) and a Ph.D. from the Committee on the History of Culture on Catholicism and Science from the University of Chicago. After being a trial lawyer for a decade and managing a law firm, Dr. Thompson attended the University of Chicago and then spent twenty years in academic life beginning as the Patricia A. Hayes Professor of Ethics at Saint Edward’s University, Leadership Studies at Georgia Tech, and director of the Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory University. For the past five years, he was the Vice President of Mission for Mercy Hospital, a hospital on Newsweek’s top 400 hospitals in the world where he participated in and oversaw clinical ethics, medical ethics instruction as well as the community health and pastoral care departments. He is the author of three books and over twenty-five articles on medical ethics, bioethics, Catholic social thought, and leadership. His current research is focused on Artificial Intelligence and Health Care.
For more information on this scholarship, contact Phillip M. Thompson, J.D., Ph.D., LL.M., Senior Chair of Ethics at pthompson@marian.edu.
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