The Catholic Church since the time Pope Leo XIII wrote the Encyclical letter “Rerum Novarum” has espoused a set of doctrines and teaching that deals with social issues and social justice. Many Papal Encyclicals have been written on this topic. As Christianity spread, and the Catholic Church diffused outside of the Western Hemisphere missionaries tried to assiduously incorporate these doctrines into practice. They engaged in social practices that were designed to ensure human development, and to aid their evangelizing mission. During the colonial period, different ecclesial agencies supported the idea of healthcare delivery, alongside their other efforts at evangelization. Today, in spite of the demise of the initial era of European missionizing the indigenous leadership of the Catholic Church in Nigeria continue to engage in healthcare delivery to enhance the wellbeing of those among whom they serve. In many places, these mission hospitals, as they are still called, continue to represent cogent instruments of healthcare delivery at both the urban and rural levels. Their intentional ability to take care of the somatic needs of their customers, envisioned as a spiritual mission, has helped to sanction a healthcare culture that is contextually efficient, and cost effective, and directed toward wellbeing. In many places, the Nigerian public healthcare delivery is in shambles, hospitals and clinics are ghost-centers of effective healthcare delivery. A critical evaluation and study of the ecclesial healthcare structures that optimizes minimal resources, in spite of financial strains, structural constraints but yet vigorous determined by a focused sense of mission in enhancing maximal output offer enormous challenges to the Nigerian public healthcare system. This paper attempts to focus on the historical and specific variables of Catholic healthcare delivery system in Nigeria. In doing so, it argues that the Catholic Church as engendered a focally effective healthcare delivery system, that has evolved into a culture. Such culture is underlined by a universal ideology framed through Catholic teachings on social justice. In emphasizing this argument, this paper introduces the challenges poised by specific and intentional social modalities and institutions as creative agencies in engendering social transformations. Therefore, it opines that the inclusion of such institutions and modalities in partnering to ensure the delivery of social services and articulating novel cultural dynamics for society, and in engendering necessary social change is highly desirable. In that sense, the desensitizing of religious negativity imagined and imaged through religious violence is perceived as socially valuable to the Nigerian polity.

The idea of healthcare and wellbeing are tied together. Healthcare is intended to foster wellness, and wellbeing. Wellbeing can be perceived from a dual perspective relative to individuals within a given community, or society, and the wellbeing of the community or society itself. Hence, healthcare delivery has often involved an exchange of ideation that are socially perceived, shaped, and essentially sanctioned. Wellbeing, and its collateral wellness, constitutes a cultural and biological notion. Wellbeing, therefore, is socially constructed, as well as it is biologically embedded. Within this framework of cultural and social constructions of wellbeing, different human societies have evolved different notions of healthcare, methodology, and delivery. Non-western cultures seemingly have different notions and methods of wellbeing and healthcare that stems from the peculiar anthropological and cosmological perceptions that is distinct from that of western societies. Nonetheless, contained within these differential perceptions and methodology of care is the major concern of achieving wellness and wellbeing. The Igala, an ethnic group located mainly in the Middle Belt region of Nigeria, especially within Kogi State, as well as in Anambra, Edo and Delta states of Nigeria, possess an anthropology of healthcare system, that involves the individuals and community, in achieving wellbeing. In doing the domain of ritual is utilized to ritualize sickness, wellbeing, and wholeness. The Igala anthropology of healthcare is focally dynamic, hence in adapting to social change, it depicts the nature of the intertwining complex that shapes the matrix of understanding, and hybrid incorporation of different medical methodological facets directed at achieving wellness. Wellbeing is also understood essentially alongside other social notions of witchcraft (Ochu), magic (inacha), charming and poisoning (ache ny’one or Ogwu eche ny’one). This paper intends to reflect on the various trajectories by which the Igala through ritual conceptualize and perforce healthcare delivery. Within the context of modernity, and its contradictions, we evaluate these cultural idioms and vignettes toward a greater understanding of the factors that embed attitudes and behaviors as they affect the Igala response to modern healthcare delivery system. In conceptualizing the Igala anthropology of healthcare, we shall allude to the changing nature and pattern of Igala cultural landscape. We shall examine the nature of today’s healthcare delivery in Igalaland and access what needs to be done in the light of critical illnesses and diseases, such as STDs, typhoid fever, HIV/AIDS, and the social problems related to healthcare such as the phenomenon of the marketing of fake pharmaceuticals.