WHEELING — With the goal of keeping WVU Medicine Wheeling Hospital aligned to its Catholic identity, Paul Lim’s first week on the job has been a blissful one.
Lim joined the hospital this week as the vice-president of mission integration. Lim said his role, which is to ensure the hospital retains its Catholic identity, is common at religiously-affiliated hospitals such as UPMC Mercy, and that ensuring that was part of the agreement when the hospital joined with WVU Medicine.
“The cool thing is, I’m already seeing it happening on its own,” Lim said. “The breast cancer center, they contacted me already because they want to put prayer cards in with their surgical information. When patients are going to the breast cancer center, they get information to take out with them, that information is going to include a prayer card.
“It was done so well, because you can tell, yes, it’s for the patient, and it addresses something they may be wondering there. But at the same time, it’s such a neat expression for the staff. One of the neat things about a Catholic institution is that it becomes an expression of your ability to minister in the workplace, and you can’t get there in other institutions.”
When asked about his long-term plans for the position with the hospital, Lim said he hopes to call attention to the needs of the marginalized and the poor.
“Catholic health care is known for its generous care for those who need it the most — this is also a priority for WVU Medicine, thus I get to make it a priority for us as a hospital and I’m very much looking forward to it,” he said.
Lim’s first mission, he said, was to love the hospital, and that task has come easy. The hospital staff have been extremely welcoming to him, and have made his first week at Wheeling Hospital a great one.
“We’ve had a lot of fun, a lot of joy, and there’s something cool about that, in the workplace,” he said. “Especially in a hospital environment, coming out of a really hard time. I’m new here, but I’m not new to hospitals, so I know that from March 2020 on, it’s been horrible. … To come here, and see joy, is really cool. It’s really neat …
“I feel like I have a pretty good preview of Heaven being here,” he added.
Lim’s duties include supervising the Pastoral Care Department, as well as Social Work and Care Management Services.
Lim said he’d met with the Most Rev. Bishop Mark Brennan, Bishop of the Wheeling-Charleston Diocese, during the hiring process and said the bishop’s care and love for the hospital was plainly obvious in their interactions.
“We were meeting in the hospital board room, and we got up, started to walk each other out, and he went to go turn the lights off,” Lim said. “I said, ‘Bishop, I think there are people who do that.’ And he said, ‘No, no,’ because he cares about the place. You’re not conscientious of the lights if you don’t care about something.”
Lim added that Brennan encouraged him to pursue faculties, or the ability for Lim to minister in the local church.
“He looked at me and said, ‘Why wouldn’t you have them? Your work may call on you to give holy Communion to someone who is sick. Your work may call on you to help assist with Mass in the chapel. … Part of the thing I would like to do is to help support them as best I can, and the bishop just told me, ‘You need to go.’”
Lim was ordained as a permanent deacon in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh in June 2020. He has bachelor’s degrees in philosophy, with a theology minor, and social work. His master’s degree in social work was earned at the University of Pittsburgh, and he has an MBA from Chatham University.
He is a licensed social worker and former director of Health Management at UPMC St. Margaret in Pittsburgh. Lim and his wife have four children.
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