Holy Family leads Dr. Ron Ferris as he leads Holy Family Medical

Young Ron Ferris was a student at Benedictine College in Atchison during the early 1990s when he fell in with the right crowd.

Before he knew it, he was a Catholic. Then an M.D. Then, a partner in a Wichita family practice clinic dedicated to the Holy Family.

The pope at the time inspired the name choice, he relates. “It goes back to Pope John Paul II saying the family is at the center of the spiritual battle between good and evil,” said Dr. Ferris, a parishioner at Wichita’s St. Patrick Parish. “We are on the side of respecting human life.”

Becky Knapp – natural family planning program coordinator for the Diocese of Wichita whose health professional credentials include BSN, RN, CFCP, and CFCE status – has maintained strong ties to Dr. Ferris for much of his career, including as his patient. That multifaceted perspective helps her appreciate his approach, she suggests. 

Knapp indicates that she and her husband, Rob, president of Kapaun Mt. Carmel Catholic High School, have another family member at Christmas celebrations because of Dr. Ferris’ professional skill.

“He just cares for his patients so well,” Knapp said. “If not for Dr. Ferris, we would not have our fifth child, John.”

She notes that their fourth child was nine when they conceived John.  “I was older at the time, with a history of low progesterone,” she said. “When Dr. Ferris checked my progesterone level and found it was extraordinarily low, he wrote me a prescription for natural progesterone. Then he said, ‘Go home and pray.’

“Dr. Ferris was on it,” Knapp continued. “He managed the progesterone level, and kept my levels where they needed to be by adjusting the dose appropriately. Today, John is a sophomore at K-State.”

Knapp goes on to laud Dr. Ferris’ effort to practice medicine in a way consistent with Catholic moral teaching.

“He has persevered over the years, without caving to pressure,” she said. “But he has done so without self-promotion.”

Perhaps a distaste for self-promotion explains why second-person pronouns creep in as Dr. Ferris considers why he does not shed his discipleship when he dons his white coat. “You definitely have to maintain your whole Catholic identity,” he said. “There’s no place where you can just say, ‘I’m going to act contrary to my beliefs.’ That would be a very serious integrity rupture.” 

Much has happened in the quarter-century since Dr. Ferris partnered with the now-retired Dr. Antonio Barba to open Holy Family Medical Associates, he reflects. When the clinic was launched, Dr. Ferris notes, he and his wife, Patty, were parents of an only child, Cecilia. Now she is 26, and has since been joined by siblings Timothy, 24; Lucy, 19; and Toby, 16.

Sometimes, he acknowledges, the personal and professional worlds intermingle, such as the time he got a telephone call while Patty was in labor with Toby at Via Christi St. Joseph. “One of my patients was in labor at Wesley,” he said. “I rushed to Wesley, delivered that baby, and raced back to be present when Toby was delivered. I am glad I made it.”

He wasn’t always able to be present for his family, he acknowledges, pointing to his 2006 deployment to Afghanistan, which not only caused him to miss Lucy’s birth, but which also raised questions about whether Holy Family would remain afloat in his absence. Other major markers he mentions during that quarter-century journey include nuts and bolts matters such as an office relocation and the clinic’s evolving corporate status, but others are far less mundane, such as the recovery of a patient in a manner that appears so miraculous that documentation about her case now constitutes part of the evidence on which Vatican investigators will rely to help determine whether the Diocese of Wichita’s own Venerable Emil Kapaun advances toward officially-recognized sainthood.

Origin story

Young Ron Ferris arrived at Benedictine College from Kansas City without any specific religious affiliation or strong faith, but he kept noticing his college friends all shared a subtle attribute he couldn’t quite identify. Whatever it was, he didn’t seem to have it, he relates, but he soon knew he wanted it. 

“I ended up in a group of friends in which five men eventually became priests,” Dr. Ferris said. “Their witness was a great influence. Their peace and joy just drew me.”

Hearing that explanation prompts a nod from Knapp.

“The church proposes, she doesn’t impose,” Knapp said. “Living in such a way that you know your life’s purpose – and what you should be doing – is very attractive.”

By his senior year of college, Ferris was received into the Catholic Church with the triple crown of baptism, confirmation, and first communion. And while a sizable contingent of his friends were being drawn into the care of souls, he felt a tug toward medicine.  

That intensified during his time as a U.S. Army Reserve operating room technician in Iraq during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. “I was already doing medical things, saw the physicians at work, and thought ‘That could be me.’”

Even so, he recognized their hardships. “It really struck me that since all those physicians were away from home for six months, they all lost their practices,” Dr. Ferris said. “When they returned, their patients had moved on, and there was nothing left. That was a big sacrifice.”

After graduating from Benedictine, he attended the University of Kansas Medical School. He accepted Catholic teaching that abortion, contraception, sterilization, artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization, and other widely accepted practices violated human dignity and God’s intention. But what implications did that have for his approaching medical career? He raised the subject with trusted friends, including those studying for the priesthood. They were both encouraging and blunt. 

“They told me not to be a wimp,” Dr. Ferris said. “They also accompanied me to conferences such as Human Life International and helped me learn more about why the Church believes what it does.”

Dr. Ferris resolved to steer clear of medical practices contrary to Catholic teaching. According to Knapp, he had to know such a stance would take a toll on his career before it had even begun, but that was an opportunity to fulfill the Lord’s promise that the servants should expect no better treatment than their master.

“Jesus entered Jerusalem knowing he would be crucified, but his purpose was to bring salvation to the world,” she said. “I think Dr. Ferris found, and then pursued, his purpose.”

Ferris was sufficiently convinced of his path that, when he reached his third year of medical school, he opted to study on KU Medical School’s Wichita campus because he believed the area’s professional and cultural climate would be more receptive to his boundaries. In fact, he said, the Diocese of Wichita was downright inviting.

Through his interactions with area Catholics and the diocese’s Office of Natural Family Planning, Ferris got to know Mike Wescott, who now serves as the diocese’s Director of Development and Planned Giving. Wescott shared a holy hour with Dr. Barba and realized a longstanding and like-minded doctor would be interested to hear about the MD who was about to embark on his career.

“He told Dr. Barba that I was finishing residency, and so we met,” Dr. Ferris said. 

A new clinic

The idea of partnering on a clinic that would limit its menu of family planning options to those approved by the Church readily appealed to both doctors, Dr. Ferris said, and received encouragement from Bishop Thomas Olmstead, who was Wichita’s bishop at the time. “We knew we wanted to do this,” Dr. Ferris said. “Bishop Olmsted was very supportive.”

Instead of reinventing the wheel, Doctors Ferris and Barba connected with and visited a practice in Lincoln, Nebraska, that had taken the path they envisioned. It went by the appealing name of Holy Family Medical Specialists. 

“The people there were more than happy to show us how they did everything, which was very helpful,” Dr. Ferris said. “They started to informally refer to us as Holy Family Medical-South, and to themselves as Holy Family Medical-North.

“It was really powerful to work alongside Dr. Barba,” Dr. Ferris continued. “He delivered several thousand babies over the course of his career and went to the chapel every time a patient was in labor. It was an amazing witness. So was the fact that he would make it to Mass every day. Think about how unpredictable a doctor’s schedule can be – someone goes into labor at all hours. He still found a way to make it to Mass every day for years and years.”

A few other things worked out, even if there were no guarantees at the time. Dr. Ferris was deployed two times, which meant tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

A miraculous recovery?

When Dr. Ferris returned in October 2006 after being deployed to Afghanistan, he had two weeks of paid leave to resettle and recuperate before resuming work. However, he quickly learned that one of his patients, 12-year-old Avery Gerleman, was in intensive care at Wesley Hospital. As described in The Miracle of Fr. Kapaun: Priest, Soldier, and Korean War Hero by Roy Wenzl and Travis Heying, Gerleman’s symptoms initially baffled the ICU doctors.

“Doctors in Wichita put Avery in a drug-induced coma and pushed a breathing tube down her throat. Avery’s lungs filled with blood. Her kidneys shut down,” the book describes. “Doctors told Melissa and Shawn Gerleman that their daughter was going to die.”

Dr. Ferris arrived at Wesley to find Avery hooked up to an array of machines – the book notes that at one point Shawn counted 32 of them – and saw her failing fast. “She was bleeding out, hemorrhaging, with blood coming out as fast as they could put it in,” Dr. Ferris said. “Her kidneys were completely destroyed, so she was on dialysis and was maxed out on the ventilator.”

Wenzl and Heying’s book describes how Shawn began praying to Fr. Kapaun – the U.S. Army chaplain who had died during the Korean War in a prisoner of war camp, and who the Vatican had slightly more than a decade previous deemed a Servant of God – asking him to intercede with God for Avery’s healing. Seeking saintly intercession was a foreign practice to both of Avery’s non-Catholic lead ICU doctors, but they did believe in miracles and had no other explanation for her survival and recovery, the book says, noting that she played competitive soccer six months after her release from a four-month hospital stay. 

When Fr. John Hotze learned Dr. Ferris was Avery’s family doctor, the Diocese of Wichita’s postulator in the cause for Fr. Kapaun’s beatification and canonization gave Dr. Ferris an assignment. “He brought me a manila envelope that contained a 15- or 16-page form to provide documentation for Fr. Kapaun’s cause,” he said.

So Dr. Ferris went into Wesley’s medical records department and sat down at a table with Avery’s records. “The file was probably two feet tall, and it was intense,” he said. “Every time someone is given a unit of blood they add a sticker to the page and one of the pages had two full rows. It was unbelievable how much blood she was given.”

That’s only part of it, he notes, citing her kidneys. “There is the biopsy of her kidney showing the antibodies, – that’s the autoimmune disease at work – but they disappeared,” he said. “She’s walking around today with working kidneys.

“The chart says things like ‘She is teetering and will probably die today – get the family here.’ It’s clear: this is going to be it. Then something just happened and the chart documents turning down the ventilator from the maximum 100% oxygen to 90%, and then 80%, then 70%, and 60%,’ and so on.”

Dr. Ferris submitted his homework to Fr. Hotze with an even greater appreciation of what he had witnessed. It constitutes one of his medical career’s most memorable highlights to this point, he says.

While such highlights no doubt give him a lift, Knapp suggests, Dr. Ferris’ influence often has its own mood-boosting effects on those with whom he comes into contact. “He’s so joyful,” she said. “He’s such a servant leader.”