What Is Vitae?

The Living Inheritance

“Ab ovo usque ad mala, homo imago Dei.”From beginning to end, the human being is the image of God.

Vitae Catholica is not a new idea. It is the recovery of a Christian tradition in medicine that is older than the modern hospital by a thousand years — and a Christian tradition in education that is older than the Western university. We stand in that inheritance, and we build on it.

A 501(c)(3) Christian Nonprofit AZ · Founded 2025

A Note from the Curator

The modern reader may ask: what is a Christian nonprofit telemedicine practice doing authoring a K–12 textbook series? The answer is that Christian medicine and Christian education were one project for most of the last two thousand years — Hildegard wrote both, Salerno taught both, Padua illustrated both. Vitae Catholica is the attempt to reunite what was never supposed to be separated.

The Lineage The Two Halves The Theological Argument The Four Marks

Movement I · The Body of Vitae

One Project in Two Halves

A clinician's practice and an author's classroom — answering, at opposite ends of a child's life, the same Christian question about the body.

Pars Prima

The Clinic

Available today. A live Christian telemedicine practice by Vitae Health (a DBA of Rodriguez Corporation), led by Prof. Dana Rodriguez, PhD, serving families across Arizona and Wisconsin by video and phone.

Pediatric wellness and developmental assessment
Chronic-condition management (asthma, ADHD, anxiety, behavioral health)
Parent coaching and Christian bioethical counsel
Special-needs and ESA-eligible services
No subscription — book the visits you need, with fees discussed openly at intake

Open Today Visit the Clinic →

Pars Secunda

The Formation

In active authoring. A K–12 Christian health formation curriculum anchored by the twelve-volume Quintivium textbook series.

One volume per grade, K through 12
Five arts of the person: Body, Mind, Ethics, Theology, Politics
Eleven body systems revisited each year at increasing depth
RSV-CE Scripture, Theology of the Body, Catholic Social Teaching
Required core subject at every Virtualis campus on launch — the third pillar of the liberal arts

Coming Soon The Quintivium →

From the Book of Psalms

“I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works! Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.”

Psalm 139:14–15 · RSV-CE

Movement II · The Lineage

A Thousand Years of Christian Medicine

Vitae is not an invention but a recovery. Five points on a thousand-year arc that begins at Salerno and reaches the present.

Manuscript folio from the Trotula corpus

XI Century · Salerno

Schola Medica Salernitana

The first Christian school of medicine

Southern Italy, eleventh century. The first medical school in Christendom, founded centuries before the university system. Women taught men; Christians and Jews taught together. Trota of Salerno wrote the Trotula corpus that taught Europe gynecology for five hundred years.

Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias illumination

XII Century · Rhineland

Hildegard of Bingen, OSB

Causae et Curae · Physica

Benedictine abbess, composer, mystic, and physician. Her Causae et Curae treats disease theologically and sin physiologically. Declared Doctor of the Church in 2012.

XIV Century · Padua, Lombardy

Tacuinum Sanitatis & Padua

Regimen Vitae · Theatrum Anatomicum

The Tacuinum Sanitatis teaches health as a daily rule of life. At Padua, Vesalius and Fabricius build the first Christian anatomical theatre (Palazzo del Bo, 1594), teaching the body as a visible theological text.

III

XX Century · Rome

St. John Paul II

Theologia Corporis · 1979–1984

In 129 Wednesday audiences, JPII delivers the most developed modern Christian treatment of the human body as theological reality — the Theology of the Body. Fully a thousand years after Salerno, the argument is complete.

Prof. Dana Rodriguez, PhD, with a young patient

2025 · Arizona

Vitae Catholica

The Living Continuation

A Christian 501(c)(3) telemedicine practice and K–12 formation curriculum, founded by Prof. Dana Rodriguez, PhD, and Zeus Rodriguez in 2025. The lineage, continued in the present tense.

Movement III · The Argument

Why a Christian Medicine Is Needed Now

Modern medicine is technically brilliant and philosophically exhausted. It can diagnose the body better than any physician in history — and it does not know what the body is.

The Christian tradition has always taught that the human body is imago Dei: the image and likeness of God. That the body is not a machine a soul rides inside, but a sacramental reality — the visible form of an invisible person. The body is not the problem and the soul is not the solution. The body is already a theological text.

A Christian medicine therefore does two things the secular clinic cannot: it treats the patient as a person with a soul who will live forever, and it teaches the patient what the body is for. Both of those are, in the strict senseeducational acts.

A Christian school, in turn, cannot teach the child the body is a machine at 8 a.m. and that the person has dignity at 10 a.m. The curriculum must be one unbroken argument, top to bottom, from anatomy up through politics. That is what the Quintivium is.

Vitae Catholica is the attempt to do both at once — and to do neither well unless they are done together.

Movement IV · The Four Marks

What Makes Vitae Vitae

Four non-negotiable commitments that distinguish Vitae from a concierge practice, a secular curriculum, or a parachurch ministry.

Nota Prima

Unapologetically Christian

Every volume is RSV-CE-anchored. Every visit is open to prayer if the family wishes. Our anthropology of the body is Catholic and classical. We make no attempt to secularize what we do.

Nota Secunda

Two Entities, One Mission

The clinic is Vitae Health, a DBA of Rodriguez Corporation. The curriculum and resource pages are published by Vitae Catholica, Inc., an Arizona 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The educational work is free to read online; clinical fees are discussed openly at intake.

Nota Tertia

Practitioner-Authored

The curriculum is not written by editors reading textbooks. It is authored by a practicing pediatric nurse practitioner — Prof. Dana Rodriguez, PhD — with twenty-one years at the bedside.

Nota Quarta

Rigorous & Cited

Every theological claim is attributable to a real source. Every clinical claim rests on current evidence. Salerno, Hildegard, Trota, Padua, Theology of the Body, contemporary pediatrics — cited, not hand-waved.

The Windhover · excerpt

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ · 1877