Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

Catholic Compassion

Reprints available for yourself  or for someone you know

 
Compassion | Chastity | Responsibility | Serving the Self | Disobeying God | Same-sex Attraction | Identity | Obedience to False Authority | To Die in All Things | The Proof | Blessings

HE stood in silence, smoldering in anger at the smug self-assuredness of her accusers. She knew in her heart why she had committed such an act. Surrounded with hypocrites, she was angry with the world, and she was angry with God. She was fed up with the misery she had to endure and wanted some excitement, some satisfaction, some sense of something for herself.

Still, she felt a strange curiosity about that man squatting on the ground in front of her. “What is he going to do?” she wondered. She cast quick glances at him, yet she never caught him looking at her.

She waited for what seemed like an eternity. People were shaking their heads and walking away, muttering to themselves. She looked at him. He didn’t look at her. He just scratched in the dust with his finger.

Then, with a mysterious calmness, he asked her a question. She shrugged and shook her head, almost whispering, “No. No one sir.”

And for the first time she felt him looking at her—not just at her, but into her. His next words stunned and confused her. “Neither do I condemn you.” Her heart quivered as it tried to comprehend what was happening.

Yes, what was happening? Call it compassion. But note something carefully. He had something else to say.

“Go, and from now on do not sin anymore.”

Many persons who retell this story neglect these final words. They try to make it seem that compassion amounts to a broad-minded acceptance of anything. But that misses the point.

Jesus came to us to save us from our sins. His mission was not to condone sin and pretend it didn’t exist. His mission was to show us how much we do sin, how much our sin hurts us, how much it hurts others, and how much we will lose if we persist in it. His mission was a mission of compassion: to call us away from sin and into holiness.

Moreover, as this story of A Woman Caught in Adultery (John 8:1–11) makes clear, sexuality and sin are closely entangled. A holy life depends on sexual purity. A holy life calls us to chastity.

  
Chastity

Chastity refers to abstinence from all sexual activity which is not open to procreation ^[1] between a man and a woman within the indissoluble bond of marriage and family; consequently, if you’re not living in the man-woman bond of Holy Matrimony, then the Christian faith itself calls you to abstain from all sexual activity.

You can find many persons who will claim that chastity is the repression of sexuality. But, in all truth, chastity is the purifying transformation of desire into love.

If you take the Twelve Fruits of the Holy Spirit—Charity, Joy, Peace, Patience, Longanimity (forbearance), Goodness, Benignity (kindness), Mildness, Fidelity, Modesty, Continence, and Chastity—and mix them together, you get a fruit salad called mutual cooperation. Mutual cooperation is the essence of Christian life. And chastity is a core ingredient in that recipe. You simply cannot have mutual cooperation if you are always making others into objects for your personal pleasure.

Chastity, then, is a way of life—the way of life, the only lifestyle, the only “orientation”—for anyone who would follow Christ and claim to be Christian. To spurn chastity is to spurn Christ Himself, Who, in His real and physical suffering on the Cross—truly present to us in the broken bread of the Eucharist—offers the only means to heal our human brokenness. 

	There is but one price at which souls are bought, and that is suffering united to My suffering on the cross. Pure love understands these words; carnal love will never understand them.
	—told to St. Faustina by Jesus (Diary, 324)

Chastity is also a choice, a choice of love. Moreover, just as chastity is a choice, the rejection of chastity is also a choice, a choice of hatred.^[2] Those who ridicule the Church for its teachings about chastity, saying, for example, that the Church has a phobia about sexuality, are those who themselves have a phobia: the fear of choosing to live a holy life with all the suffering, all the sacrifices, and all the love a holy life entails.

Still, we have an obligation—an obligation that ensues from having chosen to follow Christ in the way of the cross—to not hate those who hate chastity, to not fear those who fear suffering, to not reject those who reject holiness itself. And even if they close their ears to our words, we have a compassionate obligation to pray that they might someday, before they die, make the choice to listen to, rather than reject, the Holy Spirit.

 
Responsibility

It was almost the end of his shift. He was off at noon that day; a game was on TV early that afternoon, and he wanted to get home as soon as possible. He saw the bag on the floor. There were several men standing by a distant window talking on their cell phones.
   “It’s a nice bag. It must belong to one of them,” he told himself, as he walked by.
   Later, as he was watching the game, he saw the news item: the bomb had killed and injured dozens of tourists.
   When he was called before his boss, he stammered, trying to justify his actions.
   “What do you mean, you didn’t think it was anything serious?” His boss glared at him. “We have procedures to follow! You’re fired! Get out of my sight!”

It’s a horrific story.

But what if this were your teacher, a priest—or you—who, having disregarded the Tradition of the Church, had to stand before Christ in final judgment?

Depart from Me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

  
Serving the Self

Because chastity is a matter of respect for our bodies, we must be responsible caretakers of our bodily sexuality. Saint Paul said (1 Corinthians 6:12–20) that a lack of respect for sexual and reproductive functions are offenses against one’s own body, the temple of the Holy Spirit. Psychologically, these offenses are acts of narcissism,^[3] and narcissism, by definition, is the psychological defense of self-love.

Self-love, when reduced to a psychological defense, is a rupture with the divine because it offends true love: it places one’s self above love of God, Who made heaven and earth—including our bodies. The offense of self-love makes the temple into a brothel, so to speak.

Any activity that reduces the sexuality of the body to something no more than a form of entertainment is narcissism because it seeks to make yourself seen through your desire for another person. When you look at another person with desire, you do not see a soul enrobed in chaste beauty; you see only the exuberant fantasy that your aching throb of loneliness might be alleviated through someone’s body. Narcissism makes your pleasure in having your body fondled the focus of your satisfaction. It makes your pleasure in playing with the body of another person—turning God’s temple into your toy—into the focus of your satisfaction. That’s self-love placed above love of God, isn’t it?

So where does all this self-love placed above love of God  lead us? Well, let’s find out.

 
Disobeying God

In order to understand how friends, teachers, professors, the entertainment industry—and even priests—can lead you away from God, under the guise of “being compassionate,” consider how the serpent tempted Eve to disobey God (Genesis 3:1-6).

•	First, he led her to doubt God by making Him seem irrational: “Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?”
•	Then he led her to doubt that God was being honest with her: “You certainly will not die!”
•	Consequently, Eve saw that the fruit was good for food and looked really nice. It was natural, so it had to be good for her, she thought. So, persuaded by disobedience itself, she disobeyed God’s command and satisfied her desire.

Moreover, we continue to be tempted in the same way today by those who convince us to doubt God so that we will ultimately disobey God’s commands. Today, we are induced to look with desire at behaviors that separate us from a holy life, saying to ourselves, “How can there be anything wrong with something that seems so nice?”

Thus we are drawn away from God by so-called “well-meaning” persons who—as odd as it sounds to say it—lack compassion for us and seek only their own self-satisfaction.

 
Same-sex Attraction

The need for compassion and the danger of being led away from God find a particularly poignant merger in regard to feelings of same-sex attraction (SSA). These feelings can occur in children because of dysfunctional family dynamics. For example, a girl whose mother jumps to conclusions and does not listen emotionally to her daughter, and whose father does not demonstrate an authority of competent justice tempered with considerateness, can be attracted to the emotional openness of another girl’s personality. Likewise, a boy whose mother tends to be critical and demanding, and whose father does not demonstrate an authority of confidence and protection, can be attracted to feelings of acceptance and protection from another boy. In these cases, the fantasies of attraction are not natural expressions of the girl’s or boy’s being; instead, the fantasies point to the psychological truth of what is missing in the family structure.

Having same-sex attraction fantasies, therefore, does not mean that a person is homosexual.

Consequently, children need competent psychological explanations of their feelings of same-sex attraction—and this immediately leads to a profound irony. For example, a girl who does not trust her mother to understand her may not be inclined to go to her mother to tell her about sexual feelings. Thus, lacking any psychological resources, the girl will either be driven into a shameful isolation or be driven into the hands of political activists who, instead of offering psychological truth, will direct the girl into a political agenda with its purpose of undermining the Catholic faith.

When this occurs, conditions are ripe for a crisis of identity.

 
Identity

Halloween. Mardi Gras. Masquerades. Our cultures are full of ways we pretend that we can change our identities by changing our outward appearances.

In times past, a person’s hat really did identify his profession. And even today we wear secular uniforms (uni- means “one” and form means “shape” or “outward appearance”)—as well as religious habits and liturgical vestments—which give one common appearance to all who perform a particular function.

Most of us, however, understand full well that a uniform, in itself, does not mean anything. Unless you have been trained to perform a job, no matter what uniform you put on you won’t be able to perform that job.

Nevertheless, there is one uniform which does define us absolutely and which can never be changed. This is the uniform of the body, and it defines us sexually, according to reproductive function.

Reproductive sexuality is really quite simple, being a pure function of biology. The problems with sexual identity begin in the unconscious. Notice how children tend to believe that what is seen is real. If a child sees a man wearing a Santa Claus costume, the child will think, “That is Santa Claus.” In the same way as a child attributes reality to appearance, it often happens that individuals will unconsciously confuse their sexual functioning with the costumes which create a sexual appearance.

But the truth is that no matter what clothes you wear, no matter what kind of play you enjoy, no matter whom you choose as playmates, no matter how you act—no matter, even, how you might change your body surgically—you can never change your genetic reproductive reality.

So why, then, would anyone develop a desire to change a reality made by God? Well, even if you accept the reality of the soul, the basic facts of life—reproduction and death—are still painful realities. But as plain realities, they don’t mean anything; they just are. A fantasy of changing your personal meaning by changing your gender or your clothes or your “orientation” derives from a misguided belief that sexuality contains some mysterious, great secret that will release you from the hard facts of death and social emptiness.

But death and social emptiness are the result of separation from God, and no human effort can restore the full union with God that is lacking in all of us.

Consequently, if you fail to recognize the inherent fraud of all self-made identity in the first place, and cling to the belief that identity has any meaning apart from chaste love for God, you cling to an impossibility: the unconscious attempt to escape responsibility to God Who made heaven and earth—and reproductive sexuality as well.

It would be far better to find your identity in something that never changes, something that can never be taken from you.

 
Obedience to False Authority

Two guards lead you into a cold, harshly lit concrete room. The room is empty except for a man kneeling on the bare concrete, blindfolded, with his hands bound behind him. You recognize him as one of the terrorists who have been undermining your work. A military officer enters. He quietly removes the pistol from his holster. Holding it by the barrel, he hands it to you, glancing at the man kneeling on the floor.
   “Here. Take this. Put it to his head and pull the trigger.”
   You feel stunned, your mind momentarily paralyzed by the incongruity of the events.
   “Go ahead, take it,” the officer says. “Kill him. You have my permission.”

What would you do? If you are like most people, you will likely say that you would refuse. Fair enough. But what would you really do? Well, if you are like most people, in those particular circumstances there is a good chance that—unless you have the same living depth of faith that allowed the Christian martyrs to not betray their Tradition—you would kill the man. 

Now, that’s a shocking statement. But consider two important social-psychological scientists from the 1960s and 1970s who investigated obedience to authority. In his experiments, Stanley Milgram found that ordinary adults would be quite willing to inflict horrifying electrical shocks to other persons when told to do so by an authority figure.^[4] Philip Zimbardo, in the Stanford Prison Experiment,^[5] found that when ordinary, “nice” students played roles of prisoners and guards, the situation quickly degenerated into demeaning inhumanity to such an extent that the experiment had to be called off.

Years later, Zimbardo wrote, “. . . ordinary people, even good ones, can be seduced, recruited, initiated into behaving in evil ways under the sway of powerful systemic and situational forces.” ^[6]

So think carefully. Raised Catholic, you now hear teachers and priests—as well as television, movies, music, video games, magazines, and newspapers—telling you, “Go ahead. If it feels good, do it. You have our permission.”

Yes, they give you their permission to do anything that makes you feel good—and they even insinuate that there must be something wrong with you if you do not comply. So—what will you do?

 
To Die in All Things

In its early years, the Church struggled against the opposition of the Roman government, which drew its identity and strength from pagan religious practices. Thus, when Saint Paul founded and visited churches, he had to remind the converts not to get caught up in the prevailing cultural norms.

For example, to the Ephesians, he wrote, “I declare and solemnly attest in the Lord that you must no longer live as the pagans do—their minds empty, their understanding darkened. They are estranged from a life in God because of their ignorance and their resistance; without remorse they have abandoned themselves to lust and the indulgence of every sort of lewd conduct.”

Then he went on to remind them that lewd conduct and lust were opposed to Christian conduct. He paused in reflection, perhaps thinking about those individuals in the community who had been preaching untruths and leading the Christians astray. Then he added, almost sarcastically, that he was supposing that when they learned about Christ, He had been preached to them and taught to them “in accord with the truth that is in Jesus” rather than in accord with prevailing cultural ideas about sexuality.

What, then, is this truth that is in Jesus? Well, he continued, it is the truth that “you must lay aside your former way of life and the old self which deteriorates through illusion and desire, and acquire a fresh, spiritual way of thinking. You must put on that new man created in God’s image, whose justice and holiness are born of truth.”

Or, stated in its most elegant simplicity, “You must die in all things of human identity to have life in all things divine.”

		“Whoever knows how to die in all things will have life in all things.”
		—St. John of the Cross The Sayings of Light and Love, no. 160.

Take it from Saint John of the Cross. He understood.

 
The Proof

The proof of all this is in Christ Himself.

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

Did He cheat us or lie to us? No. Did He kill unborn children or desire the death of His enemies? No. Did He use us for His sexual pleasure or to find “self-fulfillment”? No. Instead He suffered for us, as an act of compassion and mercy. 

In His Passion He showed us what real love is: to will the good of others.^[7] And in today’s world—this confused and broken world—love continues to manifest itself by calling us away from sin into holiness. The false “love” touted by contemporary society does not call us into anything; instead it tempts us to abandon holiness for the sake of sensory feelings. Real love calls us into acts of sacrifice and giving—not the giving of material things that merely bribe others to like us, but the giving of qualities such as patience, kindness, understanding, mercy, forbearance, and forgiveness. These are compassionate qualities whose ultimate purpose is the salvation of other souls.

Christ calls us all to live lives of love, with Him, free from our own narcissistic identities. Thus Saint Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

 
Blessings

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the parents who have died in all things, who keep their love for God as the entire reason for living, who pray constantly with their minds in their hearts, and who, for the sake of love, forsake the satisfaction of personal convenience and take the time and make the emotional sacrifices to dedicate themselves to providing their children with explanations, comfort, reassurance, protection, and guidance into the way of holiness. Blessed are the children who, for the sake of love, forsake the satisfaction of personal identity, the satisfaction of comforting themselves, the satisfaction of reassuring themselves, and the satisfaction of disguising narcissism and eroticism as love.

Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God. Blessed are those who, for the sake of love, forsake personal pride and choose to live in chaste purity of heart and take pride only in the Lord.

 

Order a bound copy of this article for yourself or to give to your family and friends

Notes

1. Please note the word “open” in the phrase open to procreation. This is not to say that every sexual act must produce a child. It means that the fundamental meaning of sexuality is in its procreative function—rather than as something done for fun or sport or entertainment. To cast away the fundamental meaning of sexuality (as in masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, artificial birth control, etc.) is to fall into sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church expresses it this way: “. . . every action which . . . proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible is intrinsically evil ” (CCC 2370).

2. The spiritually negative emotion of hate does not necessarily mean a passionate loathing; it can just as well be a quiet, secret desire for harm to come upon someone or something. Hate can be a subtle thing, therefore, and it often is experienced more unconsciously than consciously. Consequently, it will often be very easy to deny that you feel any hatred for anyone at all.
     Note also that hatred and anger are theologically synonymous. Christ Himself taught the crowds, “But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:22). And Saint John the Evangelist reflected this sentiment when he said, in one of his letters, “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15). The theological implication of these texts, therefore, is that any desire for harm to come to another person—whether through active loathing or through passive resentment—is, in its spiritual essence, an evil desire to remove the fullness of life (with its possibility of love and forgiveness) from that person. 

3. Narcissism, in its psychological meaning, refers to making oneself seen and noticed; its operations are concerned entirely with the self and its satisfactions, such that all motivation begins with the self and returns to the self.

“. . . The root of the scopic drive [i.e., the motivation to see and be seen—RLR] is to be found entirely in the subject, in the fact that the subject sees himself. . . . in his sexual member. . . . Whereas making oneself seen is indicated by an arrow that really comes back towards the subject, making oneself heard goes towards the other.” See Jacques Lacan, “The Partial Drive and its Circuit” and “From Love to the Libido.” In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981, pp. 194–195).

Therefore, in contrast to this self-centered orientation of a narcissistic culture, Christ, Who is the Word, makes Himself heard by compassionately calling us out of ourselves, to listen to Him, and to follow Him. He is the good shepherd, the gatekeeper who opens the gate, “and the sheep hear his voice, as he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has driven out all his own, he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they recognize his voice ” (John 10:4). 

4. See Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371–378.
    Early in the 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a professor in social psychology at Yale University, conducted experiments about obedience. Although controversial by today’s ethical standards, the experiments revealed a dark side of human nature: many persons were quite willing to obey someone in an apparent position of authority even if such obedience meant inflicting severe pain on someone, even to the point of risking that person’s serious physical injury or death. Moreover, even though the experiments were themselves a deception (that is, the “electric shocks” the subjects administered to the victims were not real, and the “victims” were actually part of the experiment, only pretending to feel pain), many of the subjects suffered considerable disillusionment and trauma to discover that they had the capacity within themselves—in obedience to authority and peer pressure—to inflict such agonizing torment on another person. 

5. See P. Zimbardo. The Lucifer Effect. (New York: Random House, 2007).

6. Ibid., p. 443.

7. St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. I-II, 26, 4.