Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

Questions and Answers

Why do religious and clerics have such a hard time with celibacy?

 
here are two reasons.

First, the pre-Vatican II rule about the need for religious and clerics to avoid close friendships caused many unexpected problems. Actually, this rule isn’t bad in its ultimate intent, for mystics have long emphasized that no human relationships should interfere with love for God. And, if you really experience true love for God, it will be impossible to desire anything other than being absorbed in divine love. But if human friendships are forbidden, as a misguided way to inspire love for God, then everything backfires. Such a rule only strengthens and amplifies the desire for human emotional closeness in the hearts of spiritual novices. The frustrated desire for friendship can easily become a secret desire for sexual satisfaction.

Vatican II reversed this rule and now encourages intimacy in all relationships. But for pre-Vatican II religious and clerics, this reversal was a bit like taking a soldier trained for combat and discharging him to civilian life without “untraining” all the combat defenses. Such military foolishness only encourages the ex-soldier to continue living a life based on aggressive hostility. Well, imagine someone trained to fear and avoid his inner emotional life who is then told to be “intimate.” First of all, this demands that that person give what he never learned how to give (emotional honesty), and second it overwhelms him with freedom and responsibility he never learned how to wield.

And this leads to the second reason that celibacy—or more appropriately, chastity—causes such problems today.

Today, in order to reduce fears of emotional intimacy, we have books and articles and retreats based on humanistic psychology and Jungian pseudo-mysticism that teach the value of the psychological “self,” of human energy needs, and of “natural” wholeness. They preach that self-denial amounts to self-hatred, that the saints represent emotional repression raised to unhuman ideals, and that Scripture demands something unrealistic for ordinary persons. They idealize and glorify select “love” relationships as a way to inspire intimacy. In essence, many religious have “bought into” the pagan secular notion that the chalice of social communion is filled with erotic sexuality, not the Blood of Christ.

		. . . the one who would go to God relying on natural ability and reasoning will not be very spiritual.
		—St. John of the Cross The Living Flame of Love, 2. 14

Now, I have nothing against friendships. And I hold that sexual activity which is open to procreation between a man and a woman within the indissoluble bond of Holy Matrimony is, for the reverent laity who are called to it, an admirable expression of divine love. But I know that anyone who plays chess with the devil and expects to win is a fool. The devil knows more about psychology than anyone who tries to stand up against him, so no Jungian psychobabble can teach holiness.

Carl Jung’s mother practiced spiritism and his father was a Protestant minister who lost his faith. Jung grew to despise his father’s hypocrisy, and his “spiritual” attitude to life was stained with a secret need to disavow authority. Therefore, his psychology, too, is fundamentally anti-Christian. His article, Answer to Job, is filled with blasphemy. Is it any wonder, then, that a man who overlooked the concept of sin and made every effort to reduce evil to a mere psychological problem could have committed adultery with one of his patients, right in his own house, right under the nose of his wife, and say that he was doing nothing wrong? And yet you don’t have to look very far today to find “Catholic” retreats that claim to provide “spiritual” healing through Jungian psychology.

The hard truth of all this is that you can never live an emotionally open life of chastity unless you understand it as a gift of divine grace. Saint Augustine, for example, learned this the hard way. He repeatedly failed to control his rakish desires until he gave himself over totally to God:

	I thought that continence arose from one’s own powers, which I did not recognize in myself. I was foolish enough not to know . . . that no one can be continent unless you grant it. For you would surely have granted it if my inner groaning had reached your ears and I with firm faith had cast my cares on you.
	—Saint Augustine, Confessions 6.11.20

Therefore, there’s only one way to live in chastity: glorify God, not “relationships,” glorify the Cross, not “spirituality,” and let the Holy Spirit, not humanistic psychology, teach you how to love with a pure heart. But to purchase this “pearl” you have to pay for it with everything you have.

Nevertheless, many in the Church will continue to have problems with a chaste, continent lifestyle, and liberal humanism will thrive in place of sound theological counsel. Why? “Well, that pearl you speak about is nice,” they will say, “but it’s just too expensive. We need something the ordinary person can afford.”

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Additional Resources

The Story of a Repentant Psychologist  —in an interview with Dr. William Marra, Dr. Coulson, a contrite Catholic psychologist, discusses his role in the destruction of Catholic religious orders, and his subsequent change of mind.

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