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Psychological Healing
in the Catholic Mystic Tradition

Questions and Answers

I cannot connect with statements that Saints were either accosted, or so spiritually “moved” by such revelations of Christ or Mary coming to them—person to person. . . . I’ve been sifting through this in prayers and meditations. . . . My energy is spent. And it’s spent to the point, that if it means to give up Catholicism, I’ll do it, as a means of trying to find something new—trying to find one last hope of energy that will revive the neurons in my brain-dead soul. and please don’t take this the wrong way—REALLY, I mean it—I’m not giving up Catholicism to be rebelliously blasphemous. It’s just that I would rather give up on the daily Eucharist, if it means that I can have my soul and my psyche revived in a different church—everyone claims to have “theeee one true doctrine” —someone’s gotta be lying. Will Lutheran/ Methodist/ non-denominational/ Pentecostal pastors go to hell because of their denial of the daily Eucharist? Hmmm. . . I wouldn’t think that Heaven is just for Catholics because of their belief and participation in the Eucharist. Hence, why not leave the Catholic Church?

Outline of the Answer
• Loving Perfectly
• Condoning Sin
• Anger: The Rejection of Grace
• The Church Weeps
• Love Cannot be Killed

 
No one goes to heaven who does not love perfectly.

Consider this statement carefully though. It does not mean that anyone can be perfect in this life. Nor does it mean that anyone has to be perfect in order to love. It means that in Purgatory, in the fires of God’s love, souls in preparation for the passage to Heaven are purged of their inability to love perfectly.

So how do we get to Purgatory? Well, we get there through our desire to love perfectly. We get there because, in this life, we repent our wretched inability to love perfectly.

Thus it is true that the saints are those men and women who were so spiritually moved by the desire to love perfectly that they eventually reached the state of loving perfectly. It’s that simple.

 
Condoning Sin

Now, not every Protestant will go to hell. Nor will every Catholic go to heaven. The problem with the Protestant heresy is that many Protestants condone sin. They tell their followers that “This doesn’t matter,” and “That isn’t a sin,” and “The Catholic Church doesn’t know what it’s talking about when it talks about sin.” And it’s all a lie because many well-meaning persons are led straight into sin with no thought of repenting it. How can they repent their sins if they reject the truth that their behaviors are sin?

Of all the religions in this world, only the Catholic Church has all the resources necessary to know what exactly is sin and to teach you how to repent your sins.

Sadly, many persons, Catholics included, reject those resources.

Why?

 
Anger: The Rejection of Grace

Well, as I have seen in great detail through my clinical experience, the most pervasive sin of all is anger. At its core, anger is hatred, the desire to do to others what was done to you. “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life remaining in him” (1 John 3:15). Yet most individuals, because of the emotional wounds of their childhood, have more anger within their unconscious than there is oil under the rocks of the earth. And just like oil in the rocks, unconscious anger has so insidiously infiltrated our largely Protestant and non-Christian culture that every aspect of our daily lives is soaked in anger, where it seeps out in cynicism, sarcasm, argumentativeness, arrogance, competition, meanness, hostility, and you-name-it. It all comes from the deep pain of emotional wounds, it all leaks out as hatred, and it poisons the heart with the sin of spiritual murder.

Most persons don’t see this anger for what it is. They don’t realize what they are doing. But in their defiance of Tradition, and in their persecution of the Church herself, they end up taking it out on God, and that leaves them spiritually dead, because when you’re angry at God you shut out His graces from your soul, leaving you in darkness—and that hurts only you.

O Lord, my God, You are no stranger to those who do not estrange themselves from You. How can anyone say that it is You who absent Yourself?

—St. John of the Cross
The Sayings of Light and Love, 50

 
The Church Weeps

The Catholic saints have seen it all. They have seen it clearly. They have seen it because they had the courage to do anything it takes to find real love. And the sorrow of seeing things for what they really are has brought them to tears, because they know that no one gets to heaven who does not love perfectly.

“Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). Where, then, does that leave the angry and bitter heart? Well, the Catholic Church—the real Catholic Church—knows. She weeps and she prays, because she knows the truth of hell.

 
Love Cannot be Killed

And you? Well, you fear love, and you can push love away, but you can’t kill it. Isn’t that what Christ proved to us in the Resurrection? And isn’t that what He proves to us each day when we celebrate the Eucharist?

 


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