When
conciliar teaching precluded such deviant “reforms,” an appeal to “the spirit
of Vatican II” was made by the defectors. Religious themselves were sent to
seminars, conferences, and think-tanks which pressured them to abandon
hierarchical structures in favor of the “democratic,” to question traditional
doctrinal certainties, and to demand reasons for those things formerly regarded
as sacred, the most important of which was the basis for their vocation to the
religious life. They became exposed to new anthropologies under the influence
of psychology, sociology, and other social sciences, acceptance of which many
sisters were naturally compliant under obedience — all this in spite of the
obviousness that such changes were not approved by Rome and threatened the
existence of their communities. In other words, the desired ressourcement of the council Fathers, rather than providing the guiding
atmosphere in which aggiornamento was
to occur, was ignored in favor of “updating.”
That’s a credit to him, that he at least had pangs of conscience; whereas these other orders, like the Jesuits, even when they saw that the IHMs were almost extinct, nevertheless they invited the same team in. Oh, yes. Well, actually we started with the Jesuits before we started with the nuns. We did our first Jesuit workshop in ‘65. Rogers got two honorary doctorates from Jesuit universities…. A good book to read on this whole question is Fr. Joseph Becker’s The Re-FormedJesuits. It reviews the collapse of Jesuit training between 1965 and 1975. Jesuit formation virtually fell apart; and Father Becker knows the influence of the Rogerians pretty well. He cites a number of Jesuit novice masters who claimed that the authority for what they did—and didn’t do—was Carl Rogers. Later on when the Jesuits gave Rogers those honorary doctorates, I think that they wanted to credit him with his influence on the Jesuit way of life. But do you think there were any short-term beneficial...

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