Neomodernism vs. Religious Life (conclusion)

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 effects? Did it seem as if you were getting somewhere in the good sense?

Well, priests and nuns became more available to the people that they worked with; they were less remote.... But we didn’t have a doctrine of evil. As I’ve said, Maslow saw that we failed to understand the reality of evil in human life. When we implied to people that they could trust their impulses, they also understood us to mean that they could trust their evil impulses, that they weren’t really evil. But they were really evil. This hit home again for Rogers in the 1970s, when rumors began to circulate about a group that had spun off from ours. By then we had become the Center for Studies of the Person in La Jolla, having spun off from WBSI; and at the same time there spun off another group called the Center for Feeling Therapy in Hollywood. Well, charges were brought against the guys at the Center for Feeling Therapy—one of three founders of that, by the way, being a Jesuit who had left the order—and among the things that the State of California was perceptive enough to charge them with was killing babies. Eleven times, women who became pregnant while they were in the compound, the Center for Feeling Therapy, were forced to abort their babies. The State of California charged them with this crime—

Was this before Roe v. Wade?

No, this happened after Roe, but the State Medical Board held that it was unethical for those men to force the women to have abortions, because those women wanted their babies.

And this is a result of psychological feeling therapy?

Yes….Humanistic psychotherapy, the kind that has virtually taken over the Church in America, and dominates so many forms of aberrant education like sex education, and drug education, holds that the most important source of authority is within you, that you must listen to yourself. Well, if you have a baby you’re carrying under your heart, get rid of it. Women who came into the Center for Feeling Therapy with I children were forced to put them up for adoption….

Is there an assumption in humanistic psychology, a modernist, Teilhardish kind of assumption, that human nature has altered, and therefore old values, old models, don’t apply?

I don’t think that humanistic psychology assumes any alteration of human nature, but rather John Dewey’s idea that because we live in times of rapid social change, what we’ve always done is precisely what we should no longer do.

Sure.

Now the odd thing is, we’ve been living in terms of Dewey’s theory for almost a hundred years now. We’re living in Dewey’s past, and not in our own present. That’s what makes a movement like Roger McCaffrey’s and Bill Marra’s so progressive: it doesn’t pretend that the last fifty years have worked out very well.²⁴⁴

Comments

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D: This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

Things Catholic

In my second chapter I discuss why the political terms "liberal" and "conservative" are misnomers for adjectives modifying the term "Catholic." This is especially important now, when, following the resignation of Benedict XVI, pundits will misuse these terms in discussing the Holy father's legacy. Read more on this here.

Women Warriors?

A s a Catholic man and history teacher, I always tell my classes that, for reasons of masculinity and chivalry, I oppose women in the military (I teach at an all-female Catholic girls high school). So this article gives a better explanation of my view from a Catholic man's perspective: WOMEN DON'T DESERVE COMBAT by Mr. Gabe Jones “For whenever man is responsible for offending a woman’s personal dignity and vocation, he acts contrary to his own personal dignity and his own vocation.” (Pope St. John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, 10) December 3, 2015 ought to be remembered as the date that any remaining vestiges of our country’s collective sense of chivalry died a tragic death. It was on this day that Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced his decision to require combat positions in every branch of the United States military – including the Marine Corps – be opened to women. Despite being one of the most significant news items in recent memory, if you did not p...

The Pope and the Pill

C atholic teaching on the natural moral law reveals that man does not have unlimited dominion over his body or his sexual faculties, as Paul VI reminded us in Humanae vitae , for both of these must be used within the limits of the order of reality established by God (HV 16). When these limits are ignored, rejected or exceeded, horrifying consequences result. Here we are brought to Pope Paul's prophetic words: "Let [responsible men] first consider how easily [artificial birth control] could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings . . . need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and e...

Nuns' Story, or Call the Sisters

(Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham / Fr James Bradley) I have been watching the PBS series, Call the Midwives , which f ollows the nurses, midwives and nuns from Nonnatus House, who visit the expectant mothers of Poplar, providing the poorest women with the best possible care. As I observe the way these Anglican nuns are portrayed, it strikes me that they are more like Catholic nuns than many Catholic nuns after Vatican II (see chapter 5 of my book). Thus, the story featured in this post does not surprise me, especially after Pope Benedict's launching of the United States’ ordinariate for disaffected Anglicans seeking communion with the Catholic Church. From the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus , given in Rome, at St. Peter’s, on Nov. 4, 2009: “In recent times the Holy Spirit has moved groups of Anglicans to petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion individually as well as corporately.”

Homosexual Marriage

The urgency of the issue of gay marriage at this time and the compelling arguments raised against it here, make this paper an important resource: Answering Advocates of Gay Marriage KATHERINE YOUNG AND PAUL NATHANSON Claim 1 : Marriage is an institution designed to foster the love between two people. Gay people can love each other just as straight people can. Ergo, marriage should be open to gay people. Claim 2 : Not all straight couples have children, but no one argues that their marriages are unacceptable Claim 3 : Some gay couples do have children and therefore need marriage to provide the appropriate context. Claim 4 : Marriage and the family are always changing anyway, so why not allow this change? Claim 5 : Marriage and the family have already changed, so why not acknowledge the reality? Claim 6 : Children would be no worse off with happily married gay parents than they are with unhappily married straight ones. Claim 7 : Given global overpopulation, why w...

The End of Fortress Catholicism?!

John Gehring in the Post editorializes: Something unexpected and extraordinary is happening in the Catholic Church. Pope Francis is rescuing the faith from those who hunker down in gilded cathedrals and wield doctrine like a sword. The edifice of fortress Catholicism – in which progressive Catholics, gay Catholics, Catholic women and others who love the church but often feel marginalized by the hierarchy – is starting to crumble. I, as one endlessly pointing out the fruitlessness of using adjectives to describe Catholics , could not resist the following, penned by Pat Archibold of the NCR (NOT Reporter!!) Proof of Liberalism in the Pope: "It is true that the Muslim world is not totally mistaken when it reproaches the West of Christian tradition of moral decadence and the manipulation of human life." "It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from ...

George Weigel has just published a proposed blueprint for the “New Evangelization,” entitled Evangelical Catholicism which, to the extent that it is read will greatly amplify the New Evangelization, i.e., t he Church’s duty everywhere and at all times to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It was Pope Paul VI who in Evangelii Nuntiandi observed that the work of evangelization was so necessary because of the de- Christianization of the twilight year of the 20 th century. Pope Montini noted the multitudes of baptized Catholics living lives that did not distinguish them all that much from those ignorant of the Gospel; also those who, while ignorant of the full gospel, nevertheless had faith and lived according to the natural moral law, and Catholics who desired a more heartfelt relationship with Jesus Christ not given emphasis in the catechesis they received as children. His successor Pope John Paul II said that his predecessor’s use of “New Evangelizati...

Dancin' With Mr. D: Non-Binary?

A n LGBT activist has admitted that the battle over men accessing women’s bathrooms and vice versa has little do with transgenderism, and everything to do with re-working society and getting rid of the heterobinary structure—eliminating distinctions between “male” and “female” altogether. Male and female He made them. Riki Wilchins, who has undergone “sex change” surgery and is a far-left social change activist, has written that p eople should be able to enter whatever bathroom “fits their gender identity,” but the fact that we even have “male” and “female” bathrooms reflects something about society that needs to change. He added that there are many “genderqueer” or “non-binary” people, pointing to a student who recently “came out” to President Obama as “non-binary” at a London townhall as an example. “Non-binary” people don’t identify as male or female and they often want to be referred to as “they” or “hir” or “zer.” So the fact that there...

From: The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God

A turning away from the teaching of Catholic doctrine in favor of experimental liturgical activity and social protest prepared the way for the application to catechesis of the malevolent concept of “ongoing revelation” under the leadership of Gabriel Moran. For disciples of Moran, God was to be sought in the modern world, from which it follows that catechesis should be centered on finding meaning in one’s lived experience, an approach which was said to be authoritative following Vatican II. The following characteristics give indication of neomodernist inspiration in catechesis after the Council: · The prioritization of inquiry over the handing on of the Deposit of the Faith, wherein students under the catechists’ direction explore the meaning of their own experience; the net result of this method was to downgrade the bishop from the role traditionally assigned him as chief catechist in his diocese in deference to the “professional” expert more ...

Search This Blog