Still Running Off at the Keyboard

HOW DID WE GET HERE ?

Fr. Rolheiser’s comments about “sacramental sex” posted yesterday lead me to ask the question. E. Michael Jones provides the answers in the book The Medjugorje Deception.

He describes the atmosphere at Notre Dame, where professors had been persuaded to join the Rockefeller Foundation’s promotion of birth control, and thus put themselves outside of the teaching of the Catholic Church. Students at the University were being given a kind of theology that was focused on man, not on God. From this they, or at least some of them, lost their faith. At the same time America was going through the sexual revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The combination of a loss of faith and indulgence in sexual practices, together with the chaos in the Church following Vatican II produced an atmosphere known to occultists as chaos magick, though Jones doesn’t name it as such.

Jones writes:

The sexual constitution of a culture is so basic, so fundamentally important that it determines the broad trajectories of behavior in fundamental ways. …When a culture gets moved… from being congruent with the moral order to being a culture based on sexual liberation, the disruption is profound…The [Rockefeller and other] foundations…understood that a sexually liberated culture was one which they could dominate through the powerful new media. If sex became a matter of opinion, rather than a function of decrees established by God, they could manipulate that opinion to their own advantage and turn sexual liberation into an instrument of political control….what followed was the rise of the charismatic movement throughout the world. Chaos creates a need for order, and if the Church seems overcome by revolution itself, the faithful will look beyond the Church for the stillpoint in the turning world not in ritual and doctrine sanctioned by centuries of tradition, but in religious ecstasy and prophesy directly from the mouth of the Holy Spirit—in short, in religious enthusiasm which banishes the uncertainties of everyday life in an orgy of intense if necessarily ephemeral experience. (p. 37)

At this point Jones introduces Fr. Philip Pavich, an American of Croatian descent who entered the Franciscan seminary in Chicago when he entered high school in the early ‘40s. By the ‘50s he was serving as assistant novice master, and providing spiritual direction for seminarians without the educational background for it. He entered Loyola University in Chicago in 1962 where he encountered Carl Rogers-style of non-directive therapy which provided a new way of interpreting Christian love that had a tendency to get people into sexual trouble.

Pavich became sexually intimate with a divorced woman, and seriously considered laicization. When he finally decided to remain a priest he was transferred to Cleveland, where he encountered the charismatic movement and fell in love with a woman he met in a prayer group. Jones writes:

As Monsignor Knox could have predicted, the charismatic movement became a front for lots of illicit sexual activity, and many of the priests who had resisted the siren songs of the secular ‘60’s succumbed to the seduction of the charismatic spirit in the ‘70s. …

Pavich eventually went on to become a leader in what came to be known as the Charismatic Renewal….[He] suddenly quit the charismatics in 1975. At the time he was working with an Assemblies of God minister in the Cleveland area and was head of a prayer group, but in retrospect he sees the Charismatic Renewal, especially its ecumenical aspect, as another form of seduction. (p. 42-43)

While Pavich was struggling with his own sexual demons, Marijan Pehar, another Franciscan living in Herzegovina, was engaged in a similar struggle. As Jones describes it:

Pehar had never heard of the human potential movement, Carl Rogers, sensitivity training or the Charismatic Renewal, but he had heard of prayer, and he knew that as a Franciscan priest he was supposed to do (sic) pray regularly and most probably with other Franciscans so he became involved in the prayer groups that were being formed in Herzegovina at the time. He was, however, troubled by the behavior of his fellow Franciscans at the prayer groups he was attending. Instead of just kneeling down and praying the Rosary or something traditional like that, Pehar’s fellow Franciscans would wander around the room with their eyes closed bumping into each other and then confessing their sins, but not in the secrecy of the confessional. The prayer groups were led by two Franciscans a few years older than Pehar, Jozo Zovko and Tomislav Vlasic. (p. 43)

Pehar was uncomfortable with this practice and left the prayer meeting. The following is his description of later events:

”Later on, about two or three hours later, they [the Franciscans who remained at the meeting] came out, and there was some very good friends of mine, and they were different people. They were crying and everything. And I said, ‘Well, what happened inside?’ Well, it was some kind of public confession or something like that. Whatever happened in the past, whatever sins they had, they were talking openly.[“]

Pehar walked out of a similar meeting in Zagreb for the same reason: he didn’t like the manipulative atmosphere.

“They read some part of the Bible, and they were meditating about half an hour and praying alternatively, and all of a sudden one guy in the middle, he start talking something like old Greek or Latin, and after him there were three or four guys talking in tongues. I left that meeting too because later on I found out that some of those people went in hospital, in mental hospital. That’s what I said that time that I feel sorry for these people because there is something going on.”

Something indeed was going on. Father Zovko was experimenting with an explosive mixture of charismatic prayer and sensitivity training. W. R. Coulson, who worked with Carl Rogers doing sensitivity training, recognized the techniques immediately.

“The exercise, for example, of milling around the room and looking in somebody’s eyes, I mean that’s been known for years that it works very effectively. It’s been known since the mid-‘60s…It’s probably found in the basic book of values clarification, practical strategies.”

Coulson is right about the technique, but wrong about the book. However, it is mentioned in Will Schutz’s book JOY. Schutz, who made encounter groups a household word while at Esalen in Big Sur, California, discussed not only the technique but the effect it had on people as well. “Blind milling,” he tells us, “helps to open up the area of conflict between being alone and being together….This can be done by having everyone stand up, shut his eyes, put out his hands and just start milling around the room. When people meet they explore each other in whatever way and however long they wish.”

Anyone who has taken part in encounter groups can testify to the manipulation that takes place in them. The normal barriers between people fall in this artificial environment, and a synthetic euphoria which is much like being in love follows. (p. 44)

“Boundaries were broken,” Coulson said. “In fact, there’s another game in question called “Boundary Breakers.” When boundaries are broken, you’re open to all kinds of invasive maneuvers from God-knows-where. That’s what can happen. If someone wants then to plant a suggestion, that’s the right time to do it. Warm them up with a sensitivity exercise, and then suggest to them whatever you want. (p. 45)

In this case, apparently speaking in tongues was the result of putting critical thinking out of gear and opening the mind to outside influence. That is precisely the requirement repeatedly made in occult literature, for becoming a channel.

Considering that “boundary issues” have been brought up repeatedly in the priestly sexual abuse scandal, this matter of encounter groups and the implied relationship with the Charismatic Renewal cannot be ignored.

Considering what Dr. Jones presents in this book, it should not come as a surprise that Fr. Ron Rolheiser talks about sacramental sex in one of his articles, and that Fr. Rolheiser is a speaker at an event of the Cardinal Suenens Center--an event that is directed at seminary leaders. If this is still taking place, as the evidence of the confererence at Mundelain indicates it is, our sexual abuse problem is not soon going to go away.

Jones continues with this analysis:

When combined with the normal charismatic tendency of praying for a passage or getting a word of prophecy, especially when this is done under an authority figure like a priest, [encounter groups] can be especially effective in producing what otherwise would be known as mystical experiences in the participants. In fact, Schutz, who can hardly be characterized as particularly well disposed toward things religious, has experienced the same sort of thing himself. "When the encounter gets more advanced," Schutz wrote, "say to include meditation, then mystical experiences begin occurring even more frequently. Combining the encounter group with the religious experience has helped me to elevate my aspirations for the encounter group." Michael Murphy, the founder of Esalen, saw the spiritual side of encounter groups almost immediately. In fact, according to Walter Truett Anderson's account in THE UPSTART SPRING, a history of Esalen, "Murphy found the workshop as much of a mind-blower as psychedelic drugs. In fact, he wrote an essay about the similarities between the group experience and the drug experience and concluded that, of the two, sensitivity groups were more powerful and effective. [Sensitivity] groups, he decided, would be one of the new American yogas--a path of union between the individual and the cosmos."

The impression that Father Zovko and his charismatic prayer-group-cum-sensitivity-session made on Pehar never really wore off. In the alleged apparitions of Our Lady of Medjugorje were happening, he was immediately suspicious.

"Was Zovko doing this type of thing at St. James Parish in Medjugorje?" I asked Pehar.

"Yeah," he replied, "that's what I heard later on. And when I heard about that case, I said, "Something must be wrong."

"So these girls," I said referring to the seers, "could have gone to one of these meetings like that?"

"That could happen."

"And he could have suggested something to them at one of these meetings."

"That's what I think. That's what my opinion is."

In 1976 Marijan Pehar was living in a sort of co-ed monastery in Zagreb with an (sic) number of nuns and fellow Franciscan priests, including Father Tomislav Vlasic. Then one day in late 1976, Sister Rufina, one of the nuns, just disappeared. Gradually it became clear that she had got pregnant and was living in Starnberg in Bavaria, West Germany....

After doing some detective work on his own, Bishop Zanic finally tracked her down and went to visit her. In addition to talking to [her], the bishop got to see her son, who bore, he would later remark, a distinct resemblance to Father Vlasic.

(p. 46-47)

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!