Still Running Off at the Keyboard

JESUITS PURSUING THE RELIGION OF PSYCHOLOGY

The name "Jesuit" often produces a groan in traditional Catholic circles. Their fall from grace is widely known. The Jesuit-in-chief of "America" magazine Fr. Thomas Reese resigned shortly after Benedict XVI was elected. His magazine had been the object of complaints from Cardinal Ratzinger about coverage on sensitive Church issues.

Jesuit run Georgetown University often makes the news with their opposition to things Catholic--most recently a speech by Cardinal Arinze. How did the Jesuits go from being "Pope's men" to being leaders of dissent in the Church?

While researching psychosynthesis, an interview with Dr. William Coulson turned up in Google. It sheds some light on the Jesuit situation.

When Coulson's name comes up, it is usually in connection with the IHM nuns, a community that subjected themselves to the mental fiddlings of the people at Esalen, and specifically to Carl Rogers' student William Coulson. That fiddling is well represented in the interview. But there is something else there as well.

From the interview:

COULSON: The college campus was sold. There is no more Immaculate Heart College. It doesn't exist. It's ceased to function, because of our good offices. One mother pulled her daughter out before it closed, saying, "Listen, she can lose her faith for free at the state college."

Our grant had been for three years, but we called off the study after two, because we were alarmed about the results. We thought we could make the IHMs better than they were; and we destroyed them.

TLM: Did you do this kind of program anywhere else?

COULSON: We did similar programs for the Jesuits, for the Franciscans, for the Sisters of Providence, of Charity, and the Mercy Sisters. We did dozens of Catholic religious organizations, because as you recall, in the excitement following Vatican II, everybody wanted to update, everybody wanted to renew; and we offered a way for people to renew, without having to bother to study. We said, we'll help you look within. After all, is not God in your heart? Is it not sufficient to be yourself, and wouldn't that make you a good Catholic? And if it doesn't, then perhaps you shouldn't have been a Catholic in the first place. Well, after a while there weren't many Catholics left.

TLM: Now, you mentioned that the religious orders had received a mandate from Vatican II to renew themselves according to the original spirit of their founders, which would have been wonderful.

COULSON: Yes.

TLM: For example, the original spirit of the Jesuits was Saint Ignatius Loyola...

COULSON: That's right. Speaking of Saint Ignatius, I brought with me a letter that Carl Rogers got, after we did a workshop at a Jesuit university in the summer of '65. One of the young Jesuits, just about to be ordained, wrote as follows about being with Rogers at an encounter group for five days: "It seemed like a beautiful birth to a new existence. It was as if so many of the things that I valued in word, were now becoming true for me in fact. It is extremely difficult to describe the experience. I had not known how unaware I was of my deepest feelings, nor how valuable they might be to other people. Only when I began to express what was rising somewhere deep within the center of me, and saw the tears in the eyes of the other group members because I was saying something so true for them, too-only then did I begin to really feel that I was deeply a part of the human race. Never in my life before that group experience, had I experienced so intently; and then to have that --

TLM: "Reacting to my phoniness"?

COULSON: "My phoniness." But what is his phoniness? Well, his phoniness is among other things his Catholic doctrine. Because if you look within yourself, and you find the Creed, for example, you can imagine someone saying, "Oh, you're just being a mama's boy, aren't you? You're just doing what you were taught to do; I want to hear from the you." The proof of authenticity on the humanistic psychology model is to go against what you were trained to be, to call all of that phoniness, and to say what is deepest within you. What's deepest within you, however, are certain unrequited longings, including sexual longings. We provoked an epidemic of sexual misconduct among clergy and therapists-

TLM: And it seemed to be justified by psychology, which is supposed to be a science. Now, the documents of Vatican II are never read, but they include beautiful and profound things. One can also find very naive things, including the statement that theology should profit from the insights of contemporary social science. I don't know which document that was, but it gave you people. ...

TLM: ...these other orders, like the Jesuits, even when they saw that the IHMs were almost extinct, nevertheless they invited the same team in.

COULSON: 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. They thought we were saviors. I don't know whether you remember, but in '67 the Jesuits had a big conference at Santa Clara, and there was a lot of talk about the "Third Way" among the Jesuits.

TLM: You were involved with that, too? It had to do with lifestyle.

COULSON: Yes, lifestyle. We did not consult directly on that conference, but we were cheerleaders.

TLM: What is this Third Way?

COULSON: The first two ways are faithful marriage and faithful celibacy. But now there was this more humane way, a more human way-all too human as I see it today. The idea was that priests could date. One priest, for example, defined his celibacy for me as, "It means I don't have to marry the girl."

TLM: Only a Jesuit could have said that.

COULSON: As a matter of fact that wasn't a Jesuit. I think the Jesuits are capable of bouncing back because they had such strong traditions of their own, and God willing they will. A good book to read on this whole question is Fr. Joseph Becker's . 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.

Coulson pulls no punches where humanistic psychotherapy is concerned, and he should know, being at the center of it for a number of years.

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 children were forced to put them up for adoption. The only person who was allowed to have a baby, in an eerie preview of David Koresh, was the principal founder of the institution. All the other babies were killed, or sent away, in the name of getting in touch with the imperial self.

Coulson notes that transpersonal psychology is the newest trend and that it is a religion that masquerades itself as science:

TLM: Vitz tells me that there's a lot of soul searching going on now in the profession of psychology; he says they're exhausted. Would you agree with that, that they are at a dead end?

COULSON: Indeed, they've had to turn to New Age psychologies. You remember Maslow coined the term "the third force" for humanistic psychology. But Maslow quickly came to see that there was something on the horizon which he called the fourth force. It has since come to be known as transpersonal psychology. It's the fastest growing field of psychology; but it is primarily New Ageism, because it doesn't want to endorse traditional religious faith. It is psychology trying to be religion, because it understands that humanistic orientation is inadequate.

TLM: The title of [Dr. Paul] Vitz's book suggests that humanistic psychology sometimes acts like a religion, or even is one in some sense.

Unfortunately it does seem as though the Catholics teaching Ignatian Spirituality have not gotten the message. They have a lot of company among the practitioners of the New Age spirituality. Perhaps as we look for the cause of sexual abuse in the clergy, we should be looking much more carefully at the philosophy used in the formation of these abusing priests. If Assagioli's variety of humanistic psychotherapy named psychosynthesis has been used, it would be easier to understand why the women religious and the priesthood has fallen apart. The source of psychosynthesis intended that to happen because that source hates the Church.

One person promoting psychology as a kind of religion is Gerhard Wehr. Wehr wrote a book titled JUNG AND STEINER: THE BIRTH OF A NEW PSYCHOLOGY. Robert Sardello's School of Spiritual Psychology eLetter promotes the book. There you can read:

If one goes even a little way into the labor of self-knowledge, it soon becomes necessary to re-imagine one's place within whole world and indeed the whole of existence. Most of us do not have the capacities to do this on our own. Thus many of us find ourselves in a liminal place. No longer dominated by mass consciousness, we are left on our own, without ground or the capacity to steer a course for ourselves. Then we find we no longer belong to the guiding myth of the time the technological myth, the myth of materialism. Where do we go? We need a new myth, a large imagination within which understanding of who we are makes sense. In medieval times, Dante offered a whole soul cosmology of this kind. He couched it in Christian tradition, language, and practice, because that satisfied his need for a means to convey a large picture within which we can find our place. Such a cosmology interprets us; it tells us who we are, what we are doing, where we came from, where we are going.

Both Jung and Steiner have given us a cosmology within which we can see ourselves soulfully. That is why both are worth lifetimes of study. We should not make our task easy by considering these two individuals as only providing systems that agree in certain ways and diverge in others. Nor should we try to simply determine which one to follow. Both decried followers, but hoped to see independent workers inspired by their efforts.

To combine Jung and Steiner is to double the occult influence. Jung was heavily into the occult. Steiner was a Theosophist before he invented Anthroposophy. He never abandoned his theosophic thinking which he gleaned from clairvoyant access to the Akashic Record. Once again we are talking about a Source that would like to see the destruction of the Church.

We define ourselves by the tenets of our belief system. We make all of our decisions based upon it. It is so fundamental to our being that we don't even notice that it's there. We believe, instead, that our way of thinking is just a part of being human. But that entire belief system can be destroyed, and the psychologists seem to be in the process of trying to destroy it. Spiritual Psychology seems to be the religion of the twenty-first century.

We wonder why Catholicism seems to be dying. I would suggest that the reason lies in the New Age psychology/Theosophical religion that has weaseled its way into our spirituality. Until that is evicted, we have little hope of recovery.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!