Thursday, November 03, 2005
WHAT DOES INTERFAITH MEAN ?
is the question asked at the beginning of an article by Rev. Ellyn Kravette, Ordained Interfaith Minister of the School of Sacred Ministries. It's an important question--perhaps one could say even a vital question--given the commitment of Benedict XVI to the movement.
I found Rev. Kravette's website while Googling Fr. John Rossner, and he is mentioned in the text. Rev. Kravette likes Rossner's belief that there is "one common denominator in most of the world's great religions."
She likes something else, C. G. Jung's idea of a "new myth," and she quotes this passage without citing the source or using quotation marks at the beginning:
A notable feature of the new myth is its capacity to unify the various current religions of the world. By seeing all functioning religions as living expressions of individuation symbolism, i.e., the process of creating consciousness, an authentic basis is laid for a true ecumenical attitude. The new myth will not be one more religious myth in competition with all the others for man's allegiance; rather, it will elucidate and verify every functioning religion by giving more conscious and comprehensive expression to its essential meaning. The new myth can be understood and lived within one of the great religious communities such as Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc. or in some new community yet to be created, or by individuals without specific community connections. This universal application gives it a genuine claim to the term 'catholic'.
Sounds like a perscription for the One World Religion. It doesn't exactly gladden my heart to know that Jung's ideas are floating around interreligious dialogue circles, knowing that Jung was an occultist. An article in "St. Catherine Review" states:
Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, reared a Lutheran, abandoned the Christianity of his parents for the occult. Jung’s entire life and work were motivated by his detestation of the Catholic Church, whose religious doctrines and moral teachings he considered to be the source of all the neuroses which afflicted Western man. In his 1912 book, New Paths in Psychology, Jung wrote that the only way to overthrow the neuroses inducing Judeo-Christian religion and it’s "sex-fixated ethics" was to establish a new religion—the religion of psychoanalysis.
It doesn't exactly gladden my heart to read that Tarotmonk is a member of the faculty of Jung in Ireland, as listed on the website for the New York Center for Jungian Studies. In the article about his book, TAROT: TALISMAN OR TABOO?, in the Limerick Leader we can read:
Most of us are aware by now that the twentieth century was for many people a hell on earth and that this hell was a human creation. It was a hell of cruelty and mayhem resulting from the incapacity of powerful people to decipher their unconscious motivation, whether in concentration camps, institutions, schools or families.
The fact is they were people who had no connection with who they really were - all because they hadn't connected to the unconscious."
Many of the great monsters we can now parade in public with the clarity and courage of hindsight, are no more than the rest of us writ large. Every one of us was potentially an oppressor....
Anyone who is a leader or in charge of other people, has a duty to the people under their charge to take some kind of responsibility for what is undercover.
Unless we find some way of domesticating the unconscious, we are likely to be a danger to ourselves and to other people.
A bit further into the article is his solution to this crisis he has defined: "...the Tarot, he says, is 'the idiot's guide to the unconscious."
This is the man who has been the head of the school at Glenstal Abbey and has taught both philosophy and literature. It rather looks as though he has skipped the theology courses since it is C. G. Jung's religion rather than the religion of Jesus Christ that has his recommendation.
This, I presume, is where Tarotmonk is coming from. Titled "Chaos and the Psychological Symbolism of the Tarot" by Dr. Gerald Schueler, the abstract says:
The Tarot deck contains archetypal symbols that can be related to the analytical psychology of the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung. The Tarot deck, especially the major arcana or trump cards, can be used effectively in therapy. The client, with the assistance of the therapist, conducts a reading or uses several cards to tell a story and then discusses possible meanings of the symbols in his or her own words. The therapist then relates the symbolic meanings given by the client to the client's problem in much the same manner as in Jungian dream analysis. This therapeutic process can be explained by using a chaos model. Using a chaos model of therapy, a period of psychic instability is deliberately induced by the therapist through stimulation of the imagination via the Tarot symbols. Concentration on the Tarot symbols induces bifurcation points that the therapist then uses to direct change toward desired attractors. This is similar to the well-known techniques of paradoxical communication, paradoxical intervention, and prescribing the symptom, all of which induce a temporary condition of psychic instability that is required for a bifurcation.
If you scroll down to the bottom where the References are listed, you can see that one source is Israel Regardie, the ritual writer for the Golden Dawn. Aleister Crowley's BOOK OF THOTH, Eliphas Levi's TRANSCENDENTAL MAGIC, and A. E. Waite's THE PICTORIAL KEY TO THE TAROT are there as well. Even Papus's book THE TAROT OF THE BOHEMIANS makes the Reference list.
Those are the shining stars of occultism. You can't get any further into occulture than those books. And we have monks who promote the Tarot presumably using the material found there. This is precisely what scared the heck out of prior popes. But does Tarotmonk get censored for preaching this heresy? Does his abbey toss him out? No, his abbey promotes his book on their website, and another monk in good standing named Keating, who also promotes the Tarot, has a worldwide ministry of interreligious dialogue.
Can we say prelest? Yes, I think we can. The smoke of satan that Pope Paul VI worried about has infiltrated everywhere. Aleister Crowley was quite happy with his self-designation "The Beast" and "666."
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
