Abbey-Roads2

Seeing visions.

Everyone who reads this blog knows I have major problems with a certain  ”Catholic” website that may be more aptly described as a sensationalist “Catholic Tabloid” - not unlike some other Catholic sites I’ve encountered.  The main problem I have with the Catholic tabloid is how the editors focus on every fake apparition, false mystic, and freak natural phenomenon that comes along as being a sign from God.  This preoccupation with extraordinary phenomena and private revelations offers little for the edification of the faithful; instead, it more often excites the curiosity and imagination of many who are not mature in their faith.  As an article from TimesOnline  points out:

While the faithful may accept or reject such revelations, most, according to the Vatican, involve false seers who are either deluded or on the make, and these are beginning to cause problems for the Church.

First, they create tensions between the faithful who believe in them and bishops who do not. Secondly, unauthorised cults often congregate around charismatic seers who claim a direct line to God but who teach in opposition to the Church. - Appearances can be downright deceptive

All the other voices.

Obviously, there are many other natural voices out there as well.  some of these are from dissident Catholics who promote new teachings in opposition to the Church, others who are enemies of the Church preaching new spiritualities, still others who are secularists who seek to undermine the Church, and so on and so forth.  After these, we have the many who think they hear God speaking directly to them, or experience their own visions, often after visiting sites such as Medjugorje, or some other charismatic spot. 

Over the last 50 years, there has been a plethora of supposed Marian apparitions and numerous souls who claim to have private revelations and locutions.  Among these, priests, nuns, and lay people.  Some of the best known have been Fr. Geno Burresi - a stigmatist purported to have ”succeeded” Padre Pio, Fr. Gobbi, founder of the Marian Movement of Priests, and Mama Rosa of San Damiano, who claimed messages and apparitions of Our Lady of the Roses.  I have met all three of these people at one time or another, none of whom impressed me as mystics.

Silenced by the Vatican.

They obviously never impressed the Vatican either, because all were eventually censored to some degree.  In fact, Burresi was sanctioned by Pope Benedict himself, denying the priest any benefit of appeal.  The ruling forbade Burresi from preaching or hearing confessions, give interviews, publish or broadcast.  Fr. Geno Burresi was a favorite amongst devotees of Padre Pio, and Fatima; one famous name among those who promoted him was Fr. Robert Fox, who wrote a book about him and led pilgrimages to his place outside of Rome.  Included in the charges leveled against Burresi was that of homosexuality.  (Story here.)

Fr. Gobbi’s locutions were likewise labeled as natural and not supernatural in origin, and he was forbidden to publish under the title of “Our Lady Speaks to Her Beloved Priests.”   While Mama Rosa of San Damiano  and her spurious apparitions was pretty much condemned from the get go.  (Mama Rosa is one of the visionaries who claimed Pope Paul VI had been replaced by an imposter.  LOL!)

What confuses many people (which by the way is one of the reasons the evil spirit loves fake locutions and visions), is the big events, the so-called apparitions of Medjugorje, Garabandal, and the Lady of All Nations apparitions to Ida Peerdaman in Holland, remain so uncertain.  Conflicting reports claim the faithful may go to these places, while others claim the Vatican has forbidden pilgrimages.  At any rate, the apparitions lack Vatican approval.  Yet these sites all have a cult following, which is oftentimes in opposition to Church authorities.  Nowhere is this more evident than at Medjugorje and amongst many of those who follow those apparitions - ”back-home” locutionists and others.

What St. John says.

As one would expect, John of the Cross wrote cautiously regarding locutions and devotes several sections of the Ascent of Mt. Carmel explaining what they are and why they are dangerous.  He of course teaches that the soul should rather walk in the way of the pure and perfect spirit of faith.  His chapters on the subject are very good for those discerning these matters.  I was impressed with a section he wrote, that could well be repeated for our times:

“I knew someone who in his experience of these successive locutions formed, among some very true and solid ones about the Blessed sacrament, others that were outright heresies.

And I greatly fear what is happening in these times of ours:  If any soul whatever after a bit of meditation has in its recollection one of these locutions, it will immediately baptize all as coming from God and with such a supposition say, ‘God told me,’ ‘God answered me.’  yet this is not so, but as we pointed out, these persons themselves are more often the origin of their locution.”  Ascent, Bk. II, Chp. 29:4

Vain rejoicing in spiritual goods. 

I also have known people with hot-lines to God.  One friend, a former prioress of a Carmelite monastery, who left to “complete the reform of St. Teresa of Avila”, often spoke with me in the parlour of the monastery and indiscreetly revealed many things Our Lady supposedly told her.  Being quite young and vulnerable, as well as impressed with strictly enclosed nuns, I was pleased to be privy to her supernatural revelations.  Nevertheless, when she abandoned Carmel for her own project, I couldn’t help being dis-edified.  Later, I discovered there were many inconsistencies about her spiritual life that suggested she may have been deluded in her mystical revelations. 

Many times when religious people encounter those who claim to have special charisms from God, they become anxious to know directly what God has in mind for themselves.  Not a few seek the same favors God has deigned to bestow upon the saints or chosen souls.  The soul often loses much more than it gains and is no longer humble, believing itself to be good or ‘highly favored’.  Rather than pleasing God, the soul offends Him by acting contrary to His will.

St. Therese of Lisieux rightly said of supernatural favors, “I prefer not to see.”  Meaning she preferred the austere way of pure and perfect faith.  It is the safest path for little souls.  

Wearing down Catholic resistance to the “G” agenda.

I have given up blogging about “G” issues for Lent, so this post is not really about that.  It is about psychology - kind of, sort of.

Vox Nova has a post, The APA and “H” that includes an excerpt of a review by Sally Satel wherein there is an “interesting tidbit about the APA’s decision to eliminate homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders.”  I believe the reversal of diagnosis occurred sometime in the early 1970’s.  Millions of “G” people were no longer nuts.  Perverts no more!  Since then, many people in medicine and psychiatry felt the psychiatric industry had been coerced into taking homosexuality off the list of mental disorders by “G”  activists.  Hence the author of the entry posed the following question:

The APA changes its position on homosexuality after protest and harassment and people lose faith in the authority of its pronouncements? Go figure. It’s worth noting, though, that the conduct members of the APA were subjected to by those gay activists is just an extreme example of the social pressures scientists, academics, and other professionals are subjected to generally to conform their conclusions to the opinions of their social group. A researcher whose work tends towards some politically unpalatable conclusions is not likely to have people picketing his house, but he is likely to face a subtle ostracism from his friends and colleagues. - APA and “H”

I linked to the post and you can read it for yourself - the comments especially are rather interesting.  In fact, my main interest in the Vox Nova  piece centered upon the many comments it received.  I was impressed with how (some)  of the comments by defender of the Faith-style  Catholics,  paralleled similar positions taken by (some)  ”G” activists on their blogs when defending the “H” lifestyle.  The following two comments may help demonstrate my point.

“The misconceptions of many people”

 Gerald Augustinus Says:
February 18, 2008 at 1:00 am

Psychologists follow the same “manual” as psychiatrists. My wife’s a doctor of clinical psychology (which is why she can bear with me, coincidentally) and doesn’t think it’s an illness either, nor does she think that the orientation can be “cured”. She’s counseled HIV patients in the past, many of whom Catholic, unfortunately many a gay person took some serious damage from the way they were treated by (some) Catholics and resent the Church now. It seems nigh impossible to pull off the “hate the sin, love the sinner” act. In particular when people use the term “Sodomite”. (On this note - just how on earth was Lot any better than the men clamoring for the angels ? Hospitality > having virgin daughters gang-raped. Sweet…)

Common ground.

 Gerald Augustinus Says:
February 18, 2008 at 3:01 am

It is hard to tell the symptom from the cause in this matter. Certainly, it doesn’t help with psychosexual development to be widely stigmatized, in particular in the past. Regardless of what one thinks of Church rule on this subject, it must be horribly difficult to identify one’s desire for companionship, love, and, yes, sex with being ‘objectively disordered’. Suppression and sublimation certainly results in a secretive culture. The more open someone is, the less likely they are to engage in the more appalling elements of male gay culture. It’s the ‘closeted’ ones that tend to get caught in restrooms, park, and so forth. The sex abuse scandal in the Church largely happened because of sexually immature homosexuals who entered the priesthood as a ‘beard’ or in the hope to overcome their inclination. Such immaturity then resulted in abusing their emotional ‘equals’, teenage boys.

One could go on forever about the misconceptions of many people - like to claim that homosexuals ‘define’ themselves by their sexuality. For one, that which separates one from the majority sticks out like a sore thumb and by virtue of that becomes defining from both sides. In addition, to reduce homosexuality to a collection of sex acts is just as absurd as if one did that for heterosexuals.

Of course, due to the ‘deviant’ nature (de-viare, off the path) of homosexuality, there are problems caused by the fact that man and woman are made for each other (and even that isn’t all fun and games), and man and man, woman and woman, are not. Hyper-sexuality in the former, and hypo-sexuality in the latter, are quite common.

Lastly, while a gay person, in particular a man, is more likely to be more promiscuous, lead a more dangerous lifestyle (meth, in particular) etc, it ain’t necessarily so - there are many homosexuals who are quite ‘boring’ and ‘normal’.

I have a friend in Courage, I am not sure that ‘re-programming’ is part of that ?

P.S. “Sodomite” is as inappropriate a term as “onany”. The question in the story was the respect for guests, a big thing in the culture. That the women wouldn’t come clamor is self-explanatory. Neither seems ‘Lot’ to have deemed his fellow ‘Sodomites’ to be homosexual, but rather bi-, since he offered them his virgin daughters instead…(who later would go on to jump their drunken fathers and both managed to get pregnant, conveniently giving birth to ‘Ammon’ and ‘Moab’, thus paving the way for future genocide of the respective -ites.

The Catholic Church must conform! 

Contrast those comments with Michael Bayly’s  post (indeed, his website) regarding the APA’s decision, which also figures in well with his campaign for the Roman Catholic Church to discard Her own teaching on the subject:

Dr. Gonsiorek then proceeded to provide some insightful background information on the origins of NARTH – origins inseparable from the wider cultural debate on homosexuality and, specifically, the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its official manual that lists mental and emotional disorders (followed two years later by the passage of a similar resolution of the American Psychological Association).

This change in the diagnosis of homosexuality was the result of the wealth of research data gathered since the early 1950s that showed no difference between homosexual and heterosexual populations in terms of “adjustment.”

In time, the psychoanalytical establishment also changed in its understanding of homosexuality; it now has the same sets of policies and principles about sexual orientation as the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association. Yet there were “old guard” psychoanalysts who were disgruntled about being displaced and seeing their organization change its views on homosexuality. This disaffected group of psychoanalysts formed an alliance with conservatively- and religiously-oriented psychotherapists. It was from this alliance that NARTH was established. - Debunking NARTH

How queer is that?  Seems like that agenda thing may be working out after all.

Links:

http://www.powells.com/review/2008_02_14.html