tip to Tim at Old World Swine.
Growing up non-religious, and most certainly not Catholic, I eventually invested my time in the link between education and violence. Along with running my family business I gained an understanding of structural violence within our institutions. Next I found myself gravitating toward local, regional and national leadership programs which helped me appreciate the victim from new perspectives. And finally tying all these loose-ends up I reached a melting point in my personal study of violence and I was brought home to the Church (certainly a-round-about way to get home I am sure) for there we touch the truth with Christ on the Cross about human violence.
Sadly a lot of what I gleaned, a lot of which was spewed out by liberal Catholic religious who were sold a bill of goods by practitioners of humanistic mumbo-jumbo, feel-good therapists of the '60s and early '70s, still holds authority in the line of thought for most educators (both secular and religious), spiritual direction (as many SDs are religious who trained in post-Vatican II era) and intellectuals today. Though there are little signs of hope as Athos posted I am afraid that any true resurgence of "teaching" with an authority to Truth will come, as Belloc predicted, in Africans or Asiatics or in some civilisation yet unborn.
Dr. William Coulson writes how many religious orders, and many within the Church and including generations within society continue to be ravaged by the destructive effects of humanistic psychotherapy, the kind that had virtually taken over the Church in America, and dominates so many forms of aberrant education like sex education, and drug education, which holds that the most important source of authority is within you, that you must listen to yourself - and most importantly for you to accomplish this you must expelled all influences from any authority outside of yourself. As a Girardian I see this nonsense as it is today but not until I experienced the horrors of broken relationships, one after another, from trying to live free from any external authority.
This article is from 1994 but just pick up any self-help book or spiritual direction manual and you will still feel the ever lingering echo of Rogers, On Becoming a Person or for those who worship Oprah, Eckhart Tollie's new-age rendition of 'being'. Or sit around a group of teachers, it doesn't matter whether they teach at a Catholic program or in our public institutions and you will catch yourself nodding to methods that rely on reaching this authority from within - avoiding at all cost those 3 nasty words, thou shalt not... and never, never alluding to any sort of evil that may be within.
Coulson brings up how easy it was to infect this gnostic virus into the diet of American life and particularly the Catholic religious as they were caught up in the excitement coming from interpretations of Vatican II that seemed to give permission to explore whatever means to "open the windows and let in the fresh air."
Yes I acknowledge that many parishes, hopefully including the parish I belong to, are turning to the Church and proper authority to instruct our youth today, however with all the influences of higher education, media, entertainment, sports, business and politics that shower them with anti-religious, new-age, you-can-have-it-now messages it will be difficult to reverse the evil effects that ran rampant in my generation and after.
No comments:
Post a Comment