Posted on 10/09/2002 9:53:39 AM PDT by NYer
Guess I shoulda searched the News Forum before I posted it too.
Bumping again!
I know in my diocese at least, it gives us laity a much bigger stick with which to beat our pro-homo bishop.
And that's a heap of good in our battle.
Unfortunately, as one of our good diocesan priests quipped after joining us for a protest against the bishop having a New Age/ Call to Action nun speak at a diocesan conference,
"You can beat a dog with a stick, but he'll still be a dog."
That is the level of respect our bishop's own priests have for him.
Sorry, NYer. I know you don't agree with the content of the poster, but I MUST rebut such nonsense.
The difference between releasing a Church member from an obligation to perform an action which could endanger their health, and providing the means for Church members to engage in unhealthy behavior with greater impunity is night and day.
Practicing the abstinence and monogamy proscribed by Church teaching would end the risk of AIDS overnight. We ought to condemn homosexual activists for propagandizing away the Church's medically viable solution to the AIDS crisis.
I concur. I could use the practice.
Many Vatican officials have privately voiced apprehension about over-reliance on psychological methods to screen candidates to the priesthood. The document is said to address those concerns by stressing a balanced approach that recognizes the potential contributions of psychology, but within a limited sphere of competence.
The document is said to address those concerns by stressing a balanced approach that recognizes the potential contributions of psychology, but within a limited sphere of competence.A big surprise for me in the child-abuse scandla is the extent to which the church has 'bought into' the modern psycho-therapeutic regime. From using psychologists to evaluate seminarians to using therapists to heal abuse victims, the church has relied on the psych community rather than on its own traditional methods.
The above is only what an informed Vatican sources said.
I am pretty sure the language will be nice and clear in the completed document -- because that's what's badly needed. Disclosing the 1961 anti-homo-clergy document only to the US Bishops didn't do much good, so this time it will be made official -- IMHO.
That's interesting. Thanks for the post. Considering that there is no coherent peer-reviewed consensus among psychiatrists, psychologists, physicians, or philophers of science regarding what would constitute a working scientific model of the human psyche, this should prove fascinating territory. Just peruse Out of its Mind: Psychiatry in Crisis by J. Allan Hobson and Jonathan Leonard. If Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins medical schools, together with the APA, AMA, and the various international Freudian/Lacanian juntas can't agree where the id meets the elbow, or the conscious self ends and the amygdala begins, where does that leave seminary review boards?
The last thing needed is a bunch of goofy diocesan bureaucrats scrying over Myers-Briggs scores, Rorschach Inkblots, and serum serotonin blood levels. While it would nice if "Catholic experts" could make sense out of this, secular psychdom does not exactly offer a coherent working model for precision. Just imagine the kind of people Cardinal Mahony or, heaven forbid, Rembert Weakland might have hired to see if any seminarians needed Ritalin, Prozac, or sex-addiction counseling. Get the picture? Will psychologists from the NEA be picking our new priests? If the picture Michael Rose painted is accurate, it doesn't really require a PhD or M.D. to spot kooks, pervs, and people who swing the wrong way. Character screening, as in other public safety and security professions, does not necessarily require a psychobabble paradigm to weed out the pathological and unfit. Let's hope the Vatican places the right emphasis on these matters. We certainly could use a few heroes to clarify this well-known penumbra.
Right on, HowlinglyMBA! You just need good and holy men with good judgment and a good knowledge of people to choose reasonably well who should be a priest and who should not. It was done that way for two millenia. The psychological babble-junk used now has only led to deep pain and suffering within and without the Church. Nowhere is this pain greater than where children are (and have been) involved.
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