Liturgical and Sexual Abuses
G.C. Dilsaver, PsyD, MTS Reprinted Homiletic and Pastoral Review; December 2007
Liturgical abuse will forever mar the spiritual image of Catholicism in the late twentieth century. And now it is sexual abuse that will forever mar the moral image of this era. Tragically, both of these phenomenons entail the very sine qua non of Catholicism, the priesthood. It is herein hypothesized that these two phenomenons—both of which broke-out most virulently in the seventies—are etiologically linked: that clerical liturgical abuse facilitated clerical sexual abuse or, more aptly, sexual sin. To etiologically linkup sexual sin and liturgical abuse requires a few steps. The first step requires an examination of lust and its immediate precursor, covetousness. It is easily seen how the sins of lust and covetousness, or more specifically avarice, are often practically linked, as in the expense entailed in “wining and dining” a sexual partner or in one being blackmailed because of sexual vice.(1) But lust is also a direct manifestation of covetousness, and thus these two vices are inextricably linked morally.
Saint Paul’s maxim that money is the root of all evil (2) is, according to St. Thomas, the same as saying covetousness is the root of all evil.(3) Avarice is a particular manifestation of covetousness and is often a term used in lieu of covetousness, for money is the most powerful means of attaining covetous desires, being the universal medium of exchange for all worldly goods. Covetousness then denotes both the specific vice of avarice as well as the inordinate desire for any temporal good, including sexual gratification.
Covetousness as the inordinate desire for any temporal good is, says St. Thomas, “a genus comprising all sins, because every sin includes an inordinate turning to a mutable good.” The vice that drives sexual misconduct is lust. Lust is “the inordinate craving for, or indulgence of, the carnal pleasure which is experienced in the human organs of generation.” While all sins are manifestations of covetousness, lust is an especially urgent, obvious, and universal manifestation of covetousness. Thus, the two commandments that are so similar in nature as to appear almost redundant: “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” (the former being the acquisition of the latter desire). So too, Our Lord’s equating the covetous desire of lust with adultery in the heart(4). Lust or sexual impurity then is the bitter fruit of covetousness.
Though covetousness is often termed the root of sin, it is not the beginning of sin, for covetous itself finds its own etiology in the primordial sin of pride. St Thomas says:
“Covetousness regards sin as turning towards the mutable good by which sin is, as it were, nourished and fostered, for which reason covetousness is called the "root"; whereas pride regards sin as turning away from God, to Whose commandment man refuses to be subject, for which reason it is called the "beginning," because the beginning of evil consists in turning away from God.”(5)
Pride itself finds its origin and principle in irreverence for God. For pride is the contrary of humility and humility finds its origin and principle in reverence for God. “Humility properly regards the reverence to whereby man is subject to God.”(6) Thus impurity and lust stem from covetousness, covetousness stems from pride, and pride stems from irreverence for God. Irreverence for God then facilitates impurity and, as such, clerical liturgy abuse facilitates clerical sexual abuse.
The converse virtuous etiology of the above vicious etiology of lust and sexual impurity is as follows: Chastity (the contrary of sexual impurity) is the fruit of Poverty of Spirit (the contrary of covetousness); Poverty of Spirit is the fruit of Humility (the contrary of pride); and Humility has its origin and principle in Reverence for God. Reverence of God is also entailed in the Holy Ghost’s gift of Fear of God.
Fear of God, reverence for God, humility, and poverty of spirit are so close in their nature that they are often used synonymously. Indeed, according to St. Thomas,
“Humility would seem to denote in the first place man’s subjection to [reverence for] God; and for this reason Augustine (De Serm. Dom. In Monte, i.4) ascribes humility, which he understands as poverty of spirit, to the gift of fear whereby man reveres God.”(7)
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass can be said to be the fount of chastity in a very immediate way; for chastity is most akin to, and the first fruit of, poverty of spirit and thus is ultimately based on reverence for God, which is a virtue of religion. The highest act of religion is sacrifice; for sacrifice is a special act deserving of praise in that it is done out of reverence for God; and for this reason it belongs to a definite virtue, viz. religion. The intimate relation of chastity and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass becomes even more pointed when speaking of the celibate priesthood that offers that sacrifice. That is, celibacy, the highest level of chastity and purity, is of the highest propriety—and thus a disciplinary prerequisite--for priestly service.(8)
Before the replacement of the traditional Roman missal with that of the Novus Ordo Missae, candidates for the priesthood where taught to observe most meticulously the rubrics of the Mass. Any intentional addition or subtraction, that is any personal innovation, was potentially a mortal sin. The man was completely subsumed under the office of the priesthood of Christ. The many genuflections, Signs of the Cross, invocations of the Holy Trinity, physical and verbal acts of humility and atonement, detailed and precise rubrics, all were to insure a sense of self-abnegation and a corollary sense of the sacred and a reverence for God.
Yes, a priest was (and is) to enter the Holy of Holies in fear and trembling, to offer the Sacrifice totally empty of himself, painfully aware of his unworthiness and wretchedness. The traditional rubric requiring that the canonical fingers of a priest that touched the transubstantiated Host be conjoined from the consecration to the post-communion ablution symbolize the intense and delicate awe that is to be present during the Mass. The examples could go on and on, from the laity’s kneeling reception of communion with paten and altar rail cloth (indeed, even attending prelate’s receive kneeling and on the tongue), to the Eucharistic fast, to the fear of communicating without being fully shriven of sin.
The principle governing the rubrics of the traditional Roman rite is to display the greatest reverence possible that was not unduly cumbersome. For example, though full prostrations would be fully justified, genuflection was ordinarily deemed to adequately show reverence for God considering the practical efficiency and the diminishing returns of the more extreme forms of obsequity.
In comparison to the traditional Roman rite, the structure of the new Roman rite, even when celebrated in the most exacting way, diminishes reverential acts. The many genuflections, invocations of the Trinity, the physical and verbal acts of humility and atonement, the detailed and precise rubrics, have been either eliminated or greatly reduced. In sum, the vertical orientation of the Mass has been reduced to give more play to the horizontal, and thus the eliciting of humility, poverty of spirit, reverence, and fear of God has been, at least at face value, diminished. Of course, in actuality the Novus Ordo is often celebrated more free-form style and given to a myriad of abuses from the subtle to the outrageous. Even mainstream practices—Mass facing the people, the “presider’s” chair supplanting the Holy of Holies, the familiarity with the Sacred Species, folk music that evokes sentimentalism and thus egocentrism, the self-conscious congregational kiss of peace—all evoke a horizontal orientation.
Indeed, pre-Novus Ordo Vatican II era priests and seminarians experienced the most radical liturgical shift, and hence subjective doctrinal shift (as always, lex orandi lex credendi), in the history of the Church. Monsignor Gamber, apparently the favorite liturgist of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI (who described him as "the one scholar who, among the army of pseudo- liturgists, truly represents the liturgical thinking of the center of the Church") writes in a book prefaced by the future pope that:
"The liturgical reform, welcomed with so much idealism and hope by so many priests and lay people alike, has turned out to be a liturgical destruction of startling proportions a debacle worsening with each passing year. Instead of the hoped-for renewal of the Church and of Catholic life, we are now witnessing a dismantling of the traditional values, and piety on which our faith rests. Instead of the fruitful renewal of the liturgy, what we see a destruction of the Mass which had developed organically during the course of many centuries."
Cardinal Ratzinger himself said he "was dismayed at the ban on the old Missal . . . since such a development had never been seen in the history of liturgy.” He went on to assert that this abrupt liturgical change was a "break in the history of the liturgy the consequences of which could only be tragic" and that "the ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today depends in great part on the collapse of the liturgy."(10)
One can only imagine the psychological (11) and moral trauma entailed for a priest that was trained under the most precise of Tridentine rubrics when introduced to the Novus Ordo and the ensuing liturgical experimentation. This liturgical upheaval did a grave and often lethal violence to the Catholic’s, especially the priest’s, sense of the sacred; to their fear of God; to their reverence, to their humility; to their poverty of spirit; and to their chastity.
In light of this, one can only marvel at those valiant priests who maintained the faith and braved the challenges of the post Vatican II chaos while many of their confreres fled the priesthood and even the Church. Some who stayed, and stayed uncompromisingly loyal to the Faith they had been raised in, succumbed to an early death. Others who stayed and tried to courageously reconcile the Faith of their youth with the many changes often faced a martyrdom of uncertainty and confusion. But there were also the others who stayed and eagerly acquiesced to or helped perpetrate the ever-waxing changes, including those liturgical and doctrinal innovations that went against the Council and the Vatican. These priests were at best men of compromise, at worst unprincipled and effeminate men whose love for the Faith was weak or non-existent. And it was from the ranks of these latter clerics that the most heinous liturgical and sexual abuses were perpetrated.
It must be said that the seeds of destruction have always been present. There was sexual and or financial misconduct in the priesthood before the Council (see Judas Iscariot circa 30 AD). The fact that the human nature of a priest is to be subsumed under his priestly office finds its twisted counterfeit in vicious men seeking to hide behind that office.(13) In the past, even men with good intent but perverse inclinations (especially in the mid-twentieth century) sought to quench their perversity under the immense discipline and all-consuming character of the immediate pre-Vatican II priestly persona. Thus the tragic results when this persona was removed in the late sixties. No doubt these men should not have been ordained to begin with.
It must be noted well that this is the fault of pre-Vatican II formation with its strict systematic institutional formation. This formation appears to have been overly influenced by a modern (Prussian) militaristic model to the detriment of the monastic. Thus this formation, while maintaining a discipline similar to the monastic, nonetheless was deficient in psychological and humanistic insights which in the past had been facilitated by the crucial formative element of the master-disciple relationship. As such, men who could follow the letter of the law, but whose spirit and psyche were unfit, were able to advance to priestly orders.
It is not surprising that the sacerdotal scandals of the late 20th century are homosexual in nature. What with the breakup of the family(14), the modern milieu has made homosexuality an especially virulent modus operandi for the demonic to infiltrate the Church. Some homosexuals seek out a celibate cadre because demonstrations of heterosexuality are not overtly required. Of course, others enter an all-male environment because of an explicit psychological-sexual attraction to men or desire for homosexual liaisons. In any case, this propensity must always, and especially now, be guarded against. It may well be that if a man does not find it a great sacrifice to give up the sublime joys of marriage, i.e., the love of a woman and the ensuing blessings of children, then he is not called, at least as a discipline(15) in the present milieu, to priesthood. Indeed, it is this sacrifice that intrinsically validates a candidate’s intent from the very beginning.
Today there are but two orthodox Roman liturgical movements in the Church, that of a return to the traditional Latin rite and that of “reform of the reform,” which aims at making the new rite more like unto the traditional. It is this liturgical return to tradition that will best facilitate a renewal of the priesthood and ensure its purity by creating clerical cultures that embody the humility and asceticism that is the essence of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Indeed, the essence of the Holy Mass is Christ Himself experiencing complete self-abnegation or kenosis, as his incarnation and sacrifice on the Cross is renewed in his transubstantiation and sacrifice on the altar. The fact that Son of God takes on the appearance of the most mundane elements symbolizes this complete self-abnegation. Thus the Mass—for all, but especially for priests—is to be the most august school of holy reverence, humility, poverty of spirit, and purity.
Dr. G. C. Dilsaver is a clinical psychologist in Harrisburg, PA, and a former McGivney Scholar at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute on Marriage and Family. He directs Imago Dei Clinic, where the science of psychology is practiced within a Catholic-Thomistic anthropology. Imago Dei Clinic offers individual, marital, and family psychotherapy for adults and children. Imago Dei Clinic also specializes in working with clergy and religious. Intensive psychotherapeutic retreats for laity and clergy are periodically offered and are especially feasible for those attending the Clinic from outside the region.
(1) As was the case with the arch-liturgical abuser, Rembrant Weakland.
(2) 1TM 6.10.
(3) ST I-II, Q. 84, Art. 1.
(4) MT 5.28.
(5) ST I-II, Q. 84, Art. 2.
(6) ST II-II, Q. 61, Art.4.
(7) ST II-II, Q. 161, Art.2.
(8)The propriety of celibacy in service of the altar is reflected in the customary preferential employ of boys and unmarried young men as acolytes over married men when necessity requires the use of laymen in the sanctuary.
(9)In his book Feast of Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger himself says "Today we might ask: Is there a Latin rite any more? Certainly there is no awareness of it. To most people the liturgy appears to be rather something for the individual congregation to arrange."
(10) Ratzinger. J. (1999). Milestones, Memoirs 1927-1997, San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
(11)Sigmund Freud often expressed, and it is still psychoanalytic clinic lore, that psychoanalysis was most ineffectual with Catholics because of their strong superego; a compliment indeed. Of course, Freud also held religion to be a neurosis. What Freud was alluding to in his inexact way was the presence in strongly formed Catholics of a character habitually exercised cognitive assent and volitional conformity to truth, and the subsequent marshalling of the passions. A practicing Catholic psychotherapist can only long for those pre-Vatican II Catholics with a superabundance of “superego.”
(12)One wonders how many unsung martyr-priests of the liturgical changes there were. For instance, there are the stories of theologate priests who trained deacons in the rubrics of the Mass. It is legend that many of these men, masters of detailed rubrics and totally devoted to the Holy Mass, were devastated by the onslaught of liturgical changes and died an early death not long after their and (as it appeared at the time) the traditional Mass’ relinquishment into obsolescence.
(13)Indeed, there has been the post-Vatican II occurrence of men with bad intent hiding behind an ultra-orthodox or traditional priestly façade.
(14)The much mentioned “crisis in the priesthood” is but a symptom of the essential crisis in the family.
(15) Much in the same way that sociological factors in the past called for those being born out of wedlock to be barred from priesthood.
RETURN TO ARTICLES
G.C. Dilsaver, PsyD, MTS Reprinted Homiletic and Pastoral Review; December 2007
Liturgical abuse will forever mar the spiritual image of Catholicism in the late twentieth century. And now it is sexual abuse that will forever mar the moral image of this era. Tragically, both of these phenomenons entail the very sine qua non of Catholicism, the priesthood. It is herein hypothesized that these two phenomenons—both of which broke-out most virulently in the seventies—are etiologically linked: that clerical liturgical abuse facilitated clerical sexual abuse or, more aptly, sexual sin. To etiologically linkup sexual sin and liturgical abuse requires a few steps. The first step requires an examination of lust and its immediate precursor, covetousness. It is easily seen how the sins of lust and covetousness, or more specifically avarice, are often practically linked, as in the expense entailed in “wining and dining” a sexual partner or in one being blackmailed because of sexual vice.(1) But lust is also a direct manifestation of covetousness, and thus these two vices are inextricably linked morally.
Saint Paul’s maxim that money is the root of all evil (2) is, according to St. Thomas, the same as saying covetousness is the root of all evil.(3) Avarice is a particular manifestation of covetousness and is often a term used in lieu of covetousness, for money is the most powerful means of attaining covetous desires, being the universal medium of exchange for all worldly goods. Covetousness then denotes both the specific vice of avarice as well as the inordinate desire for any temporal good, including sexual gratification.
Covetousness as the inordinate desire for any temporal good is, says St. Thomas, “a genus comprising all sins, because every sin includes an inordinate turning to a mutable good.” The vice that drives sexual misconduct is lust. Lust is “the inordinate craving for, or indulgence of, the carnal pleasure which is experienced in the human organs of generation.” While all sins are manifestations of covetousness, lust is an especially urgent, obvious, and universal manifestation of covetousness. Thus, the two commandments that are so similar in nature as to appear almost redundant: “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” (the former being the acquisition of the latter desire). So too, Our Lord’s equating the covetous desire of lust with adultery in the heart(4). Lust or sexual impurity then is the bitter fruit of covetousness.
Though covetousness is often termed the root of sin, it is not the beginning of sin, for covetous itself finds its own etiology in the primordial sin of pride. St Thomas says:
“Covetousness regards sin as turning towards the mutable good by which sin is, as it were, nourished and fostered, for which reason covetousness is called the "root"; whereas pride regards sin as turning away from God, to Whose commandment man refuses to be subject, for which reason it is called the "beginning," because the beginning of evil consists in turning away from God.”(5)
Pride itself finds its origin and principle in irreverence for God. For pride is the contrary of humility and humility finds its origin and principle in reverence for God. “Humility properly regards the reverence to whereby man is subject to God.”(6) Thus impurity and lust stem from covetousness, covetousness stems from pride, and pride stems from irreverence for God. Irreverence for God then facilitates impurity and, as such, clerical liturgy abuse facilitates clerical sexual abuse.
The converse virtuous etiology of the above vicious etiology of lust and sexual impurity is as follows: Chastity (the contrary of sexual impurity) is the fruit of Poverty of Spirit (the contrary of covetousness); Poverty of Spirit is the fruit of Humility (the contrary of pride); and Humility has its origin and principle in Reverence for God. Reverence of God is also entailed in the Holy Ghost’s gift of Fear of God.
Fear of God, reverence for God, humility, and poverty of spirit are so close in their nature that they are often used synonymously. Indeed, according to St. Thomas,
“Humility would seem to denote in the first place man’s subjection to [reverence for] God; and for this reason Augustine (De Serm. Dom. In Monte, i.4) ascribes humility, which he understands as poverty of spirit, to the gift of fear whereby man reveres God.”(7)
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass can be said to be the fount of chastity in a very immediate way; for chastity is most akin to, and the first fruit of, poverty of spirit and thus is ultimately based on reverence for God, which is a virtue of religion. The highest act of religion is sacrifice; for sacrifice is a special act deserving of praise in that it is done out of reverence for God; and for this reason it belongs to a definite virtue, viz. religion. The intimate relation of chastity and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass becomes even more pointed when speaking of the celibate priesthood that offers that sacrifice. That is, celibacy, the highest level of chastity and purity, is of the highest propriety—and thus a disciplinary prerequisite--for priestly service.(8)
Before the replacement of the traditional Roman missal with that of the Novus Ordo Missae, candidates for the priesthood where taught to observe most meticulously the rubrics of the Mass. Any intentional addition or subtraction, that is any personal innovation, was potentially a mortal sin. The man was completely subsumed under the office of the priesthood of Christ. The many genuflections, Signs of the Cross, invocations of the Holy Trinity, physical and verbal acts of humility and atonement, detailed and precise rubrics, all were to insure a sense of self-abnegation and a corollary sense of the sacred and a reverence for God.
Yes, a priest was (and is) to enter the Holy of Holies in fear and trembling, to offer the Sacrifice totally empty of himself, painfully aware of his unworthiness and wretchedness. The traditional rubric requiring that the canonical fingers of a priest that touched the transubstantiated Host be conjoined from the consecration to the post-communion ablution symbolize the intense and delicate awe that is to be present during the Mass. The examples could go on and on, from the laity’s kneeling reception of communion with paten and altar rail cloth (indeed, even attending prelate’s receive kneeling and on the tongue), to the Eucharistic fast, to the fear of communicating without being fully shriven of sin.
The principle governing the rubrics of the traditional Roman rite is to display the greatest reverence possible that was not unduly cumbersome. For example, though full prostrations would be fully justified, genuflection was ordinarily deemed to adequately show reverence for God considering the practical efficiency and the diminishing returns of the more extreme forms of obsequity.
In comparison to the traditional Roman rite, the structure of the new Roman rite, even when celebrated in the most exacting way, diminishes reverential acts. The many genuflections, invocations of the Trinity, the physical and verbal acts of humility and atonement, the detailed and precise rubrics, have been either eliminated or greatly reduced. In sum, the vertical orientation of the Mass has been reduced to give more play to the horizontal, and thus the eliciting of humility, poverty of spirit, reverence, and fear of God has been, at least at face value, diminished. Of course, in actuality the Novus Ordo is often celebrated more free-form style and given to a myriad of abuses from the subtle to the outrageous. Even mainstream practices—Mass facing the people, the “presider’s” chair supplanting the Holy of Holies, the familiarity with the Sacred Species, folk music that evokes sentimentalism and thus egocentrism, the self-conscious congregational kiss of peace—all evoke a horizontal orientation.
Indeed, pre-Novus Ordo Vatican II era priests and seminarians experienced the most radical liturgical shift, and hence subjective doctrinal shift (as always, lex orandi lex credendi), in the history of the Church. Monsignor Gamber, apparently the favorite liturgist of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI (who described him as "the one scholar who, among the army of pseudo- liturgists, truly represents the liturgical thinking of the center of the Church") writes in a book prefaced by the future pope that:
"The liturgical reform, welcomed with so much idealism and hope by so many priests and lay people alike, has turned out to be a liturgical destruction of startling proportions a debacle worsening with each passing year. Instead of the hoped-for renewal of the Church and of Catholic life, we are now witnessing a dismantling of the traditional values, and piety on which our faith rests. Instead of the fruitful renewal of the liturgy, what we see a destruction of the Mass which had developed organically during the course of many centuries."
Cardinal Ratzinger himself said he "was dismayed at the ban on the old Missal . . . since such a development had never been seen in the history of liturgy.” He went on to assert that this abrupt liturgical change was a "break in the history of the liturgy the consequences of which could only be tragic" and that "the ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today depends in great part on the collapse of the liturgy."(10)
One can only imagine the psychological (11) and moral trauma entailed for a priest that was trained under the most precise of Tridentine rubrics when introduced to the Novus Ordo and the ensuing liturgical experimentation. This liturgical upheaval did a grave and often lethal violence to the Catholic’s, especially the priest’s, sense of the sacred; to their fear of God; to their reverence, to their humility; to their poverty of spirit; and to their chastity.
In light of this, one can only marvel at those valiant priests who maintained the faith and braved the challenges of the post Vatican II chaos while many of their confreres fled the priesthood and even the Church. Some who stayed, and stayed uncompromisingly loyal to the Faith they had been raised in, succumbed to an early death. Others who stayed and tried to courageously reconcile the Faith of their youth with the many changes often faced a martyrdom of uncertainty and confusion. But there were also the others who stayed and eagerly acquiesced to or helped perpetrate the ever-waxing changes, including those liturgical and doctrinal innovations that went against the Council and the Vatican. These priests were at best men of compromise, at worst unprincipled and effeminate men whose love for the Faith was weak or non-existent. And it was from the ranks of these latter clerics that the most heinous liturgical and sexual abuses were perpetrated.
It must be said that the seeds of destruction have always been present. There was sexual and or financial misconduct in the priesthood before the Council (see Judas Iscariot circa 30 AD). The fact that the human nature of a priest is to be subsumed under his priestly office finds its twisted counterfeit in vicious men seeking to hide behind that office.(13) In the past, even men with good intent but perverse inclinations (especially in the mid-twentieth century) sought to quench their perversity under the immense discipline and all-consuming character of the immediate pre-Vatican II priestly persona. Thus the tragic results when this persona was removed in the late sixties. No doubt these men should not have been ordained to begin with.
It must be noted well that this is the fault of pre-Vatican II formation with its strict systematic institutional formation. This formation appears to have been overly influenced by a modern (Prussian) militaristic model to the detriment of the monastic. Thus this formation, while maintaining a discipline similar to the monastic, nonetheless was deficient in psychological and humanistic insights which in the past had been facilitated by the crucial formative element of the master-disciple relationship. As such, men who could follow the letter of the law, but whose spirit and psyche were unfit, were able to advance to priestly orders.
It is not surprising that the sacerdotal scandals of the late 20th century are homosexual in nature. What with the breakup of the family(14), the modern milieu has made homosexuality an especially virulent modus operandi for the demonic to infiltrate the Church. Some homosexuals seek out a celibate cadre because demonstrations of heterosexuality are not overtly required. Of course, others enter an all-male environment because of an explicit psychological-sexual attraction to men or desire for homosexual liaisons. In any case, this propensity must always, and especially now, be guarded against. It may well be that if a man does not find it a great sacrifice to give up the sublime joys of marriage, i.e., the love of a woman and the ensuing blessings of children, then he is not called, at least as a discipline(15) in the present milieu, to priesthood. Indeed, it is this sacrifice that intrinsically validates a candidate’s intent from the very beginning.
Today there are but two orthodox Roman liturgical movements in the Church, that of a return to the traditional Latin rite and that of “reform of the reform,” which aims at making the new rite more like unto the traditional. It is this liturgical return to tradition that will best facilitate a renewal of the priesthood and ensure its purity by creating clerical cultures that embody the humility and asceticism that is the essence of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Indeed, the essence of the Holy Mass is Christ Himself experiencing complete self-abnegation or kenosis, as his incarnation and sacrifice on the Cross is renewed in his transubstantiation and sacrifice on the altar. The fact that Son of God takes on the appearance of the most mundane elements symbolizes this complete self-abnegation. Thus the Mass—for all, but especially for priests—is to be the most august school of holy reverence, humility, poverty of spirit, and purity.
Dr. G. C. Dilsaver is a clinical psychologist in Harrisburg, PA, and a former McGivney Scholar at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute on Marriage and Family. He directs Imago Dei Clinic, where the science of psychology is practiced within a Catholic-Thomistic anthropology. Imago Dei Clinic offers individual, marital, and family psychotherapy for adults and children. Imago Dei Clinic also specializes in working with clergy and religious. Intensive psychotherapeutic retreats for laity and clergy are periodically offered and are especially feasible for those attending the Clinic from outside the region.
(1) As was the case with the arch-liturgical abuser, Rembrant Weakland.
(2) 1TM 6.10.
(3) ST I-II, Q. 84, Art. 1.
(4) MT 5.28.
(5) ST I-II, Q. 84, Art. 2.
(6) ST II-II, Q. 61, Art.4.
(7) ST II-II, Q. 161, Art.2.
(8)The propriety of celibacy in service of the altar is reflected in the customary preferential employ of boys and unmarried young men as acolytes over married men when necessity requires the use of laymen in the sanctuary.
(9)In his book Feast of Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger himself says "Today we might ask: Is there a Latin rite any more? Certainly there is no awareness of it. To most people the liturgy appears to be rather something for the individual congregation to arrange."
(10) Ratzinger. J. (1999). Milestones, Memoirs 1927-1997, San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
(11)Sigmund Freud often expressed, and it is still psychoanalytic clinic lore, that psychoanalysis was most ineffectual with Catholics because of their strong superego; a compliment indeed. Of course, Freud also held religion to be a neurosis. What Freud was alluding to in his inexact way was the presence in strongly formed Catholics of a character habitually exercised cognitive assent and volitional conformity to truth, and the subsequent marshalling of the passions. A practicing Catholic psychotherapist can only long for those pre-Vatican II Catholics with a superabundance of “superego.”
(12)One wonders how many unsung martyr-priests of the liturgical changes there were. For instance, there are the stories of theologate priests who trained deacons in the rubrics of the Mass. It is legend that many of these men, masters of detailed rubrics and totally devoted to the Holy Mass, were devastated by the onslaught of liturgical changes and died an early death not long after their and (as it appeared at the time) the traditional Mass’ relinquishment into obsolescence.
(13)Indeed, there has been the post-Vatican II occurrence of men with bad intent hiding behind an ultra-orthodox or traditional priestly façade.
(14)The much mentioned “crisis in the priesthood” is but a symptom of the essential crisis in the family.
(15) Much in the same way that sociological factors in the past called for those being born out of wedlock to be barred from priesthood.
RETURN TO ARTICLES