Spiritual Abuse

Saturday January 6, 2007

I came upon this article on the Web recently. It hits the nail on the head.

Spiritual Abuse by Chaplain Larry Hirst on power that can corrupt

Power is a strange thing. Without it nothing would be accomplished. As hospital chaplains, we deal almost every day with the loss of power: loss of power in a limb due to a stroke; or loss of power to make one’s own decisions due to mental decline, dementia or Alzheimer’s; or, the loss of power to effect any change in the impending death of a family member. There is a corollary between health and power and sickness, disease and the loss of power.

Power is also at work in hospital settings through the power of the system. Hospitals must exercise power in caring for the physical and psychological needs of its patients through its agents who determine when and how health care is delivered to those in need. The power or lack thereof is determined by the policies established, budgetary limitations, and finite human resources that are available.

On April 3, 1887, John Dalberg wrote in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”This quote has been cited often, for there is the ring of truth to it. Most of us have experienced this abuse of power by someone who has power over us. It may have been a parent, a teacher or employer; it may have been a spouse or a spiritual leader. Of course, it would be rare that we ourselves haven’t abused our power, however limited our power might be. It seems our nature to use power to harm inst ead of to heal.

This is also true when it comes to spiritual power. There is a special power that those in spiritual leadership within their religious tradition, or in positions like mine as a chaplain, possess. Some people I visit are separated from the spiritual foundations upon which they grew. Curious about why this separation has taken place, conversations sometimes reveal a soul wound that is in need of some attention. I have heard stories of spiritual leaders who used their power to destroy, who used their powers to condemn, who used their powers to judge, and in so doing inflicted wounds that have not healed over many years.

When the abuse of spiritual power occurs, it is not necessarily intentional and malicious. This potential exists when those in leadership forget that they hold their office for the purpose of serving God and God’s people. One of the things we must do to guard ourselves against abuse is to be aware of it and to identify it. The following characteristics are common in a spiritually abusive leader:

1. Power positioning –The spiritual leader constantly reminds those who are under his care that he/she is the authority.

2. Unquestioned authority –The spiritual leader labels anyone who questions his/her teaching or authority as rebellious.

3. Secrecy –Church leaders broker information and maintain levels of secrecy for the purpose of maintaining control.

4. An elitist attitude –A spiritual leader insists that only those who agree with him/her on everything are true and refuses to acknowledge anyone else as being able to truly know God.

5. An emphasis on performance –A spiritual leader measures spiritual vitality by self-established standards of performance and codes of behavior are imposed over all areas of life.

6. Motivation by fear –Spiritual leaders use fear of falling into the hands of the devil or fear of falling under the wrath of God to maintain control of their followers.

7. Painful exit –A person cannot leave the group on good terms. Any decision to leave results in excommunication or some other public humiliation and ridicule and censure.

People’s spiritual lives have crumbled as this abuse leaves them alienated from God and leads them to believe that God is on the side of the abuser. Spiritual abuse can happen in any congregation, for power as a bent towards corruption.

Many “unchurched”share stories of experiencing spiritual abuse. They don’t call it that, but there are many victims and the tragedy is that the damage often leaves them forever outside a caring congregation. When people have a belief system but live outside a community of faith, it may be that they find a faith community so terrifying that they can not bring themselves to come back.

I pray that God will give us wisdom as we minister to these wounded souls. I also pray that we will be ever diligent not to abuse the spiritual power that is invested in our position as chaplains.

Larry Hirst is a Certified Specialist in Pastoral Care (CAPPE) and serves as the facility Chaplain at Bethesda Hospital and Place in Steinbach, Manitoba. Larry spent 22 years in congregational ministry with the Baptist General Conference of Canada prior to transitioning into chaplaincy. He and his family live in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

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And here are some comments from my ‘friend and colleague,’ Dick McBrien, to provide a theological context for the nonsense in Lincoln Nebraska. Incidentally, Fabian Bruskowitz was a contemporary of ours as the graduate school of the North American College in Rome in 1966. He was just ‘one of the boys’ then with certain ‘career’ goals.

What is Catholic Faith?
By Rev. Richard P. McBrien
http://www.the-tidings.com/2007/010507/essays_text.htm

Inflation is an economic term that refers to a situation in which the value of money decreases while the price of consumer goods remains the same or increases. The dictionary defines the verb “to inflate” as “to fill something with air or gas so as to make it swell; to enlarge or amplify unduly or improperly.”

Inflation not only occurs in the economic order; it can also occur in the Church. When claims for religious truth are “enlarged or amplified unduly or improperly,” the actual truth loses some of its credibility. The extreme consequence of such inflation is that all religious truths lose their value.

These considerations came to mind when the bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska, published in his diocesan newspaper portions of a letter sent to him in late November by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops. Cardinal Re has upheld the bishop’s decision rendered more than ten years ago to excommunicate members of his diocese who belonged to the national lay organization Call to Action and 11 other groups.

The bishop had claimed that membership in such organizations is “always perilous to the Catholic faith and most often is totally incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

Call to Action appealed to the Vatican to reverse the bishop’s “extrasynodal legislation,” but the appeal was rejected.

Information given to this column at the time indicated that other U.S. bishops had advised the bishop of Lincoln not to press the issue because of the unfavorable publicity his threat of excommunication was generating around the country.

For ten years the issue did, in fact, lie dormant. This column is not aware of anyone in the Lincoln Diocese who, because of their continued affiliation with Call to Action, remained away from Holy Communion and the other sacraments or was refused any of these sacraments. That may have happened, but it is unlikely that the press would not have reported it.

According to the story in the Southern Nebraska Register, repeated in a Dec. 11 dispatch from ZENIT, a news agency operated by the Legionaries of Christ, Cardinal Re’s letter to the bishop of Lincoln stated that the “judgment of the Holy See is that the activities of ‘Call to Action’ in the course of these years are in contrast with the Catholic Faith….Thus to be a member of this Association or to support it, is irreconcilable with a coherent living of the Catholic Faith.”

This column has no interest in attacking the bishop of Lincoln or Cardinal Re, and it leaves to canon lawyers to decide whether the bishop was on solid canonical grounds when in 1996 he issued his original extrasynodal legislation and decree of automatic excommunication, following a 30-day grace period.

What is of concern here is the claim that was initially made by the bishop and most recently confirmed by Cardinal Re that being a member of, or simply giving support to, a national lay organization like Call to Action, is “always perilous to the Catholic faith and most often is totally incompatible with the Catholic faith,” or that “the activities of ‘Call to Action’...are in [such] contrast with the Catholic Faith” as to be “irreconcilable with a coherent living of the Catholic Faith.”

These claims beg the question: What constitutes “the Catholic faith”?

Is every official teaching of the Catholic Church, at whatever level, and every disciplinary decree of a Roman congregation a matter of “Catholic faith,” or what the traditional Latin manuals of theology called “de fide”?

Is there no doctrinal difference, for example, between the Church’s current discipline of obligatory celibacy for priests of the Latin rite and the teachings of the ecumenical councils on the divinity of Jesus Christ? Is the belief in angels on the same doctrinal level as belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist?

Are the matters of faith contained in the Creed that is recited at Mass on Sundays and great feasts of no greater doctrinal authority than the Church’s current teaching on the ordination of women or the current practice in the Roman Catholic Church regarding the selection of bishops?

The 1962 edition of the so-called Spanish Summa, the best of the Latin manuals in wide use prior to the Second Vatican Council, lists 14 different levels of authority for church teachings, eight of which include the words “de fide.” In each instance, the category requires that the teaching be found somehow in the sources of Revelation and/or infallibly taught by the Church.

Which specific matters of “Catholic faith” does Call to Action reject? Or are we dealing here with doctrinal inflation?

Father Richard P. McBrien is the Crowley-O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

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And here is a little ‘corollary’ to the above which addresses some of the canonical issues raised in McBrien’s commentary. They are appropriate in the light the increasing tendency among some bishops to ‘govern’ rather than shepherd the faithful. In any event, despite the many ambiguities in Church law, the very same law can be used to protect the rights of folks in the pew. As one of my canonical colleagues put it, “it really is difficult to get ‘kicked out’ of the Church under the revised Code of Canon Law. It was posted on COMMONWEAL Magazine ‘blog’ by Grant Gallicho. [KEL]

Bruskewitz – Excommunication & Canon Law

As I promised in I did some digging to find out the canonical significance of Bishop Bruskewitz’s 1996 to excommunicate members of Call to Action (and several other groups) in his diocese, along with its recently by Cardinal Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops.

Oddly, I couldn’t find any news stories that contained a comment from a canon lawyer. I’m surprised the blog, whose responsibility it is to critique religion coverage in the secular press, didn’t take journos to task for failing to ask the obvious: is the excommunication legal?

I did, and here’s what I learned from a canon lawyer:

1. In canon-law criminal cases, the benefit of the doubt always goes to the accused.

2. Cardinal Re’s letter carries no evidence of any proper appeal procedure. Everything in it indicates it is little more than a personal letter of support. It is not signed by the secretary of the Congregation for Bishops. It makes no reference to any canonical procedure. Therefore, the letter must be assigned minimal meaning: the cardinal wanted to give personal support to the bishop. He invokes the authority of the “Holy See,” yet he can never be the Holy See.

3. Given the sweeping nature of Bruskewitz’s decree, no one should be considered excommunicated unless he has been cited by name and found guilty by a full-fledged legal process (unless a person is widely known by the community without any doubt, and he has openly and resolutely broken with the church). It is likely that several legal technicalities could be invoked to argue that Bruskewitz’s decree has no standing in canon law. These should be sufficient to introduce reasonable doubts about Bruskewitz’s law, and a doubtful law is no law at all—especially in criminal matters.

4. “Automatic excommunication” works in a given territory, and can be applied only to permanent residents of the diocese. Historically, such sanctions were used to deal with particular problems. For example—true story—in some parts of southern Italy, to set fire to someone’s vineyard was a special way of ruining a family (cf. mafia), so local bishops imposed automatic excommunication on anyone who did it, as a deterrent. But, as mentioned, so long as someone has not been cited and condemned by name no one may hold him excommunicated. If he has been condemned formally by name, he is excommunicated everywhere. The sanction can be lifted by the ordinary of the diocese that made the original law. Helpful exemptions, however, exist (urgency and/or no easy communication).

To understand what’s going on here, two factors are relevant: 1.) In theory, cardinals and bishops are under the direct jurisdiction of the pope. Hence, the normal administrative reaction of any official under the pope is to approve of what the bishop has done. If he did otherwise, he would intrude on the jurisdiction of the pope—cf. the attitude of Vatican officials and other bishops toward bishops who obviously were guilty of covering up abuse cases.

2.) We have several good laws in the church (e.g., the declaration of the rights of the faithful in the new code), but we do not have autonomous tribunals to enforce them. So there is and there is not rule of law in the church—as we understand it in U.S. law. What’s more, behind the network of laws are deeply rooted administrative practices that can be described only as “rule of man.” All we can do is to live with it the best we can. The Italians know this very well—and take it for granted.

It could be argued that Bishop Bruskewitz’s decree lacks of the rigorous requirements in clarity and precision that are necessary for the validity of penal laws.

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