Commentary
Not all that long ago, a report came out (see above), stating that a certain cohort of bishops from Spain had banded together to formally oppose what they claim is a ‘doctrinal error’, namely that of believing in generationally caused or inherited problems. It is here that I intend to contest that assertion because it clearly presents another inconvenient problem which only adds to the too-many extant problems within our Church today. This is why too, I am calling such a fallacious claim on the part of these bishops none other than a walloping “load of…”! And that’s heavy language I know, but when you constantly have to deal with emergence after emergence of divisive sentiments cropping up left, right, and center, it sooner or later starts to spark a deep sense of anguish within the heart because what has our Supreme Pontiff been telling us for quite some time now?? None other than to cease stoking the fires of division and doctrinal sqabbling within the Church and instead let’s build healthy relationships between us based upon the mutuality of fraternal dialogue and respect. But do these pop-up renegade cohorts ever listen to that? Not likely. Otherwise they would have ceased to crop up here and there on an all-too- regular intermittant basis.
Thankfully, we have the knowledge too, to effectively combat this doctrinally divisive frenzy because there are many good-willed pastors who will not agree with such a position as the one this Spanish cohort has recently asserted. The late Fr Benedict Groschel would heartily disagree with this lot on that point….so would both Fr Chad Ripperger and Fr Cedric Pisgena, not to mention Fr Wade Menezes and Fr Chris Alar. Fr Chris Alar for example, gave a great teaching series on Spiritual Warfare Ā¹ and in the context of these lectures, he explained about how we can suffer from generational “hand-me-down” issues. Fr Ripperger also explains this in many of his excellent study series. Fr Cedric talks about some instances of substance addiction being generationally influenced as consistent with a genetic weakness predisposition. All these pastors would therefore be hard-pressed to agree with the stance this cohort of Spanish bishops has stridently taken.
I too, heartily disagree with much of what these bishops are trying to argue and fervently maintain. They assert (albeit wrongly), that ecumenical agreement on certain points of doctrine or Scriptural teaching is indicative or should be seen to be synonymous with so-called ‘syncretism’. The late Dr Gerald G May would also be most astutely inclined to disagree with what these Spanish bishops are trying to claim. For their claims smack of an anti-spiritual reaction to the moving of the Holy Spirit within the Church and are rather reactionary & revisionistic by nature, tending towards trying to reformulate Catholic doctrine in an ultra-modernist, secularist, un-supernatural way, thereby dismissing the validity of the apostolic works of spiritual healing, deliverance and exorcism.
If the Church accepts the notion of genetically inherited disorders from a scientific point of view, then there is no sound basis in dismissing the relationship of these disorders to disorders in the spiritual life when the relationship between the temporal order and spiritual order are intricately connected. Of course not all genetically inherited disorders are going to necessarily show symptoms & signs related to spiritual discord or dysfunction but there are many instances where they can or tend to display symptoms concurrent in both the affected person’s physical health & wellbeing and their spiritual health & wellbeing. This is more particularly the case with inherited types of mental illnesses. It is here that I wish to draw readers’ attention to a number of very important works on this area which do help to shed much light. These are, in no particular order of relevance or preference and neither are they by any means, an exhaustive selection: Robert Henderson’s Operating in the Courts of Heaven to Cleanse Your Bloodline, Gerald G May’s Addiction and Grace, Fr Chad Ripperger’s Dominion, Fr Thomas Eutenauer’s Exorcism & the Church Militant, James Longman’s The Inherited Mind: A Story of Family, Hope, and the Genetics of Mental Illness. The purpose of me suggesting them is to help readers understand that the situation is far more complex than what the article re: the cohort of Spanish bishops implies. For their take on the matter is inconsistent with the Caritas embedded in that which we call Catholic Social Teaching, since it is an intrinsic denial of the validity of the whole person relative to their unique God-ordained place in the world replete with a given geography, environmental influences, historical contexts impacting their family, personhood, developmental tragectory and miscellaneous influential circumstances. All of this, it should be understood, has a profound impact on the organic & spiritual dynamics inherent within a person’s ontological make-up, and it leaves impressionable traces within the psyche and physiology which can be transferred to the genes by a very convoluted maze of synaptic impulses and chemical imprints or time-stamps. To view the spiritual life as completely transcendant or detached from the perplexities of our temporal existence is heading down the heretical road of Gnosticism. For both these terrains are enmeshed and intertwined in such a way that their problems quite often require working through in-tandem more than in isolation.
Denying the validity of healing ministries devoted to curing psychological, emotional, and spiritual wounds in the person’s entire make-up is a dangerous move although it is certainly not new. It was one of the influences during the early Vatican II period behind alot of the de-spiritualization of Catholic teaching, reducing it to nothing more than a superficial belief system consisting of a rather impersonal view on God’s relationship to us where the relational intimacy side (be it b/n God and us or us and others) is devoid of supernatural grace and as such becomes nothing more than kowtowing to a nominal, rationalistic set of legalisms anchored not upon the principles of love, mercy, and righteousness, but more out of an obligation to obey man-centered rules and regulations in the name of pleasing God without a robust heart-centered conviction or without the building of an interior consciousness centred upon knowing deeply God’s holy will for our lives personally, and for our world.
Hence too, the danger of such superficial interpretations of what constitutes authentic Catholic doctrine, especially when those concocting such superficial interpretations claim that ministries, apostolic works or charisms which focus on healing and deliverance of the whole person are ‘heretical’ – since these ministries, charisms and apostolic works are far from heretical because Jesus Himself ministered to the whole person rather than only fixing some parts and discounting or irrelevantizing others. He certainly confronted the works of the Devil on a clearly supernatural basis, casting out demons and curing all who had fallen under the power of this Evil One. The reduction by these modernist pundits of Jesus’ ministry of exorcism and deliverance to a mere metaphor for a type “mental illness” without real spiritual roots, and which according to them, can more than adequately be dealt with by secular or purely medical approaches is, by amd large, a huge part of the problem faced by the Church in our time, precisely because the Devil loves it when he can convince people that either he doesn’t exist or that even if they still believe he does, they do not take him or his intentions to “steal, kill, and destroy” very seriously.
YouTube Reference:
Ā¹https://www.youtube.com/live/LWF1L8YxZqY?si=mf9w7vRsUwTo1AlW
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