The Vatican: Still Tone Deaf After All These Years

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

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Just when you think Pope Benedict might be getting it, he dismisses generations of abuse at the hands of clergy as "a mystery." Understandably, this has angered survivor groups. SNAP's Barbara Dorris decried the comments as "platitudes, refusing to even accurately name the crisis."

" The pontiff's wrong: there's little mystery here," said Dorris in an emailed statement.

She cited priests' having `'sometimes almost absolute power, over devout and defenseless kids," as well as bishops who abuse power and `'ignore, hide and enable heinous crimes against kids."

The pontiff's unintentionally incendiary statements came in a pre-recorded address played during the grand finale of the previously discussed Eucharistic Congress in Ireland. And this was the event that was supposed to stop the Church's hemorrhaging in that country. I don't think this will help.

I will say this. His Holiness seems genuinely mystified.

`'How are we to explain the fact that people who regularly received the Lord's body and confessed their sins in the sacrament of Penance have offended in this way?" said the pope, referring to church staff who abused children.

"It remains a mystery," he said. "Yet evidently their Christianity was no longer nourished by joyful encounter with Jesus Christ. It had become merely a matter of habit."

Religion, even participation in the mysteries, is not a cure-all. It doesn't automatically fix mental illness any more than physical illnesses. This is the cardinal error of viewing every problem as one of sin, and symbolic redemption as the sufficient solution. It's the same mistake made repeatedly in Amish communities, where a forgiveness and reconciliation process has fueled recidivism and marginalized sex abuse victims rather than perpetrators. Pedophilia, psychopathy, narcissism, and other pathologies, that have been so clearly demonstrated in the cycle of abuse in the Church just aren't going to be resolved by prayer. And forgiving people for their sins doesn't mean they won't keep committing them.

This core error in thinking has been a prime mover in the decades of mishandling and cover-ups at every level of the Church. Abusive priests were given spiritual counsel, forgiven, and told, go (to another parish) and sin no more.

As with the Amish communities, apparently repentant abusers have been protected and supported over anyone who knew better than to simply forgive and forget: victims, law enforcement, the media, an angry public. These critical voices have been ignored, disparaged, and even demonized.

The Church has a propensity for blaming its internal problems on those who point them out rather than the criminals who cause them. Oh, and, the devil.

The Vatican's No. 2 official on Monday blamed the media – and the devil – for fueling the scandal over leaked Vatican documents.

Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone told an Italian Catholic weekly that journalists reporting on the leaks scandal are "pretending to be Dan Brown ... inventing stories and replaying legends." The reference to Brown is particularly acute; Brown wrote "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Demons" the best-selling fictional accounts of power struggles and scandals inside the Catholic Church.

. . .

"The truth is that there's a will to create division that comes from the devil," he said. The interview is due on newsstands Thursday but was made available to journalists Monday.

What the Vatican continues to engage in is what Jungian psychology calls shadow projection. As defined by Paul Levy:

Shadow projection, or scapegoating, is when we split off from our own darkness and project it outside of ourselves. When we project our shadow onto someone else, we believe that the other person is the embodiment of the darkness that ultimately belongs to ourselves. We then want to fight and destroy the evil we see “out there,” as it reminds us of something dark within ourselves that we’d rather have nothing to do with. By trying to destroy the evil we see in the outer world, however, we become possessed by and incarnate the very evil we are trying to destroy. Shadow projection is a reflection of the inner process of dissociating from and wanting to get rid of─exterminate─a part of ourselves. Shadow projection is a self-mutilation that is actually an act of psychic violence, not only on ourselves, but on the “other” who is the recipient of our projection.

Perhaps we should all just start mailing the Vatican Debbie Ford books. Dark Side of the Light Chasers indeed.

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Paul Levy on the Collective Shadow

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

I've referenced Tibetan Buddhist and healer Paul Levy before -- notably in my review of The Secret. Levy's essays are available on his site Awaken in the Dream and in his book The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis. In his newest book Wetiko, Levy continues to explore the projected shadow as a collective phenomenon and the Native American mythical embodiment of it known as wetiko to the Cree. Years ago, I watched a movie called Wendigo, another Algonquian name for the same phenomenon. It's a haunting film that brilliantly captures the sense of doom we experience at those times when life is turned upside down leaving us at the mercy of an unfolding fate that seems to have its own agenda. As Levy explains, we actually animate this darkness run amok from our suppressed shadow. The more in denial of our shadow we are, the more inevitably we will confront it as a seemingly alien entity in our reflective world.

One of the things that struck me in this Red Ice Radio interview is Levy's anecdote about a New Age bookstore that wanted him to appear but not talk about all that shadow stuff. They wanted it to be "positive." It put me in mind of another author who dared to write about the painful side of spiritual growth; Rabbi Yonassan Gershom who wrote about Holocaust reincarnates.  Said Gershom:

Then in 1984 I was invited to speak on Jewish mysticism at the annual Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship (SFF) retreat at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. SFF is an eclectic group of spiritually oriented people who are interested in psychic phenomena, and most believe in reincarnation. Here, I thought, would be a receptive audience for these case histories that I had been gathering. So I suggested "Cases of Holocaust Reincarnation" as my topic.

I was turned down flat. The SFF representative explained that the theme of the retreat would be "I Am the Light," and they wanted to focus on uplifting, positive material because that's what people expected. The Holocaust was just too heavy and depressing, and might upset people, even if I were talking about reincarnation. Couldn't I do something more inspiring, like a Sabbath liturgy?

This relentless focus on the upbeat and cheerful is not just naive. It's dangerous -- something I've written about ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And as Levy has been explaining brilliantly for years, it can unleash terrors beyond our conscious imagining.

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