Put to the Test

A story that came out of the Vatican a couple of days ago has left me a bit shocked. I first noticed it in a CNN crawl that said something like, “Vatican approves psychological testing for priest candidates.” A thorough and sober story from the Catholic News Service is headlined Vatican recommends some use of psychological testing in seminaries.

As that story, written by John Thavis, explains, a document released by the Vatican on Oct. 30 says “seminary candidates should undergo psychological evaluations whenever there is a suspicion of personality disturbances or serious doubts about their ability to live a celibate life.” The document, “Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood,” doesn’t sanction routine psychological testing for all seminarians; rather, it says, “the use of psychological consultation and testing [is] appropriate in ‘exceptional cases that present particular difficulties’ in seminary admission and formation,” according to Thavis.

However, during a press conference announcing the policy document, Thavis writes, “Archbishop Jean-Louis Brugues, secretary of the congregation, said that, in fact, many dioceses currently have mandatory psychological evaluations for candidates to seminaries.”

Naturally, all of this is linked to the scandal of sexual abuse by priests that has been widely reported over the past several years, and much of the coverage of this week’s announcement has assumed that the new policy is meant to stop homosexuals from being ordained. (“Vatican: Screen for possible gay priests” was the headline on the Seattle Times online story.)

That’s not what I find perplexing. Here’s where I’m having problems:

The word “psychology” is of course Greek in origin and derives from “psyche,” meaning “soul” and “logos,” meaning “word” but also, as I’ve discussed previously, “description,” “explanation,” and so on. So the literal meaning can be taken as “study of the soul.”

As we all know, the Catholic Church has held itself out for almost two millennia as the authority par excellence on the soul and matters pertaining thereto. And it has a long-established “psychology,” largely adapted – through such church fathers as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose and Augustine, and pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite – from Platonism.

But while the “psychological consultation and testing” now being proposed, and the “mandatory psychological evaluations” already being practiced aren’t specified, it does sound rather like the church is now conceding that the modern materialistic-mechanistic psychiatric/psychological establishment is a better evaluator than it is of men’s souls. (Not women’s, because of course the Vatican still refuses to countenance the ordination of women.)

The Catholic Church has, for about a century now, been relatively accommodating toward science, unlike the more fundamentalist sects that, for example, deny the reality of the evolution of species by natural selection. Some of that may be a result of lingering embarrassment over its despicable treatment of Galileo and Giordano Bruno and so on. But this latest concession may be going too far.

Psychology these days pretty much has discarded the psyche. In fact, many practitioners have dropped that term and prefer to be called behaviorists. The consensus (leaving out Jungians, who are widely derided as “mystical”) seems to be that the mind is nothing but a sort of secretion of the brain, and any abnormal behaviors – the “disorders” that seem so numerous these days – can easily be fixed through chemical modification. So “psychological evaluation” consists basically of seeing which set of symptoms in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual a person matches, and treatment consists of selecting the right medication to “control” it – because no “cure” is possible.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the church shouldn’t do something to prevent pedophiles from becoming priests. I’m just saying there may be better ways to solve this problem. One rather obvious example: Until about the 12th century, priests were allowed to be married and have families; it was only with the reform movement led by Bernard of Clairvaux and others that a monastic-type celibacy was universally prescribed for parish priests. Other religions allow, and even encourage, their clergy to marry, and don’t seem to have such widespread problems with sexual misconduct.

There’s also a very long-standing system of what one might call “vetting” that might be more harmonious with the church’s mission as a spiritual organization. This system was practiced in the Greek philosophical schools and the early Christian monasteries, and it continues to be practiced today in Eastern Orthodox and Buddhist monasticism, and the Sufi schools.

In all these traditions, students or aspirants or candidates for initiation or whatever must undergo a lengthy period of what one might call “spiritual apprenticeship” under the watchful eyes of a community of aspirants who are undertaking the same struggle. The emphasis from the outset is on ethics: the cultivation of virtue and the eradication of vice; only when the school’s leaders are satisfied with the genuineness of the aspirant’s progress is he or she led to the next level of practice.

While there are still some vestiges of this tradition in Catholic monasticism (reflected to a degree in the works of Thomas Merton), the church doesn't especially encourage either its clergy or its laity to undertake this sort of inner conquest of the Self. Instead, like other Christian sects, it turns its energies, and those of its members, toward worldly affairs and outer victories.

Viewed that way, this announcement about psychological testing makes perfect sense: In a world obsessed with appearances, it gives the appearance that the church is doing something decisive about a festering problem. But from another perspective, one might conclude that the church itself is failing a test and paying the price for neglecting its own soul.