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I find
your website useful and informative but narrow in scope. How about talking
directly about Carl Rogers and his effect on the Catholic Church. Leave out
the hell, fire and brimstone and give a logical explanation of how the
humanistic, person centered theory doesn’t work in the Church. I,
personally, get turned off with the negative approach of Protestant theology
on the website especially when combined with psychology and I do enjoy the
“real love” aspects so concentrate on that. I think your apostolate
will reach more people if you appeal to those on the fence who might have
been told all of their lives that they are garbage. Learning all about garbage
does not make it smell any better. It is still garbage until it turns into
compost with the real love of Christ. Allow real love to radiate from you
. . . and allow negativity of the past to rot in its own misery.
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 here really is not much to say
about humanistic
psychology [1]
except that it advocates the erroneous idea that psychology itself can be
a replacement for religion. And, of course, its adherents
do not believe in the reality of
sin.
And sadly enough, as I learned
from my religious studies in a Protestant seminary, much of
Protestant theology today has degenerated into
nothing but humanistic psychology, in which Christ is seen as just a metaphor
for the so-called “collective unconscious.”
Truth and
Facts
You find this website “narrow
in scope” because, with your liberal ideology, you would like to throw
Tradition into the garbage. Yet to speak at all
about Catholic psychology one must of necessity speak about—and
correct—the anti-Christian errors that have been purchased wholesale
by our contemporary culture. Moreover, to speak
the truth, one has to speak about sin and
repentance. These are the facts of Christian
faith; the hell-fire and
brimstone part comes only as a warning, from Christ’s own
mouth, about rejecting His mercy by persisting
in sin. And this hell-fire and brimstone warning permeates the
Gospels.
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His winnowing
fork is in His hand, and He will clear His threshing floor and gather His
wheat into the granary, but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable
fire. |
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—Matthew 3:12
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But I say to
you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment;
whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says,
“You fool!” shall be liable to the hell of fire. |
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—Matthew 5:22
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Every tree that
does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the
fire. |
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—Matthew 7:19
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The Son of Man
will send His angels, and they will collect out of His Kingdom all who cause
others to sin and all evildoers. They will throw them into the fiery furnace,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth. |
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—Matthew
13:41–42
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Then He will
say to those on His left, “Depart from Me, you accursed, into the eternal
fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” |
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—Matthew 25:41
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If your hand
causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed
than with two hands to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable
fire. |
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—Mark 9:43
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Even now the
ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not produce
good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. |
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—Luke 3:9
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. . . on the
day when Lot left Sodom, fire and brimstone rained from the sky to destroy
them all. So it will be on the day the Son of Man is revealed. |
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—Luke 17:29–30 |
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On the
Fence
Now, you make a good point about
appealing “to those on the fence who might have been told all of their
lives that they are
garbage.”
These are today’s lost sheep who have wandered
off into spiritual
wilderness because of family dysfunction.
The deceit, the game-playing, and the abuse that have been inflicted on
children—by parents, mind you, who claim that sin and
hell are old-fashioned up-tight ideas and who have
discarded the fear of God—have created
generations of poor lost souls, completely lacking in moral
guidance, who feel like garbage.
The sad thing is that, when we
listen to Christ’s own words, we hear what will happen to garbage. Fire.
Yet Christ speaks of the fire as a warning to us; He speaks in mercy, with
real love, for behind His warning is a final
plea.
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Tell sinners
that no one shall escape My hand; if they run away from My Merciful Heart,
they will fall into My Just Hands. |
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—as told to Saint
Faustina
Diary (1728; see also 1146, 1588) |
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Two
Choices
These wounded souls, therefore,
have two choices for genuine spiritual healing—and neither choice is
easy. They can follow the advice of the Catholic mystics through the ages,
like Saint John of the Cross, and let go of all their
illusory attachments to the world—attachments
that make you feel good temporarily, even though you know you are standing
on a rotting garbage pile—and plunge into the abyss of Christ’s
mercy. Or, if these poor souls lack the courage
for such a radical change of attitude, they can turn to
psychotherapy, through Catholic
psychology, to overcome the resistance and
fear that prevents a complete plunge into real
love.
Psychotherapy
To accomplish the work of
psychotherapy, however, a person
will perform a difficult task that even you don’t seem to understand.
To heal the belief that you are garbage it is necessary stand directly
on the garbage pile of your life and dig down into it with your bare hands.
It is necessary to feel the hurt—and
the hate encrusted around it—from
every wound, raw and bleeding in the depths of your heart. And then, seeing
it all, feeling it all, and knowing it all, it is necessary to dissolve that
crust of hatred and bitterness in the cleansing waters of God’s
forgiveness and, in turn, forgive those who have
hurt you. This is hard work because it amounts to seeing
sin for what it is—in yourself and in
others. But it’s the only path to the
honesty
that will lead, in turn, to total trust in
God.
And if you don’t do the
work, all that garbage will rot under the surface, and you will
be left rotting in your own misery.
Scandal in the
Church
Talk about garbage may be a hard
thing to hear, but why do you think we have had so much scandal in the Church
recently? So many men who felt like garbage took up the priesthood to cover
over their pain—rather than heal it—and
yet it leaked out anyway onto the lives of innocent victims. And why did
Carl Rogers succeed in ruining those religious orders? So many men and women
who felt like garbage underneath their habits turned to humanistic psychology
to feel good about themselves without having to be bothered about discipline
and obedience. They threw away the “old-fashioned
and up-tight” ideas of sin and hell, and,
finding themselves with nothing to repent,
they soon found their religious lives collapsing around them, more useless
garbage for the garbage pile.
Notes
1. In an interview about Carl Rogers and humanistic
psychology, Dr. Coulson, a contrite Catholic psychologist, discusses his
role in the destruction of Catholic religious orders, and his subsequent
change of mind. See
The Story
of a Repentant Psychologist.
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