Minds and Money

An important read from Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, who discusses a pattern involving the use of suspension & mandatory psych evaluations / treatments of priests by their bishops:

Over the last few months I have been contacted by diocesan priests (and a religious) who were being sent by their bishops (superior) to be “evaluated” at one of these psych clinics for clergy.  The most (in)famous of these in the USA is St. Luke’s in Maryland.

The pattern is alarmingly similar.  The priest has some sort of dust up in the parish (or wherever).  For example, a woman gets angry because he preached about contraception, someone claims that he has “boundary issues”, somebody on the staff says that he is “cold” or “remote”.  They complain to the bishop.  The bishop tells the priest – pressures the priest – to go for “evaluation”.  With great trepidation the priest obeys (an important point).  He goes for a week or two of evaluation, at the end of which he is told that there isn’t much wrong with him.  He goes home, thinking that all is well.  Shortly thereafter, he is called in to the bishop’s office, where he is told that the clinic sent the bishop a very different assessment.   The priest is diagnosed – and it is always about the same – narcissism and borderline bi-polar.  The bishop then really puts the screws to the man to go back to that clinic for “treatment”.  He is told for three months or so.  But when he gets there, and they confiscate his mobile phone and even his shaving kit, and start pumping him full of drugs and monitoring/controlling email, he is told that he’ll be there for six months.  The horror show begins.

Read the whole thing here and understand that, while some priests undoubtedly do require counseling and care, particularly after the era of scandal that we have lived through, this tactic can be held over the head of any priest who steps out of line for many, many things. It’s a powerful tool, especially in the hands of an ideologue, a person lacking scruples, or one desperate to maintain his standing.

The fact that a great deal of money changes hands in this practice is also to be considered.

Some people might think this wouldn’t happen to priests in our diocese, that they’d be sent away, confined, phones confiscated, mandatory treatment plan and etc. Those people would be wrong. In this diocese, as in others, clergy are never more than a step away from accusation of this or that “inappropriate” thing. (Note how often “inappropriate” now replaces “morally wrong,” because the latter often cannot be truthfully asserted. Which is, in a word, weasley.)

It begins to look to us like what is needed is a charter of the rights and protections that priests ought to have in our Church, which, while upholding the standards of their office and their duty to revealed doctrine, does not treat them in a way that affronts their human dignity. It’s not at all clear that the current code of canon law provides for this sufficiently, or else we wouldn’t constantly have good priests in chokey at the whim of their bishops.

On one hand, it’s ridiculous that such a thing would be needed. But on the other hand, it was ridiculous that the Dallas Charter was ever needed, yet it most certainly was.

Rod Dreher recounts the following communique from a priest:

There is nothing that the laity can do to protect priests. Bishops have total authority over us. We can certainly walk away. We can leave. But Kalchick [a Chicago-area priest & victim of clerical sexual abuse, famously censured for having destroyed a rainbow banner once used at his parish] is a great example of what happens when a priest stands up to his bishop’s agenda. He’s probably done as a priest.

He can submit to St. Luke’s and get the evaluation, but St. Luke’s has an alliance with the bishops as well. It’s the bishops who pay the bill. When a priest goes there the priest must sign a release for everything he discusses to be turned over to the bishop and the diocese. So how is he supposed to deal with any real psychological issues he might have knowing that the data is going to be sent back to the bishop and put into files or even potentially released or used against him? Point being, the priest isn’t free. It’s a coercive environment. It’s rigged against priests and the information can be used by bishops to continue to manipulate those priests for years to come, all under the guise of “I just want Fr. X to be healthy.” What they are really after is reconditioning priests to act within a particular safe metric to avoid bad publicity or cause problems. Sounds a bit Orwellian doesn’t it?

Any study of the scriptures or indeed of human history shows us that the people most desperate to retain excessive control over others, especially within the confines of minds and consciences, are those who should least possess it.

Do we imagine the original Apostles ever desired to acquire and maintain themselves in this sort of power, saw that as their prerogative? Did Christ Himself wield His rightful authority over man in this way? Never.

The call found in the letters of Peter and elsewhere in Scripture to submit to authority with humility was surely never intended as a license for those authorities to humiliate those who did, especially not to violate them within their deepest self–their conscience and psyche–because they are spoiling one’s “brand” of Catholicism. It is so far beneath the dignity of a bishop to do so that it can hardly be expressed. Talk about your “broken and untenable” systems.

We cannot ignore this glaring problem if genuine Catholic renewal is our aim. Our future priests–should we be so fortunate as to have any–don’t deserve to be sold into this type of subjugation.