Over the past few hours, several websites in traditionalist circles have been promoting, with barely concealed enthusiasm, a report published by the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. Entitled Do You Know Them to Be Worthy?, it sets out twelve proposals for bishops, rectors and formation teams on assessing the suitability of candidates for Holy Orders. The study is being presented as the definitive answer to the abuse crisis. It is a shameful document which, under the banner of ‘quality’, advocates practices that run counter to canon law, the Church’s established practice and the professional ethics governing healthcare.
Who are the authors?
The document is signed by Fr Thomas V. Berg and the psychologist Timothy G. Lock. Neither has any expertise in canon law, yet both venture to rewrite the rules governing the internal and external forums and to redefine categories found in documents issued by the Holy See. Berg, who holds a doctorate in philosophy, spent twenty-three years with the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel’s congregation. He taught and heard confessions at the congregation’s seminary in Thornwood, and obtained his doctorate from the Regina Apostolorum, its own university. He left in 2009. That a man formed for more than two decades within a system that became the paradigm of blurred forums and controlled consciences should now propose weakening the separation between the internal and external forums is no minor detail.
Lock, for his part, sits on the board of Courage International, a US organisation that promotes conversion therapy for gay people. Once again, the familiar and dangerous conflation of sexual orientation, disorders of affective development and abusive behaviour re-emerges: profoundly different realities are collapsed into one another, fuelling prejudice and confusion. People who would struggle to be taken seriously elsewhere continue instead to be heard and given space within the Church. Against this background, the claim to dictate the criteria for vocational discernment to the US episcopate, and implicitly to the universal Church, appears reckless, to say the least.
To be clear, some of the report’s underlying concerns deserve a hearing. There is nothing objectionable about insisting on the quality of candidates rather than numbers, calling for a second psychological assessment during formation, requiring formators to be properly trained, or giving greater weight to the judgement of formation teams than to pressure from certain bishops. The problem lies in the methods proposed, which reveal a policing approach to formation and reduce psychology to an instrument of authority.
Spiritual direction reduced to an instrument of scrutiny
Proposal 5 states that one of the aims of spiritual direction and psychotherapy should be to help seminarians bring into the external forum matters that have emerged in the internal forum, so that they may be taken into account when their suitability is assessed. Canon 240 §2 provides that the opinions of spiritual directors and confessors may never be sought when decisions are being made about admission to Orders or dismissal from the seminary; the Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis reiterates the strict distinction between the two spheres in no. 197. To make the internal forum serve the scrutiny process is to strip it of its very purpose and destroy the trust that allows it to bear fruit. Which seminarian will still open his heart if he knows that, by institutional design, what he confides is destined to land on the rector’s desk?
The therapist turned into an informer
Even more alarming is the casual manner in which the report describes, without condemning them, the models of ‘confidentiality’ used in Catholic seminaries. Under one model, at the outset of therapy, the seminarian signs a release authorising the psychotherapist to report to the rector any behaviour deemed serious. Under another, confidentiality is gradually eroded according to a predetermined timetable, year after year, until a report is eventually passed to the formator. The Guidelines issued by the Congregation for Catholic Education in 2008 require prior, explicit, informed and freely given consent. The Italian Episcopal Conference recently reiterated the same requirement in its new Ratio Nationalis. Consent signed as a condition of admission to formation, within such a radically unequal relationship, is not freely given. From the standpoint of professional ethics, moreover, therapy simply ceases to work when the patient knows that the clinician is reporting to his superior: psychology is turned into an instrument of surveillance, the exact opposite of its vocation. Making matters worse, Proposal 3 envisages a Director of Psychological Services combining irreconcilable roles: therapist to the seminarians, adviser to the formators and member of the admissions committee. It is a structural conflict of interest that no professional regulator would tolerate.
Opening a file on anyone who discloses same-sex attraction
The most outrageous point comes in Proposal 12. It is a proposal that tells us a great deal about those who signed this document and very little about the seminarians to whom they would like it to apply. When a candidate discloses that he experiences attraction to people of the same sex, a memorandum recording the date of the disclosure should be placed in his file, enabling bishops, rectors and vocation directors to ‘follow him over time’ and provide him with the means to ‘overcome’ his condition, should it prove transitory. This is a full-blown system of keeping files on people, plainly at odds with canon 220, which protects every member of the faithful’s right to a good reputation and privacy. Quite apart from the serious breach of privacy involved. The authors go further still, inventing a pseudo-diagnosis: if the attraction persists for more than five years, it supposedly changes from ‘transitory’ to ‘deep-seated’. The clinical vocabulary employed - diagnosis, symptoms - pathologises something that no scientific diagnostic manual has classified as a disorder for half a century. Note 50 plumbs new depths by comparing the distinction between the two categories to that between Acute Stress Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: sexual orientation is likened to a trauma-related disorder, with the duration of the ‘symptoms’ as the only variable. Note 51 then revives the language of ‘overcoming’ such tendencies, with ominous echoes of the reparative approaches condemned by the leading professional associations for decades.
The underlying anthropological error
At this point, the perspective needs to be widened. The report invokes the 2005 Instruction on the admission to seminaries of persons with homosexual tendencies, while radicalising it in the process: the authors write that it ‘explicitly excludes individuals with SSA from Orders’, whereas the Vatican document concerns deeply rooted tendencies, those who practise homosexuality or those who support the so-called gay culture. Yet even if the Instruction is taken in its authentic wording, that position - the furthest the Church has gone in this area - rests upon a flawed understanding of homosexuality.
A homosexual person, like a heterosexual person, is called to chastity: nothing more and nothing less. Celibacy binds every ordinand in equal measure under canon 277 §1; the promise is the same and the renunciation is the same, whatever the ‘inclination’ - a wholly unscientific term used by the Church - of the person making it. The Catechism, in nos. 2358–2359, requires that homosexual people be treated with ‘respect, compassion and sensitivity’ and calls them to chastity, just as it calls everyone else. If the criterion for suitability is affective maturity and the ability to live continence with inner freedom, as the very Ratio cited by the authors states in no. 110, that criterion is by its nature neutral with regard to orientation, because it is assessed through the candidate’s conduct and degree of integration. An individual’s orientation should be neither a problem nor, still less, a matter for those in authority.
The report, moreover, disproves its own case. No dated memorandum is prescribed for anyone who discloses past romantic or sexual relationships with women: in their case, note 35 envisages only a delay in admission. Homosexuality alone is placed under special surveillance as such, treated like a pathological condition requiring monitoring. In Proposal 11, the summit participants themselves acknowledge that they know and love brother priests with this inclination, priests who have baptised their children, blessed their marriages and accompanied them through bereavement. Yet only a few lines later, they recommend barring candidates with a stable attraction from entering the Configuration Stage. The experience they cite contradicts the conclusion they reach.
Counting the lapses
Proposal 10 also deserves attention. It establishes time-based benchmarks for continence - twelve months without ‘lapses’ before ordination to the diaconate - and entrusts formators with assessing the frequency of lapses involving pornography and masturbation. Moving into the administrative and disciplinary sphere a matter that belongs first and foremost to conscience and the internal forum produces an entirely predictable result: it rewards those who know how to conceal and penalises those who choose to speak honestly. The report itself acknowledges that many seminarians hide these difficulties even from their spiritual directors, yet it does not appear to realise that the system it proposes would reinforce precisely that reticence.
From the United States comes yet another formation model obsessed with policing the sexual sphere, as though a candidate’s maturity could be measured by counting days of abstinence, lapses and confessions. The decisive question should be another: whether the person possesses sufficient affective balance, inner freedom and the capacity to face the tensions of daily life responsibly. Such an accounting of lapses would appear grotesque if it were systematically applied to engaged couples preparing for marriage. Holy Orders and Matrimony have different purposes, but both belong to the sacramental life of the Church. There is no reason why the former should be subjected to a scrutiny of conscience that would immediately be regarded as invasive and improper in the latter.
The methodology
The question of the report’s authority remains. The authors acknowledge that its conclusions represent their own ‘prudential judgement’ and cannot be reduced to the views expressed at the expert summit convened at Notre Dame. Only one bishop took part in the meeting; there was no consensus on the strictest proposal concerning continence; and data from the CARA study are used selectively. A document that aspires to guide the episcopate therefore rests, by the signatories’ own admission, on the judgement of two individuals.
That certain traditionalist circles should greet such a text with delight says a great deal about their idea of the Church: dossiers, surveillance, therapists serving those in power and consciences laid bare before authority. The idea, in short, is to compile files that can later be used for blackmail; to peer into other people’s underwear, but never one’s own.
It would indeed be interesting to know about the lives of those promoting this system. In some cases, quite a lot is already known, and their lives run in precisely the opposite direction to what they write. Had this scheme been applied to them, they would probably never have been ordained. But traditionalists are like that: inflexible with other people’s consciences and highly libertine with their own. Everyone else is a sinner; but if you are caught stealing gambling money and evading tax, then you become the victim of the system. Is that not how it works?
The rigorous selection of candidates, which we all support, requires properly trained formators, respect for the autonomy of psychology and scrupulous observance of the distinction between the forums. Above all, it requires a Church that looks upon her children - all her children - and calls them to holiness without demanding that their confidences be filed away.
Fr C.V. and Fr F.V.
Silere non possum
