CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Every
priest is painfully aware of that irritating result of the teaching on sexual
thoughts called "scruples." He has been puzzled and disturbed by the
sincere person who has come to him in the confessional and has become almost
whimperingly incoherent while confessing and reconfessing and again reconfessing
sexual sins of thought.
Scrupulosity
is treated in the moral theology textbooks as an abnormality due to an inability
on the part of the penitent to
differentiate between a sexual sin of thought and a passing sexual thought.
The mental conflict has its cause in the policy of the parochial schools
that teach youngsters before the age of puberty that thoughts regarding sex or
"indecent" parts of their own bodies are mortal sins.
But the tortures of scruples at times persist long beyond the age of
adolescence.
Priests
are loathe to hear the confessions of the scrupulous.
Such a person will go through the formalities of the beginning prayer,
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My
last confession was two days ago-since then I have committed many mortal sins of
thought. I had such thoughts walking
down the street seeing women and thinking how beautiful their bodies were.
I tried to stop such thoughts by prayer and saying “Jesus, Mary and
Joseph” as fast as I could but the more I prayed the more I saw the pretty
women. And when I went home and to
the bathroom I thought of the indecent parts of my own body and sinned again.
Now in confessing these sins I am thinking of them again and therefore
sinning some more. I have just
committed all of these sins over again by thinking of them while I am confessing
them."
This
frenzy can reach the point where the penitent tries to separate his speech
mechanism from his reflective mind. He
whispers faster and faster, trying to unburden his sins before his mind can
catch up with them and sin again. This
mad performance can go on by the hour. Some
people never recover from it. Some
go to psychiatrists and become nominally adjusted.
In others, the pendulum. swings to the opposite and all moral restraints
are dropped.
Of
course scruples arise from ignorance, but that ignorance is
very common and very understandable when the system attempts to teach a
distorted sex morality to little children. This
is admitted by Kirsch:
We
grant that it is not an easy matter to teach the young plainly what is a sin and
what is innocent and harmless. Our
teachers of religion do not always draw a clear distinction, and young people
may continue for years to believe something to be sinful which is altogether
harmless. Among the questionnaires
received by Hoffman there are two letters from men who complain that for a long
time they were in ignorance as to what was sinful in this regard.
One of them wrote-
'Even
when I was fourteen I was not at all clear about the sins against the Sixth
Commandment. For instance, I
considered sinful any looks, touches and imagining of the nude posteriors.
When I was in fifth-year Latin I privately asked our teacher of religion
how he could reconcile it with the teachings of the catechism that in our chapel
we had an Immoral picture.' The immorality of the picture consisted in the nude
back of an angell it is things like these that I confessed as sins for years.
But that was not the worst feature. Much
worse was the fact that my lively fancy was often occupied with these matters as
being forbidden and therefore excited the passions.
My whole emotional life was poisoned in consequence, and I had to fight
many a battle that taxed both my mental and bodily strength, in the effort to
keep my passions under control."
A
Catholic doctor gives his observations of the results of this ignorance. . . .
He finds among his patients that some conceived an aversion for their parents
that continued for years. Others
conceived a horror of all sex Me, became neurotic, and suffered a complete
destruction of their emotional life. He
also traces later sexual perversions to complexes formed by the children
concerning the origin of life. He
found in the case of some boys who had been uninstructed, that the first seminal
emissions caused a shock that had permanent evil results; in some cases there
was a complete change of personality. He
also observed hallucinations, neuroses of anxiet y, and dementia praecox in
consequence. With girls he observed
that the first experience of menstruation produced a feeling of anxiety that
soon included all sexual emotions."
The
frustrating confusion, mentally destructive agony and the corresponding torture
of other innocent people are graphically painted in the following letter from a
Protestant girl. It shows how an
impossible, unrealistic moral code conceived in the ivory towers where the
theologians dream, can and so often does reach down into the intimate minds and
hearts of sincere, innocent Catholics, and literally destroy them:
To
finish my story; I very nearly married a Catholic boy this last month.
I love him very much. I would
do anything for him, up to and including becoming Catholic-in name only.
There are many points of Catholic theology that I cannot accept.
This is probably the reason I am not in a convent at the moment.
I never looked at Catholicism from your angle before.
I would not like to have my children brought up in the school system you
describe. I want a lot of things for
my children "that I never had." This is the same old story, you've
heard it a million times. But the
truth always becomes a clich6.
The
boy that I am in love with has been "shock-troop trained," even though
he was not raised in the Church. His
parents were divorced when be was quite small, and his non-Catholic father, a
fine, if rather low economic class person, bad custody of Bob for a few years.
He went to public grammar school at first, but then his mother took him
over and he was sent to parochial school.
It
was in the fifth grade that he discovered that be had been "called to the
priesthood." His mother, a "fallen-away Catholic," encouraged him
to atone for her own sins.
The
only three people who ever objected to his priesthood are his father, whom he
has never forgiven for being human and divorcing his mother when he found her in
bed with another man; a college professor (non-Catholic) who did not want to see
his writing talent wasted; and myself.
I
take back what I said about my being as mixed up as any one person could be.
Bob is even more mixed up than I am.
I won't go into detail, but sex has been his main problem.
Taught by the Church that sex is morally wrong, even in its place, he was
at odds with himself. His father is
a very virile man. So is Bob.
But his virility has been perverted in too many ways to put on paper.
In short, he wanted to enter the priesthood as an escape from
"worldly temptation."
When
I met Bob, and I admit I met him only a year ago, I knew none of this.
We became friends almost immediately.
We had long discussions about religion.
When he told me that he planned to enter the priesthood, I was horrified.
He is a very talented boy....
From
August to March, our friendship was purely platonic.
Finally, he thought enough of me to "make a pass." Nothing
violent, just a few goodnight kisses. Then,
one night, be told me that this part of our relationship must end.
I was becoming an "occasion to sin." I don't have to explain
what that means to a prospective seminary student.
I couldn't understand, of course. I
was hurt, and I showed it. He could
never stand to see me hurt. He broke
down then, and told me a lot of things. Some
of these things would have sent an ordinary schoolgirl flying for the nearest
policeman. But I love the guy.
What he's done, what he's been doing doesn't matter to me.
I'm not interested in that. I'm
interested in HIM!
The
two of us decided to embark on a cure for some of his diseases.
I'm no psychologist, of course, but I watched my father go incurably
insane. I was there, and I've never
been able to forget any of it. I
never will. I know, even if you
don't agree, that God used me as a tool to help Bob.
He was greatly improved, even people that had known him all his life
commented on that. We had long
sessions and all kinds of discussions. Eventually,
he told me that he was in love with me. I
think I was so glad to bear him say it, I must have made some kind of mistake.
We
planned to wait four years to be married-a long time, we both realized, but
financially essential. Anyway,
through our decision, we both gained some measure of emotional security.
I won't go into the reasons (you probably know them by this time) why we
decided to go ahead and marry this summer. Bob's
father was very eager to help us. Of
course, I realize that help from any in-law is supposed to be bad for newlyweds.
But, under the circumstances, we both decided that it was best to accept
help, since Bob could never finish school if we had to go it alone.
Before I go on, understand this: Bob had already been refused entrance to
the Trappist monastery in
He
went to his parish priest to see about having the banns published.
When he came back, he told me that he didn't love me and he never bad.
I must have gone into shock. The
next thing I remember him doing was wiping my face and telling me to blow my
nose. Then he told me that he was
all mixed up. He didn't know what he
wanted. He asked me to let him enter
seminary for a trial time. I love
him that much. I told him to go
ahead if that was what he wanted. Oh,
I was very brave. It didn’t last
long, of course. His priest had told
him that be couldn't see me for a while. In
desperation, I begged him to make a decision.
He was regressing. He was so
mixed up that he couldn't even let his frustrations out on paper-and for Bob,
that is just about impossible. I
didn't see him for two weeks. Finally,
I decided the best thing for me to do was what I've been doing all my life-to
run....
The
Church's unyielding condemnation of birth control also drives all too many
Catholics into serious neurotic states. The
married people know they must practice birth control-they have too many children
already, or the woman's health is precarious, or the husband simply insists on
it. But the constantly repeated
guilt haunts them, as illustrated by the following true case history, sent to me
by a psychoanalyst:
At
this point, she was afflicted with anemia, and emotionally upset.
Mary bad resented having each child and the resentment of the children
continued as she attempted to raise them. After
the fourth child, she refused to have sexual intercourse with her husband.
He went to the priest about her refusal, and the priest called to tell
her that producing children was a duty owed to the Church.
Then Mary secretly started using a contraceptive device, but finally her
guilt was so great that she confessed this deviation from doctrine.
'The priest spent one hour telling me that if I ever confessed
one more sexual sin he would not accept the confession and would personally
see that I was excommunicated."
By
the time she entered analysis, Mary had six children and hated them and her
husband. She only came to me because
when her father, a non-Catholic, died he made her promise that she would seek a
psychoanalyst rather than a priest; she had always loved him deeply, and she
envied his free and easy approach to life as opposed to the narrow, limited
lives of her mother and grandmother who were Catholic, Her father explained to
her that due to the Church she bad married a man she did not love and she had
more children than she could care for properly.
He told her that drinking was no solution.
Mary
completed her analysis, divorced her husband, placed her children in a neutral
home and prepared herself to become a legal secretary.
She is now happy in her work as the office manager in a large legal
office, and she is presently engaged to a man whom she met at my office who has
undergone analysis. They plan to be
married and to create a home for her children.
When I saw her recently, she said if she had never left the Church she
would after reading a recent statement by Bishop Sheen which she had seen quoted
in The Reporter of November 3, 1955,
"I ask you to drink to our friend the leader of Spain, who from deep and
intimate personal experience I believe to be not only the most unselfish but one
of the greatest, if not the greatest, heads of state in the world, with the
exception of our own President."
Needless
to say, when James attempted sexual intercourse he found himself to be impotent,
His impotency continued, and it caused great emotional distress.
Gradually, he became convinced that his impotency was God's punishment
for his sins-just what sins he did not exactly know.
He became so disturbed that his wife thought that she would cure him of
the curse of his sins by confessing hers, namely, that she had sexual
intercourse and orgasms frequently throughout her high school years.
She thought she could reason with him that she had not been punished;
therefore, be was not being punished. To
her surprise, he became exceedingly violent and pummeled her until she became
unconscious.
To
me, he later confessed that when she was unconscious he seriously considered
"bashing her head in with a hammer." Now he started periodic attacks
of jealousy which were always climaxed by physical brutality, that the wife
accepted as a punishment for her sins. Several
times they consulted priests and received general advice to forget the past and
start life anew under Gods guidance. After
one particularly brutal beating which hospitalized his wife for three weeks, a
doctor insisted that he see a psychoanalyst.
Jaynes was cured, but in his return to sanity he dropped his Church
affiliation and his faith in such
medieval notions as the Virgin Mary complex.
A
crime that the clergy condemns as violently as birth control is the marriage of
a Catholic outside the Church.
Many
Catholics adjust themselves mentally to this "life of sin, by hoping that
God will be merciful and give them a chance to confess on their deathbeds.
Others Simply quit the Church and worry no more.
But some are deeply affected by the admonitions of the priests.
On
But
Mrs. X. was a Catholic and wanted a Catholic funeral for her baby.
She asked the
A
supervising nurse and a student nurse, both Roman Catholics, were on duty when
the priest visited Mrs. X. He upbraided her for being in
Mrs.
X. was thrown into violent hysterics. The
doctors feared permanent psychic trauma. The
intern came to me, literally bursting with fury.
He wanted to commit physical mayhem on the priest.
I told him that such an action was against the law and would not cure the
woman's hysteria. We went to see
her, and knowing the methods of the priesthood, I was able gradually to calm her
down. I pointed out to her that
throughout the centuries priests used the misfortunes of nature to enslave the
believing.
To
the good they said that illness, death and other catastrophes were tokens of the
love of God, testing man's fidelity. To
those who disobeyed the clergy, these same illnesses, deaths and catastrophes
were the scourge of an angry God-and portents of even more violent wrath to
come.
I
was able to show Mrs. X. the ridiculousness of the priest's position.
On the day she was admitted to our hospital, a devout Catholic boy was
also admitted. He had been bitten by
a dog while delivering newspapers. He
turned out to be the one in ten thousand who is sensitive to the Pasteur
anti-rabies vaccine. He was dying of
post-vaccinal encephalitis.
'Your
baby died," I told Mrs. X., "and Sammy is dying.
If God cursed you because you were not married by a priest, why did he
curse a good little Catholic boy? By
what authority can any priest interpret the mind of God -or the misfortunes of
nature?"
Mrs.
X. not only recovered from her hysteria, but she also severed all ties with the
Church, as did the nurses Who witnessed the event.
Miss
D. was an attractive nurse, a product of parochial schools.
She fell in love with a young man who would have no truck with the
Catholic Church, its premarital promises or its priestly marriages.
Shortly after their baby was born they learned that something was wrong.
The baby was a hydrocephalic. It
had "water on the brain.' It was a hopeless condition, one that would cause
the baby's head to grow all out of normal proportions, hang limp on its little
shoulders and after an agonizing eternity of several months to several years,
would inevitably end in death.
The
girl's father came to me. He said
she was becoming neurotic. She was
told that the baby's condition was God's curse because she had married outside
the Catholic Church. She was in
danger of becoming bitter toward her husband.
I
told him what the doctors told me. Hydrocephalus
was an abnormality that happened once in every so many thousand births and might
just as easily happen in the popes own family.
My advice was not to approach a priest but to approach her husband and
become pregnant as soon as possible. A
normal baby would "lift the curse" -and it did!
Mrs.
N. was a strict enough Catholic, as a result of her parochial school training,
that she would not get a divorce even though her married life was extremely
unhappy. She took to heavy drinking
and in one of the better bars of
After
an evening of mutual alcoholic commiseration, they started home together in his
car and ended in our emergency room. A
few days later, after Mrs. N. had "dried out" and her broken bones bad
subsided to a dull ache, she called for me.
She felt that life was useless. She
could not live with the Catholic Church or its moral code, yet she was not
morally strong enough to defy it. Her
life was at an impasse; she felt that suicide was the only logical step.
I
tried to paint the panorama of things that a woman could do to relieve the
boredom and enrich herself and her fellowman-work, P.T.A., women's clubs,
hospital auxiliaries, polio work, Red Cross, day nurseries arid, above all,
intelligent politics. Mrs. N. went
home cheered.
A
few days later she called and told me she had decided on her contribution to
humanity. She wanted to donate her
eyes to the blind. I told her that
that sounded fine. She should see
her lawyer and have her will drawn UP to that effect.
"No," she said, "I want it done now.
My eyes are no good to me. They
are a source of constant temptation. I
want to go into
My
delaying tactic was to tell her I would have to consult one of the hospital's
attorneys. He surprised me with the
opinion that the Catholic woman's request, although stupid, was perfectly legal.
People can donate blood, bones and skin.
There is no legal reason why they cannot donate their eyeballs.
The
lady kept calling me for her appointment in surgery.
The specialists refused to grant her request because the local eye bank
was filled with dead people's eyes, and they refused to take any from the
living.
In
our hospital's psychiatric department, in the letters from doctors and in the
cases that I deal with personally, I have learned that the Churches sexual code
is not only frustrating but that it unbalances people mentally.
I
began to wonder if the Church might not be filling our insane asylums instead of
giving calmness and mental assurance to her believers.
I determined to find out. Occasionally
the press would hint at something along this line, as seen in this report from
the New York Times:
ARE
NOT IMMUNE TO MENTAL ILLS
A
"religious devotee' may be maladjusted, just as he may be well adjusted,
Dr. Sandor Lorand told the American Psychoanalytic Association.
He described difficulties in treating the maladjusted and the techniques
he had used.
"The
reassuring function of divine protection may break down in certain individuals
because of severe traumatic experience in childhood and adolescence," said
Dr. Lorand, who is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry of the State of
They
had curbed any thoughts and feeling that were considered
'sinful" and had thus ended with a constant feeling guilt for having
hostile or "sinful' thoughts....
Free
association, necessary in analysis, was accompanied by guilt and fear in these
patients because it "involved expressions of thoughts forbidden by
religion."...
Therapy
was successful when his patients were finally able to develop their own moral
code rather than that which had been imposed upon them in childhood, he
reported. They developed a clear
distinction between responsibility for actions and responsibility for thoughts
and feelings .2
We
heard from 205 institutions, in addition to statistics from
The
reports covered 361,704 mental hospital patients.
Many interesting facts developed which are not part of this survey.
For example, there are 10984 Jewish patients or three per cent of the
total. Local rabbis tell me that
nationally Jews constitute four to five per cent of the nation.
It was shown earlier that only six-tenths of one per cent of our
prisoners are Jewish.
The
same confusion regarding the term "Protestant" exists in the mental
hospitals that was so evident in prisons. Some
count the Catholics and Jews, deduct them from the total patient load and
consider the rest as "Protestants."
The
following are the replies received from 163 mental hospitals in the
Table
V111. Catholics in Total Population
and in
Mental
Institutions
Catholics Catholics
in
in State
Hospital
Population
%
7.
Dept. of Mental Hygiene (mentally ill,
mentally deficient)
31.4
defectives)
27.7
Ridge State Home (mental defectives)
16.5
Winfield
State Training School
7.6
Eastern
Pownal
State School
28.9
Rosewood
State Training School
23.2
Fernald
State School
60.3
Belchertown
State School
54.1
Wrentham
State School
52.9
Miles
Standish State School
59.8
Catholics Catholics
in in State
Hospital
Population
in
in State
Hospital
Population
New Jersey Training School-Girls 26.7
New Mexico Home-Mental Defectives
56.3
Gowanda State Homes, Hospital 43.6
Grafton State School
30.3
Catholics
Catholics
In
in State
Hospital
Fopulation
Orient State Institute
17.6
CHdren7s
Eastern
Paul Valley State School
5.2
in
in State
Hospital
Population
As
can be observed, the preceding statistics do not refer to private psychiatric
institutions, particularly Sisters' Hospitals.
No one knows bow many additional Catholics are patients in these
exclusively Catholic institutions-patients driven to insanity by Church laws.
I have heard many nurses tell stories of nuns they have cared for in
Sisters' Hospitals, and particularly in Catholic Sisters' psychiatric hospitals,
who have broken under the unnatural strain of convent life.
No one knows how many there are.
One
of our nursing executives told me that she was surprised that the nuns in
Sisters' hospital schools of nursing would send their students to Sisters'
psychiatric hospitals because of the disillusionment of seeing so many nuns who
were patients in them. She spoke of
a very intimate friend of hers who had trained in
It
would be impossible, of course, to get all of the statistics on the many
hundreds of Sisters' Hospitals in the country, but they would add appreciably to
the figures quoted above.
A
religion established by God Himself, as the Roman Catholic Church claims to be,
should be a balm to the human soul. It
should provide a lodestar for the normal mind as well as for the burdened mind.
It should ease the pressure of the world's iniquity as well as the
world's problems among its members. Certainly
among them God's grace should be sufficient.
There should not be the manic depressives, the split personalities, the
anxiety neuroses that scourge those who have no divine mental or moral anchors.
And in their lives, abounding with grace and the blessings of the
sacraments and the sacramentals, women should be protected by God from giving
birth to idiots, mental defectives and monstrosities.
But
what are the facts? If the sanity
and mental stability of the members be a "mark of the true Church" or
an index of the infusion of divine peace, then certainly the Roman Catholic
Church is far from God-surely much farther than are the Jews and Protestants.
The
indictment of Catholicism and its system would be strong enough if the
percentages of Catholics in the various states and in mental hospitals were
equal. That would prove that
confession, the Mass, the other sacraments and the solicited aid of Mary were
merely useless. However, the figures
themselves condemn Catholicism as a threat to mental health.
"By their fruits ye shall know them."
I
had suggested to one of our consulting psychiatrists that we eliminate from the
tabulation all institutions that we knew to be for epileptics, mentally
retarded, morons and the like. He
insisted that we include them. Most
of them also show a higher percentage of Catholics than the average in the state
population.
The
state hospitals, of course, include all categories of the mentally ill.
Many of those types could in no
way result from a religious background. Some,
however, the psychiatrist insisted, well might be caused by the mental strain of
religious indoctrination or the continuance of childbirth because of Church law
after the couple had had one or more mentally deficient children.
Many of the hospitals listed care for mental deficients only.
They, too, have a percentage of Catholics above the average in the state.
Catholics
who go to prison are those who take their moral code too lightly.
It is my opinion that many who go to the insane asylums are those who
take it too seriously. They are the
very devout who try to avoid "bad thoughts" and go into scruples that
tear their souls. They are the
married Catholic women caught between the prohibition of birth control and the
realization that an uncontrolled series of pregnancies can wreck their health,
bankrupt their families and alienate their husbands.
They are the indoctrinated Catholics whose minds have been atrophied by
the parochial school, who have let the Church and its priests think for them and
have simply snapped under the strain of facing the realities and problems of
life.
One
interested psychiatrist worded it this way: "Insanity is the opposite of
sanity and reason. The lack of
reasoning or thought is the beginning of mental illness."
The
parochial school tries to destroy thought or reasoning in its pupils-and all too
frequently succeeds. It demands
blind mental obedience and conformity. The
Catholic may not think for himself. He
must think with the Church: sentire cum
ecclesia. He is forbidden to
think against it.
Some
excommunications are imposed for merely thinking heretically: quicumque aliter
censverit ... anathema sit! Lack of independent
thought produces mental atrophy. Lack
of reason is lack of saneness. Once
conditioned, a crisis produces the final break-mental illness or insanity.