Of “Healing Priests” and Other Strange Intrusions

By Father John A. Perricone

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to the Father which is in secret: and thy father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6:6)

What is absent in enthusiasm is a humility before the example of the saints, who never prayed with external display or manic delirium but always with a calm and chastened manner.

Addressing this subject is a task fraught with danger. For the doctrinal vacuum created in the past sixty years of “spirit of the Council” convulsions has left not a few Catholics stranded in a kind of no-man’s-land. Unanchored by the hallowed Tradition and traditions of the Church’s millennial treasures, they find themselves scrounging for scraps off the tables of secularism and therapeutic kitsch. With liturgical offerings that often impersonate third-rate vaudeville, their souls starve.  

"With good intentions, they find refuge in a kind of hysterical prayer—put another way, a sort of soothing emotional swoon. Since this refuge is born of genuine spiritual longing, it is hard to hold it to strict theological/ascetical standards. But be held to them they must. Otherwise, added to the doctrinal bedlam there will be spiritual decadence, a salve which soothes but does not sanctify. Some may argue that it is a halfway house to authentic prayer, or better than nothing. But this sentimentality is addictive and can render the soul permanently impaired. Raised on a diet of pretzels and beer, the taste of caviar is unendurable.

Msgr. Knox gave this thorny problem of emotion/hysteria in prayer magisterial treatment in his classic Enthusiasm. He traces the dark cul-de-sacs of emotion in prayer from the early Church to the nineteenth century. Each time it rears its head, a more serious fissure is to blame. Msgr. Knox stated:

Enthusiasm…[has] at [its] root a different theology of grace. Our traditional doctrine is that grace perfects nature, elevates it to a higher pitch, so that it can bear its part in the music of eternity, but leaves it nature still. The assumption of the enthusiast is bolder and simpler: for him, grace has destroyed nature, and replaced it. The saved man has come out into a new order of being, with a new set of faculties, which are proper to his state… He decries the use of human reason as a guide to any sort of religious truth. A direct indication of the divine will is communicated to him at every turn, if only he will consent to abandon the arm of flesh—man’s miserable intellect, fatally obscured by the Fall.

This serious detachment from the ascetical/spiritual tradition of the Church leaves the soul lost at sea, accountable to nothing but his own excitations. Chesterton names this the “god within.” In a famous passage from Orthodoxy, his scathing assessment:

Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within…That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the inner light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any on his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the inner light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.

What is absent in enthusiasm is a humility before the example of the saints, who never prayed with external display or manic delirium but always with a calm and chastened manner. Shall we say, like the Publican: “And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breasts, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13).   

St. Cyprian should not be forgotten in his Treatise on the Lord’s Prayer: 

When we pray our words should be calm, modest and disciplined. Let us reflect that we are standing before God. We should please him both by our bodily posture and the manner of our speech. It is characteristic of the vulgar to shout and make a noise, not those who are modest. On the contrary, they should employ a quiet tone in their prayer.

It is precisely a waning of that humility which creates the fertile conditions for extravagant and false spiritual phenomena to flourish. If the soul does not take its delight from obeying the Church and her tradition, it begins only to delight in itself. Sadly, this narcissism leads men out of the Catholic Church. These departures are clearly seen in Catholics who intentionally embrace error. 

Read the rest: https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/of-healing-priests-and-other-strange-intrusions