April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
EDITORIAL

Give it up

EDITORIAL



Give it up

In "Kristin Lavransdatter," a trilogy by Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, the main character is a young woman whose main flaw - and charm - is her headstrong, passionate nature. The story is set in 14th-century Norway replete with Catholic themes, trappings and struggles. 

Like Shakespeare's "Othello," Kristin loves "not wisely but too well." She is human, even sneaking out of the convent where she spends a year in spiritual formation to meet her lover. 

Kristin overcomes her family's resistance and other barriers and marries the man, but is dogged by her guilt over the liaison and the resultant pregnancy that, the world will soon realize, began before the nuptials.

Such guilt, such suffering, such anguish. It leads to other lies and further woes. A Catholic reader could only wonder why, despite the many priests and churches and feast days that dot her life, Kristin does not - at least by the start of the second novel - simply go to confession and get it over with.

Last week, in the second of our series on the sacraments, writer Peter Feuerherd explored the power of reconciliation. Many of us find in the sacrament healing, peace and community as we verbally admit our failings to a priest and receive God's love and forgiveness. 

But most of us are like Kristin, weighed down by sins real or imagined and rarely taking the help that the Church offers. Indeed, three out of four Catholics never take the sacrament or do so less than once a year.

One can speculate endlessly over possible reasons. Certainly the sacrament was shoved aside in recent decades as we learned to drop our "guilt complexes" and insist we would not be "guilted out" by judgmental people and institutions. 

In this dubious enterprise we were encouraged by the enormous therapeutic industry, from certain schools of psychological counselors to popular authors and drug companies. 

Judging from the use of alternatives - medications, illicit drugs, alcohol, materialism, health and fitness obsessions, and other forms of dissipation - we still have plenty to run from. Or we think we do.

So it is interesting to consider some of the unlikely fans that Catholic confession has earned over the centuries. Goethe, no friend of the Church, had a deep appreciation for the sacrament's simplicity and power. In his writings and personal life, he embraced the confessional approach though on a purely secular, aesthetic basis.

Sigmund Freud and his descendants adopted the confessional approach in psychotherapy. He once described its roots in an interview: "And in what consists my method of curing hysteria save in making the patient tell everything to free him from obsession? I did no more than force my patients to act like Goethe. 

"Confession is liberation and that is cure. The Catholics knew it for centuries, but Victor Hugo had taught me that the poet too is a priest; and thus I boldly substituted myself for the confessor."

Another psychiatric pioneer, Josef Breuer, similarly argued that the urge to verbally reveal secrets in therapy is akin to "one of the basic factors of a major historical institution - the Roman Catholic confessional."

While therapy and psychiatry serve many good purposes, even easing the neuroses of unjustified anxiety or guilt, these do not erase actual sin. Only God can make us whole.

(10/01/09) [[In-content Ad]]

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