A non-Catholic has taken on the psychobabble industry in the current issue of The New Oxford Review.
Cal Samra is a former Associated Press and newspaper reporter who served for five years as the lay executive director and newsletter editor of a psychiatric-research foundation. He is currently the editor and publisher of The Joyful Noiseletter, an award-winning Christian humor newsletter.
Samra’s opening paragraphs follow, with my emphasis…
The secular press has been in full hue and cry over the clerical sex-abuse scandal in the U.S. and Europe. Many of their criticisms of the Catholic hierarchy’s mismanagement of the situation — transferring pederast and pedophile priests from parish to parish and covering up their crimes — are valid. But, to my knowledge, not a single journalist in either the secular or religious press has had the courage or the objectivity to question and investigate the high-priced psychiatrists and mental-health “experts” who supposedly screened these priests before seminary and before ordination, and who treated them after their crimes and acted as counselors to the bishops who shuffled them around. These so-called experts were the sophisticated folks who devised psychological tests to screen seminary candidates and candidates for ordination — tests that obviously failed. They were the experts who treated pederast and pedophile priests at great cost, pronounced them “cured,” and recommended to the bishops that they be reassigned to another church, where, it was discovered, they were in fact not cured. The psychiatrists simply failed the bishops and took a lot of money but none of the blame. The biggest mistake the bishops made was allowing themselves to be duped by the culture of psychobabble fostered by the news media and Hollywood — which have given uncritical support of psychiatry for decades — and believing the myth that psychiatry is a science.
It’s not as if the Catholic bishops were not forewarned. Many eminent Catholic and Protestant writers, including G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, have challenged and criticized the essentially secular psychiatric establishment for decades. Furthermore, writers of all religious persuasions have expressed concerns about how psychiatry and psychopharmacology were used by Nazis and communists as instruments of state control.
It’s high time someone confronted the “experts” who screened and treated pederast and pedophile priests and asked them some hard questions, such as: What is your view of sexuality? Do you believe that pederasty is sinful? What is your view of religion? Are you a practicing believer, and do you believe that faith has an important role in the healing process?
Much more here.
Tags: Abuse-Sexual, Psychobabble
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AMEN!!!
See http://www.catholictherapists.com if you need an orthodox therapist.
I just wonder who the DOR uses for their assessments.
And remember, when the scandal of the Catholic psychiatric centers broke, it ws the bishops who were using therapists in Catholic psychiatric institutions, especially set up for priests, who told the priests it was OK to be a homosexual and to come out of the closet. There were a couple of Catholic priests in the DOR who were treated at such places, returned to active priesthood, and , as the article states, relapsed into doing abuse.