After the Second Vatican Council, having received no help to inspire a new spiritual revival and reluctant to reintroduce the old moral spirituality that had failed before, there was a new “pseudo-spiritual movement,” seen most clearly in religious life. This new “movement” was to do what the old moral spirituality had failed to do.
While Marxism was developed into Liberation Theology in South America and was seen as the way to change the world, it was Depth Psychology that was developed in Europe, which was seen as the way to change oneself. In both cases, returning to authentic, traditional, Catholic, God-given wisdom was rejected in favor of the latest wisdom of the world.
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St. Augustine would turn in his grave, for the Pelagianism that he had spent his lifetime trying to destroy was alive and well and taking over the helm on the Barque of Peter. The slow and gradual spiritual deterioration that had set in since Quietism was now to gather a pace after the Second Vatican Council. For, if nothing else, the strong atmosphere of authoritarianism that had held the Church together before was suddenly lifted. The same sort of libertarianism that prevailed in the “swinging sixties” began to seep into the members of the Church, who soon began to vote with their feet.
The gap that was left when no document—nor any teaching—on the spiritual life was given at the Second Vatican Council was filled by the teaching of Depth Psychology, mainly implemented by ungifted amateurs. With the demise of the traditional, God-centered spirituality that once thrived in the Church, new secular missionaries rushed in to introduce their man-centered sociopsychological therapies of one form or another. All methods, all ways, and all courses, no matter how bizarre, that promised greater personal psychological well-being and maturity were in, while all courses that offered traditional spiritual growth in Christ were out.
My knowledge of these divisive times comes not from sifting through contemporary documents but from experiencing these horrors for myself, although it has to be said that they mainly affected those living in religious life. The laity continued with the same sort of moral spirituality as before, although the quality of a person’s religious identity tended to be assessed by their liturgical preferences, by which other Catholics judged them.
From 1969-1981, I was the director of a diocesan retreat and conference center in London, so I was well positioned to see what other such centers were doing in the United Kingdom and in Ireland. The center that I was running belonged to the Dominican Sisters of Oakford in South Africa. The Dominican General, finding no clear spiritual guidance from the Vatican Council, sent her sisters to seek it elsewhere. On the advice of the Dominican Fathers in Rome, Sr. Margaret Mary Sexton sent sisters to a yearlong course on Dominican spirituality in Rome. Acting on the advice of a Dominican sister who had studied Depth Psychology in Rome under Professor Rulla, S.J., another group was sent to study psychological renewal in Denver, Colorado, under the Jesuits in the United States.
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Each year, different groups were sent to both Rome and Denver. The inevitable clash took place under a new General, Sr. Dolores, who sympathized with the sisters who were sent to Denver, Colorado, where professor Rulla’s teaching was disseminated and put into the hands of ungifted and ill-prepared amateurs. As Professor Rulla was a Jesuit, he had himself experienced the failure of that old moral spirituality in his own formation and in the formation of so many of his peers. He became convinced that a person’s “actual self” could only be transformed into their “ideal self” not by traditional methods of formation, which had been tried and found wanting, but by Depth Psychology.
Since I lectured in Mystical Theology at the Dominican renewal course in Rome, and as I was the director of the Dominican conference and retreat center in London, I was seen as the opposition. So, I was immediately sacked. Half of the community in the convent next to the retreat center, including the prioress and the novice mistress, moved from the convent into stables that I had renovated at the rear of the conference center. Here they awaited the approval of Rome for the new congregation that now thrives in New Forest.
