Christ-Centered Catholic Spirituality: From Theocentric to Anthropocentric Spirituality thence to Synodality

Until my 20th birthday, I was a Jesuit junkie. However, because of my dyslexia, I felt it would be impossible to join the Jesuits, so I joined the Franciscans instead. After attending nine Jesuit retreats both at school and elsewhere, I was well prepared to make my Franciscan novitiate into a Jesuit novitiate. During my final Ignatian retreat, the retreat master helped me to produce a sort of league table of the virtues that I would have to acquire in the novitiate if I were to become another Christ. I took the calendar down from my wall and assigned each month to the acquisition of a different virtue.

By the time my parents came for my simple vows, their erstwhile and errant son would be no more. The outward shape and form would only be the external shell that hid the new self-made man within. However, no matter how hard I tried, no matter what ascetical practices I imposed upon myself, after six months I found I had completely failed and the road ahead seemed to offer me nothing other than the continual failure that made me all but despair.

Thanks to a little book I found in the novitiate library by a Franciscan called John of Bonilla, published in the 16th century, I saw the light. On the first page I read these words: “With love all things are possible, but without love nothing is possible.” Despite the fact that my Ignatian form of “contemplative meditation” that had hitherto set my heart on fire suddenly fizzled out and turned into ashes, I continued to give the same hour after compline to personal mental prayer. Thankfully my new addiction to Franciscan spiritual reading led me to the mystical work of St. Bonaventure, the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum that concluded with inspiring words, encouraging the traveler to journey on into the darkness when contemplative purification begins and where alone, true love would ultimately be found.

The final retreat before my simple vows was given by Father Dominic Devas OFM, who had translated the work of John of Bonilla from the Spanish. When I showed him the league table of virtues that I had been given and tried to put into practice in the first six months of my novitiate, he was astounded. “Quite apart from anything else,” he said, “Where are the infused theological virtues, faith, hope and above all love, for without Love you cannot even begin the spiritual journey?” He told me that moments before Saint Francis received the Stigmata, he received a revelation to ensure that he would not misunderstand the sufferings of the Stigmata. The revelation came from Christ Himself, which stated emphatically that it is not by suffering that you are united with God, especially self-imposed ascetical suffering, but only through love.

I was finally converted from the Anthropocentric Spirituality that you find expressed in Ignatian spirituality, to the Theocentric Spirituality that you find in mainline Catholic Spirituality, as seen both perfectly embodied in the older orders from the time of Christ to the end of the 17th century.

However, I do not want to give the impression that the older orders in whom Theocentric Spirituality was perfectly embodied in the 13th century, still flourished in the Franciscan order that I had chosen to join; nor in any of the older mendicant orders for that matter. Since the love taught by the Holy Spirit in prayer was taken out of mainline Theocentric Spirituality in the aftermath of Quietism, the self-centered Anthropocentric Spirituality, that you see most perfectly embodied in the Ignatian exercises, insinuated itself, not just into the new activity-centered congregations of men and women, but into all other religious orders, and through them to the laity. I know because I gave retreats to all of them, with the exception of the Jesuits and the Carthusians, while simultaneously running a retreat and conference center in London from 1969 to 1981.

Both Theocentric and Anthropocentric spiritualities believe that it was God who first called us, and both believe that we are called to be united with Jesus Christ, as a prelude to being united with God the Father. However, in Theocentric Spirituality it is the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit alone who is seen as the only one who can sufficiently prepare us to be united with Jesus Christ. Our task is to create the quality space and time for prayer to enable Him to enter into us, to prepare us to be united with Christ. In Anthropocentric Spirituality, however, it is we who are expected to make ourselves sufficiently prepared to be united with Jesus Christ by trying to root out the sinfulness that is in us.

The very first words of the Ignatian Exercises make it clear that we are being introduced to a Renaissance-style Anthropocentric Spirituality. These words are, “Spiritual Exercises to conquer oneself and regulate one’s life.” This is further clarified in St. Ignatius’s “first annotation” when he writes that the soul has to “rid itself of all the disordered tendencies, and, after it is rid, to seek and find the divine will, as to the management of one’s life for the salvation of the soul.”

In order to conquer oneself in the Ignatian Exercises there are many different ascetical means, like those given in paragraph 85 of the Exercises, “to chastise the flesh, that is, giving it sensible pain, which is given by wearing haircloth or cords or iron chains next to the flesh, by scourging or wounding oneself, and by other kinds of austerity” that you will find nowhere in the Gospels. Nor are these austerities dismissed but rather encouraged by Fr. Fleming SJ in his modern commentary. You do not need to be a theologian to see that the Exercises are flirting with Gnosticism, Manicheism, Neo-Platonism, and above all else the semi-Pelagianism that St. Augustine fought against throughout his life. Then there are prolonged examinations of conscience to see our sins, and to see also all the great moral virtues with which we should be endowing ourselves and how we are failing to embrace them. Notice how all the focus is not upon the love of God and how He can transform us, but on self, and how we can transform ourselves. At this point defenders will always say—“Yes but with God’s grace,” but in fact, in reality all the practical emphasis is on what we do. Contemplation, the prayer in which the Holy Spirit gradually transforms us, plays no part in official Jesuit spirituality. This is what I mean by an Anthropocentric Spirituality. This endless self-absorption inevitably leads to scrupulosity which I have been reliably informed afflicted St. Ignatius himself. That is why in paragraph 345 he has to detail rules for dealing with scrupulosity.

Before the Council, this Anthropocentric Spirituality, which had spread far beyond the Jesuits, tended to put the emphasis on outward observance, much like the legalism that prevailed when Christ first came among us. After the Second Vatican Council, the spiritual bankruptcy it left behind made us ripe and ready for a hostile takeover that is squeezing the very life out of the God-given spirituality with which Christ came to redeem us.

For the Jesuits, this Anthropocentric Spirituality is still what it always has been: a way of finding the will of God, which they believe can be verified by what they call “discernment.” They are certain that they always discover God’s will in all things through this same discernment process. However, it is inevitably flawed, because it has been designed and used by sinful unpurified human beings who will, as often as not, get the answers that they have decided upon before the process begins. We have seen these same methods of discernment used by the promoters of Synodality, as I myself saw them used by Jesuits after the Second Vatican Council under the pretext of helping individuals and communities to discover God’s will for themselves. As a traveling retreat master at the time, I found that these discernment processes invariably led to the conclusion that both individuals and communities should henceforth adopt the new socio-psychological spirituality in which group interaction was mandatory in order to discern virtually everything.

Here we see clearly the forerunner of what is today called Synodality. Almost everything was permitted except to return to the spiritual rigidity of the past or to question certain infallible dogmas handed down from Marxist liberation theology by a new self-selected hierarchy. What helped to destroy Traditional Catholic religious life in the 1970s and 1980s is now the chosen tool with which to destroy the Traditional Catholic Church today. Let me give you an example of just one of these dogmas that was as infallible then as it still is today. LGBT morality is in, Catholic traditional sexual morality is out.

At the end of a week’s holiday in the Outer Hebrides with an American Dominican priest in the 1970s, he told me he was fearful of returning home. For in his own seminary and in other seminaries of both men and women in the USA, to be a straight man or a straight woman was to become an embattled pariah. The same is true today only more so, but now not just in seminaries but virtually everywhere in the Church. And all the signs are that in the ongoing synodal process LGBT morality is about to be canonized and dissenters quashed.

Earlier this month, Peter Swindal was in the news explaining how after a year spent in discernment under the direction of Jesuits it was made clear that he had a vocation to become a Jesuit. However, everything changed in the last minute of extra time, because he happened to mention that he disagreed with the LGBTQ stance of Father James Martin SJ, who despite his radical sexual stance was invited by the Napa Institute to take part in the Eucharistic procession from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral into the city of New York. After a whole year of discerning that God’s will was for him to become a Jesuit, God’s will, it seems, was hastily overturned the moment one of the great dogmas of the Church of Synodality was called into question. He was told that he must immediately accept some form of psychological counseling in order to see the error of his ways.

To understand how the Jesuits came to this point, it is necessary to read The Jesuits by former Jesuit Malachi Martin. The author describes the epoch-making changes that took place in the Jesuit Congregation from their General Congregation in 1963 to their General Congregation in 1973. Under the leadership of Father Arrupe they both adopted and adapted Marxist liberation theology as their blueprint for changing the world. In the same way they chose the latest fashionable psychotherapy as their blueprint for changing themselves and for changing others. In short, for doing what they believed traditional spirituality had failed to do in the past.

Although the liberation theology that began in Latin America in the late 1950s and early 60s did not begin or end with the Jesuits, they were eventually its greatest promoters within the Church. When their endeavors were harnessed together with the humanism of Freemasonry, a new form of Universalism that was already rampant in the secular world, called Globalism, began to take over the Catholic Church. It had a new form of government too, called synodality, that could easily be manipulated by a new form of hierarchy made up of self-perpetuating modernists. As it is long overdue that we return to the authentic Catholic spirituality that was first practiced by Jesus Christ before He handed it on to the first Christians, I will return to this theme next time.