Religion: How to Cure the Preacher

For the man who has been chosen to be a minister of God, the test of faith is no longer the only test he must pass. He may be given the Thematic Apperception Test, the Interpersonal Check List, the Miller Analogies Test, the Strong Vocational Interest Blank, the Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The Lutheran Church of America now gives all of its seminarians most of these tests—and not to keep neurotics out so much as to help them once they get in.

“We continue to ordain known pre-psychotics and schizophrenics,” says the Rev. J. Victor Benson, the Lutherans’ secretary for psychological services. At a Lutheran-sponsored conference in New York last week, psychologists and psychiatrists from other church bodies agreed with Benson that psychological testing is a valuable tool for assessing future ministers. And whatever mental illness is revealed can be treated by “a competent Christian psychiatrist,” or even turned to useful ministerial ends.

The psychologists had a friendly, ecumenical view of clerical neurosis. Jesuit William C. Bier, chairman of Fordham’s psychology department, said that the priesthood has a particular attraction for the potential schizophrenic. Dr. Fred Brown, chief psychologist at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital, reported that many rabbinical candidates were sick, but “no ‘sicker’ than the ministerial candidates of the Roman Catholics and Protestants.”

The ministry is fine therapy for some neurotics, argued New York Psychiatrist Gotthard Booth, who has been administering psychological tests to ministerial candidates for 24 years. Since the fulfillment of the deep need that impelled them to seek the ministry often has a balancing effect on mentally disturbed ministers, said Dr. Booth, many churchmen find in clerical garb “an ambulatory sanitarium.” But a good minister, said Dr. Brown, may operate successfully while driving his wife “to the brink of psychosis and his children into neurotic reactions.” Concluded Booth reassuringly: “There is some evidence that serious ‘nervous breakdowns’ occur less frequently in the clergy than in the average population, only half as often as in lawyers and physicians.”