Religion: Saintly Neurotics

The Roman Catholic Church needs psychiatrists. So says Auxiliary Bishop Joseph M. Marling of Kansas City, Mo., whose address to the Guild of Catholic Psychiatrists is reprinted in the current issue of The American Ecclesiastical Review. Bishop Marling warns that it is the psychiatrists’s scientific knowledge only that the church needs−not moral notions, “consciously or unconsciously imbibed from modern thought,” such as assigning too much authority to instinctive drives, negating the power of free will, or overstressing the subjective aspect of sin.

But, with this caveat, the bishop invites Catholic psychiatrists to pay special attention to the problems of mystical phenomena (ecstasy, levitation, visions, stigmatization), vocations to the priesthood and religious life, and such common lay problems as sexual aberrations and “the ever practical matter of the validity of the assent given to the marriage contract.”

From Handicap to Holiness. Bishop Marling feels that the saints provide an especially rich field for the psychiatrist. For Catholic writers often show a misguided tendency to suppress neurotic elements in the saints’ biographies. For though “the struggle for perfection . . .tends to a balanced character, to genuine psychological unity,” there is no need to deny that many saints were neurotic. In Bishop Marling’s view, “Many a saint has borne a neurosis to a holy death, and enjoys the honors of the altar precisely because, though handicapped by ignorance of its nature and source, he struggled valiantly against it.”

As an example, Bishop Marling cites a study by a Catholic priest, “at home in the psychic realm,” of St. Teresa of Lisieux (1873-97), who seems to have suffered a severe obsessional neurosis.

“At her mother’s death,” writes the bishop, “when she was four and a half, she admits that she became reserved, timid and inclined to weep without cause. At six, she ‘enjoyed’ melancholy. At eleven, her sister, Pauline, her second mother, entered [the Carmelite order], A serious nervous breakdown resulted, with fits of catalepsy, hallucinations and delusions. Treatment failed; she did not recognize her own sister. A cure came suddenly when the statue of our Lady smiled at her. The propensity to tears and headache continued; she loved to be alone. At twelve, scruples set in; black moods followed. When told that she was too young to enter Carmel at 15, she described her feelings with such phrases: ‘A three days’ martyrdom,’ ‘lost in a frightful desert,’ ‘stormy waters, darkness, lightning,’ ‘dark night, utter desolation, death.’ ”

From Fear to Heroism. “What she calls her conversion, the conquest of tears, took place at Christmas, 1886, but it was not complete. Turning to the last year of her life one meets her intolerable fear that God did not love her, that heaven does not exist−a condition that she could not explain. The author [of the study] judges that she suffered from psychoneurosis, ‘sharing her disability with that section of humanity which has given the world most of its thinkers, artists, poets, musicians, and, we can add, many of its saints.’ But he shows how bravely and heroically she fought the neurotic tendencies−the propensity to tears, the scruples, the laxity that often accompanies scrupulosity, the urge to inflict others with a description of her intolerable melancholy. Her cheerful manner so deceived her fellow sisters that they had no idea what she meant when she spoke of her life as one of bitter suffering.”

Such studies, says Bishop Marling, open new approaches to the saintliness of saints. “The hagiographer will explore the terrain with greater skill if a capable Catholic psychiatrist be at his side.”