This book is about sanctity traps and how to avoid them. But before talking about negative things, we should first say what real sanctity is. After all, in the final analysis our job as Christians is positive - to be holy.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux has been called the great saint for our time. She knew how to be holy. But in one sense, she never did anything. There are some colorful anecdotes about how badly she wanted to be a Carmelite nun. On the other hand there are no miracle stories, no great works of evangelism. Her namesake in religious life, Teresa of Avila, traveled all over Spain founding religious houses. The "Little Flower" stayed in one place and never founded anything. She never came close to being Mother Superior. She wrote no great theological treatise and no manual of prayer - just her own autobiography. She had no great mys-tical visions and never received the stigmata. All she did was to spend each day loving God and her sisters in the con-vent. She chose deliberately to shower special care on those who were hardest to love - the really disagreeable nuns. Then, as her tuberculosis slowly killed her and her soul was assailed by doubts about God, she continued to pray and to love Jesus. She called this her "little way". Because of it, the Church recognizes Thérèse as a great saint. Being holy was not something she did; holy is what she was.
In the proper sense of the word, only God is holy. Sanctity or holiness is one of God's principal qualities. To be holy means to be both higher and fundamentally differ-ent. God is higher than any created thing, magnificent and powerful. Scripture speaks of him as "high and lifted up" (Is. 6:1). He dwells in glory, "in unapproachable light" (1 Tim. 6:16). Angels and saints alike bow before his throne. Demonic powers tremble before his majesty and power. God is also other. He is fundamentally different and separate. He is different from us. His ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts. (Is. 55:8) No statue or image even begins to resemble him. Because he is other - so different and separate - no one can approach him without God's special help. The people of ancient Israel knew that for a sinful human being to look upon God would be death. God is too high and too magnificent for mortal men and women to cope with. Only God is truly holy.
Because God is holy, anything that belongs to him is made holy; it shares in his holiness. And if a person or thing somehow resembles God, it too shares a kind of holi-ness. So if a building is set aside for the worship of God, it is holy. It is consecrated, which means "made holy". The church building is no longer profane, or for earthly use. This is why it is wrong to use it for secular pur-poses. The Church building is set aside for God and reflects his holiness. This is also the point of the second commandments, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." When we back up a surprising, but trivial piece of gossip with the phrase, "I swear to God", we are calling on the majestic and holy Lord of creation to stand behind a thoughtless tale. God's own name is holy and should not be used frivolously.
In much the same way, people can be called holy. Some people are set aside and consecrated directly to God's ser-vice. They are then holy in the same way that a church building or chalice is holy. This is why it is a sacrilege to strike a priest. Not only is it an assault against a man, but it is also and insult against God. Selected from among men to minister the sacramental mysteries, this man may no longer be treated like other men. This is also why priests may not hold political office or serve as armed sol-diers in war. They are set aside for God. The pope is called "Holy Father" or "Holiness" for the same reason. Some popes have been very saintly; a few were great sinners. But all were set aside to serve God as head of his Church on earth. No matter what the man may be like personally, he is still Holy Father.
The kind of holiness that we are all concerned about the most is personal holiness. That is what this book is about. This is the holiness that makes us saints. This is the holiness that the Second Vatican Council says we are all called to. It is the most important kind of holiness, because it is the only kind that God works inside us. If enough cardinals vote for someone, he becomes the Holy Father. It's all up to the cardinals. But whether you or I become holy is between each of us and God.
God told ancient Israel, "Be holy, as I am holy." (Lv. 19: 2) The way they were to be holy was to obey God's law, especially the Ten Commandments. God then revealed himself fully in Christ. Jesus is not only truly man, but truly God as well. He taught, "Be merciful as your heavenly Father is merciful." (Lk. 6: 36) Here is a new side to holiness. Christ reveals holiness as abundant mercy. That is why he added the second part of the Great Commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Jesus' whole life was an exercise in mercy which reached its climax on the cross. Jesus gave his life so that we would not have to suffer the just consequences of our sins. The true path of holiness, then, reduces to love. We become holy by imitating God's incarnate love and mercy in Jesus. Ultimately, every path to holiness (or "sanctity") comes down to this: accepting God's love and responding to him in love by imitating Christ.
If you are reading this book, it is probably because you want to be holy. Perhaps this desire has caused you problems in some way. Maybe you got ‘burned’ by a religious group. Or you could be confused about the latest demands that Christ or Our Lady is allegedly making on those who would be holy. The good news is that this desire to be holy is also God’s plan for you. As the Second Vatican Council so often reiterated, all of us are called to holiness. Few of us are intellectually brilliant, artistically gifted, or athletically talented. Not many have the chance to be heroes during war or disaster. But all of us can be true saints. In fact, it is our vocation. But on the road to sanctity we can fall into traps, and these are what this book is about.
The afternoon was warm and quiet that spring day. Both boys were napping and lunch dishes were cleaned up. Linda lay down on the sofa, closed her eyes, and welcomed a few moments of reverie. Disjointed memories and images floated lazily through her mind - - - thoughts of her day, the boys, her home, her husband Steve. Suddenly she sat upright: "What am I doing here? I never chose this. I don't love Steve." In a moment her entire perspective on her life, her marriage, and her faith changed.
A tawdry tale from Ricki Lake? Yet another woman who "found herself" and abandoned her family? No, Linda is a good Catholic woman who had consecrated her life to Christ. She did not leave her husband or abandon her children. How-ever, she did open her eyes to a serious problem. Linda had fallen into a sanctity trap. Because of it she married a man, but not because she loved him and wanted to share her life with him, bear his children, and grow old by his side. Of course she loved him in the way any one Christian ought to love another. She had even come to like and respect him. But she did not really want him for her whole life.
Because of a false idea of sanctity Linda had lost her chance to build a marriage naturally, on the basis of her own desire and decision. Instead, she - and Steve who had the same problem, it turned out - had to build a marriage out of duty. They had to love out of obedience, hoping that their feelings would eventually follow. They were victims of the Personal Prophecy trap.
Sanctity traps take many different forms, but they have similar results. Good Christians, wanting to love God and be holy, find themselves bound up, guilt-ridden, and often trapped in marriages or jobs they never wanted. The effects of a sanctity trap may be legal, social, psychologi-cal, or physical. In every case, though, the victims have lost something of the freedom that God wants for them.
A religious renewal community set the trap that Linda and Steve fell into. However, sanctity traps can appear anywhere. A freshman in college 2,000 miles from home, Luis almost ruined his health and had to drop out of college because of a self-inflicted trap. Inspired by books of the great contemplative saints*, Luis fasted severely, deprived himself of sleep, and spent long hours in prayer. When his father finally flew up from Guatemala to take him home, Luis was a physical and emotional wreck.
Sometimes another person's expectations can become a sanctity trap. Not long ago young people would enter religious life or the priesthood out of family duty; "someone from our family should do this". More often today, young people embrace false - and often crippling - spiritualities or ways of life because religious leaders or teachers convince them that this is what God really wants, because this is the perfect way to be holy.
The most serious and dangerous traps lie in groups and organizations. The past thirty years have seen a dramatic rise in the awareness of cults and cult-like groups. What was David Koresh's commune in Waco, if not a large sanctity trap? The same principles that form the Branch Davidians can be at work in other groups, movements, and organizations. Because of its leader, its isolation, and its end-of-the-world theology, the Branch Davidian cult developed into an extreme example of a sanctity trap. But other groups can develop the same patterns of leadership and control on a less intense level. Even if the result is not a fiery drama on the east Texas plain, good Christians can still be crippled spiritually and psychologically.
But what is a sanctity trap? By this term sanctity trap we mean any idea or practice that promises holiness, but instead delivers physical, psychological, or spiritual bondage.
As I said, sanctity traps can be found anywhere. Certain personal spiritual flaws can make us particularly susceptible to them. For example, St. John of the Cross, the great Spanish Mystic, warned against "spiritual gluttony". Many Christians whom God has blessed with an experience of his love begin to crave spiritual experiences. They become like gluttons who crave tasty foods and treats to enjoy. They pray to adore and honor God - yes - but they also long for and look for powerful religious experiences. Now, God does bless us with deep and moving experiences - the peace of Medjugorje, the radiance at Fatima, the overwhelming joy of yielding to the power of the Holy Spirit, the profound solemnity of a High Mass in Latin - but he uses these only to encourage us. God always gives his gifts so that we will seek him as the Giver. Spiritual gluttony forgets the Giver and seeks just the gifts.
Scruples are another spiritual flaw. Conscientious Christians can become overly responsible, constantly worried about doing everything right. The boss kept her late at work, dinner boiled over, and the 7th-grader needed the report typed tonight ("PLE-E-EASE, Mom?"). The scrupulous woman will then get out of bed at 11:17 PM, thinking that she has let the Blessed Mother down by forgetting to say the seven Our Father's, Hail Mary's, and Glory Be's for the day. Scrupulous Christians constantly fear that they are leaving something out or doing something wrong. Their great fear is that they are letting God down. Like spiritual gluttons they are psychologically vulnerable to sanctity traps.
If imperfections like gluttony and scruples make Christians susceptible to sanctity traps, groups and movements provide the opportunities for them. 350 years before Christ, the philosopher Aristotle remarked that we are social ani-mals. Human beings belong to society, and our social groups influence us profoundly. This is as important in religion as it is in worldly affairs. The Psalmist could have gone to the Temple whenever he wanted to, but he was happiest to go with other believers: "I rejoiced because they said to me, 'We will go up to the house of the Lord'." (Ps. 122: 1) Just as we enter into the "team spirit" at a sports event, we get caught up into the devout sentiments of a congrega-tion during a procession. We join our faith with the faith of the assembly. We make their hopes our own. In fact, this is Christ's will for us. He founded a Church so that each of us could be saved as part of his people. Only the Church has the whole Christ; no single Christian does. The Church is the Body of Christ. The individual Christian is always in a certain way incomplete.
Religious groups and spiritual movements build on the social aspect of Christianity. There are many ways to serve Christ and many good spiritualities. It is natural for Christians to come together into groups according to their experi-ences, interests, and temperaments. They can reinforce each other in their commitments. Alone I may set out to serve the poor and do a few good works for a month or so, but if I join St. Vincent De Paul Society, my commitment is more objective. Other members will help me remain more faithful to Christ's call upon my life. Often an organized group can be more effective than several individuals working alone.
Religious groups also offer a sense of fellowship. If I have had a charismatic experience and have begun to pray in tongues, my fellow Catholics in the parish may find this kind of prayer strange or even offensive. By attending a charismatic prayer group, I can experience the support of others who embrace this spirituality. Groups and movements represent important ways to live out a part of the faith. The Church alone contains the whole life in Christ, but within the Church many different groups can help us out.
To speak about groups is to speak about leaders. "Official" Church leaders - bishops, priests, abbots, moth-ers superior, etc. - get their positions in institutional ways. They go to school or get appointed. Movement and group leaders, on the other hand, arise "naturally", often on the basis of their strong personalities and dynamic lead-ership skills." "David Brown" went to the seminary and was ordained as "Fr. Brown"; ten years later, the bishop appointed him Vicar General, because he knows Canon Law so well. The Congrega-tion for Bishops in the Vatican recommended "Msgr. Smith", and then the pope appointed him to be "Bishop Smith". But the leader of the movement or prayer group is often the one who can inspire confidence and motivate followers. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who renewed the Benedictine order and founded the Cistercians, was such an inspiring speaker that when he came to town, many mothers hid their sons, knowing that boys who heard Bernard preach usually joined the monastery. Often the entire 'tone' or 'flavor' of a religious group is set by its leader. The Franciscans still reflect St. Fran-cis of Assisi's joyful simplicity. Mother Teresa shows by her life as well as by her words what it means to serve Christ in the poorest of the poor. This is why the second Vatican Council encouraged religious orders to remain faith-ful to the spirit and charism of their founders. The leader profoundly affects the group as a whole and its individual members.
Because groups can influence us so powerfully, they can lead us into sanctity traps. The reasons for this will appear throughout this book, but three of them are worth mentioning here: 1) perfectionism and elitism; 2) peer pres-sure, and 3) ambitious leaders.
At this point I should give you a warning. In this book I will discuss many different groups and movements within the Church - the charismatic renewal. the Medjugorje/Marian movement, the pro-life movement, and oth-ers. For the most part these movements and groups are good. I do believe that in the wake of Vatican II the charismatic renewal was a grace for the Church. It led many Catholics back into reading their bibles and gave a strong impetus to evangelization. The events in Medjugorje have not only resulted in many conversions, but have also inspired a worldwide rebirth of Marian devotion. In fifty years, Catholics will probably be grateful for the efforts of today's "traditionalists" to preserve the Latin Mass.
I could go on, but the point is simply that abuses and sanctity traps don't make a whole movement bad. God himself started Judaism. Yet Christ condemned the "sanctity traps" that the Pharisees and lawyers set for the people in the name of the Law of Moses. "Woe to you scribes and Phar-isees, you frauds! You shut the doors of the kingdom of God in men's faces, neither entering yourselves nor admitting those who are trying to enter." (Mt. 24:13) St. Paul warns against false teachers who "worm their way into homes and make captives of silly women burdened with sins and driven by desires of many kinds". (2 Tim. 3:6) This was in churches that Paul himself had established.
To repeat: The criticisms in this book should not be taken as blanket condemnations of any movement or group.
Perfectionism and elitism are the result of the fact that a group has rediscovered something important in Chris-tianity. They have found something that seems generally to be missing in Church life. For example, in the early days of the charismatic renewal, many leaders referred to the charismatic experiences - praying in tongues, spiritual gifts, receiving prophecy, expecting miracles - as a return to the experience of the early Church. They saw themselves reliving the book of Acts, as it were. It was not hard, then, to conclude that the faith of non-charismatics fell short of the full Christian ideal. In a very different way, dedicated pro-lifers can sometimes assume that others who do not participate in their activities fall short in their wit-ness to Christ. So we see a young protest leader challeng-ing a priest and Catholic university president to prove his fidelity to Christ signing on to a particular statement at a particular time. In the 1960s some questioned whether any fully committed Catholic could continue to live in the suburbs and not personally work against poverty and discrimina-tion in the ghetto. It is very easy for a group - any group - to believe that their charism is the one essential thing that every Christian must embrace. In this way they set up a new standard for Christian perfection. They risk seeing themselves as the spiritual elite.
Peer pressure: Religious groups are subject to the same patterns of behavior as secular groups of human beings. If cliques and rivalries can form within the sophomore class, they can also form in the youth evangelism team. If certain members of the marketing team always try to shine too brightly when the CEO is there, there will also be prayer group members who show off when the bishop visits. When a group has especially strong, charismatic leaders, we frequently see members imitating them - expressing their views, using pet phrases, even smoking a pipe, growing a beard or wearing long skirts.
In particular, ordinary peer pressure is at work in every group - even religious ones. We all naturally want to 'fit in'. We accept the group's norms and adapt our behavior to what others want and expect. In many ways this can be good, but it can become destructive. Peer pressure can prevent a Christian from witnessing to the truth. For example, the Latin Mass movement contains an undercurrent of mistrust of the American Catholic hierarchy. In such an atmosphere many people feel awkward and uncomfortable speaking favorably about their parish priest or sticking up for the bishop.
Ambitious leaders can overreach their charism and rightful authority. Every religious success and spiritual gift can bring earthly rewards - including fame and a repu-tation for holiness. Mother Teresa chose to serve the poor-est of the poor, and they gave her the Nobel Peace Prize. She has been on the cover of Time. Because of these earthly rewards, the leader can always be tempted to magnify his or her own status. Other leaders - especially Church authorities - may be seen as a threat to the leader's own influence and power. This tendency is normal. Even the apostles argued about which one of them would be most impor-tant. We all get defensive and protective of our positions, authority, and prestige. When this happens to a religious leader, though, he may slowly fall into pride and begin leading his followers not to Christ but to himself.
It is especially important to realize that some reli-gious leaders are even frauds. Some men and women con-sciously use the faith of devout believers for their own benefit. In the late 1980s and into the '90s the media devoted considerable attention to prominent televangelists whose "ministries" were devoted to making themselves rich. We know now that many cult leaders are motivated by a desire for power and the luxury of a personal harem. This happens among Catholics, too.
A particularly dramatic example comes from Italy. Upon the death of Padre Pio (whose life and ministry were exemplary) a young monk revealed that he had received the stigmata - almost as a kind of "passing of the torch". Soon his fellow monks and visitors to the monastery began to smell a sweet aroma in his presence. Stories of miracles and bilocations began to circulate. Eventually Father Gino - he had been ordained - succeeded in bringing the nuns of a neighboring convent into perfect obedience to himself. He began to enter into relationships of deep inti-macy with some of his young followers, encouraging them to depend too much on him. He became an important spiritual influence on many in Italy, and his reputation spread throughout the world. And he was a fraud. Investigations have shown that the 'stigmata' were faked. The odor of sanctity came from bottles in his cell. He had a strong, imperious will that he imposed on anyone who fell under his influence. His cult became a sanctity trap for his followers. And it was the result of deliberate deceit.*
The next ten chapters are a kind of catalogue of sanctity traps. I have broken them down into ten main ones. Someone else might find more, but these seem to be the most common ones. The ten traps are
1. "Holy Card Pictures" - confusing looking holy with being holy;
2. "The Obedient Wife" - that personal, family, and societal peace come from wives' being totally obedient and submissive to their husbands;
3. "Religious Recipes" - trusting formulas to make us holy;
4. "Blind Lover's Leap" - that Christianity is a matter of finding love so real "you can just feel it" and not of thinking;
5. "Personal Prophecy" - that God has a specific thing he wants of you and that you must decipher his clues to it;
6. "Prophet for Our Age" - that something so new is happening that to serve God we must follow the new prophet he is raising up;
7. "Devils Are Everywhere" - that all the events in the world and even the thoughts in my own mind are under the devil's constant influence;
8. The "Deny Your Self" - that self-denial means denying that I have a mind and a self;
9. "Big Happy Family" - the illusion that perfect family love and acceptance are possible in a spiritual or religious group of 'real' brothers and sisters in Christ, and
10. "Perfection Is Possible" - expecting that a pure and perfect experience of holiness is possible in this life and that we can find a pure and perfect Church life.
Each of the next ten chapters will examine one of these traps. We will look closely at some true-life experiences of these traps*, at the lives of some saints, and at what Scripture says. Most important, we will uncover positive steps for avoiding and getting free of such traps.
Chapters in Sanctity Traps
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7 - Part 1
Chapter 7 - Part 2
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11