The P.O.T. trap causes two general kinds of problems - one earthly and the other spiritual.
1) Secular or earthly problems: Simply and bluntly, the Prophet for Our Time winds up with too much power. This was clear in David Koresh's case and also with Jim Jones. It is also true of less dramatic 'prophets'. As the only one with God's "now word" and the vital secret wisdom, he is above criticism and reproach. Who can argue with someone who gets his daily instructions directly from God? If you disagree with him, you show that you are either too proud or not strong enough to fight in the Lord's battle. You might even be opposed to God's plan. In any case, it is NEVER the prophetic leader who is wrong.
As the Prophet for Our Time, this leader has the lives and resources of others at his disposal. He believes he is the voice of God for them. They owe him unquestioning allegiance for the highest and noblest of rea-sons. This is not merely a source of pride; to believe this is itself spiritual pride of the highest degree. And the prophet is only human. Sooner or later, he will take advantage of his power. Again and again we see this truth: Wherever religious leaders have total, direct personal authority over others, they exploit them sexually and financially.*
A group's high spiritual ideals and love of the Lord is no protection. The prophet's high level of inspiration is no guarantee. If the leaders have total authority over their followers' lives, and if they are not subject to regular, effective oversight, it is almost cer-tain that some members of the group are being sexually manipulated and financially exploited.
"That may be true of some groups," the loyal member might respond, "but our leaders are different. First of all, we can see how spiritual they are. And besides, they are all accountable to each other." As we said in Chapter 2, looking holy is not the same as being holy. A man may be capable of inspiring a crowd of 10,000 Christians and still live in adultery. In a curious way, he is not even hypo-critical - at least not to his own mind. It is remarkable how easily someone can convince himself that the desire he feels for a woman is spiritual, not carnal. Adultery is what lustful guys do, the kind who hang out in bars. "Our relationship is more spiritual than physical. The Spirit brought us together." From believing that God has specially chosen me it is not far to thinking that his moral rules don't apply to me in the same way.
The idea that a team of leaders offers protection from abuse often offers only false security. The most powerful member - the "true prophetic voice and judge of the prophets" - can easily become the distributor of sexual ben-efits to, and in fact the seducer of, the others. These benefits may be fairly innocent, at first, as when a partic-ularly lovely young woman is moved into a man's household or put under his authority. Eventually, the leader will come to "have something on" the others and his control of them will be complete. It does happen. Sex is and always will be a powerful temptation. Authoritarian leaders can be counted on to abuse it.
If sexual misbehavior is always hidden, financial exploitation is in the open - but under a different name. God's work needs money, and young people with college sav-ings or - even better - elderly members with substantial retirement accounts "need to get their priorities in order". "There are 260,000,000 people in this country, and only about 2,000,000 of them regularly receive Mary's messages. That's less than one percent! Can't we do more to get out Our Lady's word?" In comparison with someone's eternity in hell and the possible triumph of Satan over the Church, money for college or retire-ment is a pretty minor problem. "Besides," the exhortation goes, "don't you trust God to meet your needs?" So even important earthly needs have less claim on our resources than the work of Christ. For Christians who really do want to give it all for the Lord or for His Mother, these arguments seem conclusive. They dig deep and turn over the money.
Of course, this kind of appeal is false. If I have an income or savings adequate to my needs and my fam-ily's, then God has provided. My income is the normal way for him to provide for me. If I give away what he provides, then I am not entitled to addi-tional provisions "in faith". Caring for one's family - including one's own legitimate needs - is one of the first acts of charity. Children may be starving in Africa, but my own children are just as real. They will starve if I don't feed them. Souls may be lost because they don't hear God's word, but God wants me to bring that word into my own work and social circles - and I can do this best if I fit in with the appropriate education. God does not command ignorance or poverty in old age, just so that we can help others do his work.
Just as important is the sorry fact that this money is often misused. A young man from the Third World once confided to me that his biggest complaint about most of the charismatic renewal leaders he had met was that they tended to travel first class, to stay in the bet-ter hotels, and to eat well in good restaurants. Lead-ers - especially God's P.O.T. - feel themselves entitled to special remuneration. Apostolates become full-time jobs. Wants become needs. Religious leaders - especially those who are not subject to financial oversight - can come to live comfortably on other people's sacrifices. It is naive to think that any person is so holy that he won't fall into this trap. It happens - often.
God does raise up prophets, and often they have something important to say. However, the reason Christ taught us all to pray, "lead us not into temptation" is that all of us can be tempted. Sex and money are perhaps the most potent weapons in the devil's armory. Even "God's holy man for our time" is not immune to ordinary temptation. It is almost a law of nature, then, that unrestrained absolute power results in sexual and financial abuse.
The second general kind of problem with the P.O.T. trap is that it changes the spiritual rules. God's way has always been modest. The Pharisees asked Jesus for a sign from heaven - some decisive, magnificent, undeniably supernatural event that would prove beyond all doubt that he was the Christ. Jesus replied that it is an "evil, adulterous" gen-eration that seeks a sign (Mt. 16:1-4). On the day Christ was born and God himself appeared in this world as man, a Chinese servant may have stood trembling in fear before his master, awaiting his rebuke for a mistake he had made. As Jesus died on the cross to redeem us all from our sins, a young Gothic hunter might have rejoiced, for the darkening sun made it easier to creep up on his prey. And when the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost, Mayan fisherman set out into the Gulf of Mexico to fish. In other words, when God was doing his greatest saving works, most of the world was going about its business. When Mary appeared for the last time in Fatima, 70,000 Portuguese - believers and skeptics alike - saw the sun spin and dance. And in America a similar crowd watched the White Sox beat the Giants in the World Series. Life goes on, even while God is changing the world.
A great spiritual battle is going on, but it is not a battle that makes headlines. God has always chosen to work mysteriously, through those who are insignificant. (Think of the press Our Lady would have gotten had she skipped Fatima and instead appeared at Comiskey Park! But she chose not to.) God's plan is not to overpower our hearts with great events, but to touch our hearts and minds individually by the witness of the truth. He wants not simply to over-come the cosmic Evil One; he wants me to repent of the hid-den sins in my own heart. His work of salvation has not been accomplished with massed armies, but with saints who love him passionately.
In our zeal for God's work, we tend to Americanize Redemption. That is, we try to apply American know-how to accomplish what the cross could not. It is tempting to see the cause of Christ as an organizational problem. To be sure, modern media and organizational management techniques can serve Christ and his Church. But the key is always love unto death - even death on the cross. With good organiza-tion and budgeting, effective advertising, aggressive use of the latest technologies we can fill a stadium with charis-matics praising God, fly more pilgrims cheaply to Medju-gorje, get Latin Masses established in more dioceses, send low-cost Bibles to Russia, and put papal encyclicals on the Internet. Good as all these might be, they are all secondary. The real battle is in confessionals and on death-beds, in the daily choices for love and against lust or greed or pride, in the Christian mother's quiet testimony how Christ helped her overcome her temper toward her children, in the manager’s decision to keep the faltering worker on payroll for those last 18 months until his retirement.
The battle is not against a purely external enemy. Satan is powerless without our sinful cooperation. The cutting edge of God's work, the center of the conflict be-tween Christ and Satan is always in the human soul. It is folly to try to structure a community that will have no sin, no weaknesses. An army marches in lock-step, but the People of God is a communion of individual souls. Each soul is the scene of the decisive battle against sin. It is the cross - not mass movements, small-group dynamics, or dem-onstrations of power - that overcomes sin.
This brings us to the heart of the issue concerning authority. Christian authority is Christ's authority, based on the Word of God and the sacraments. A true prophet or teacher's authority is the authority of God's word. He or she is responsible to proclaim that word, to speak it as the Lord leads. However, it is God's place to enforce obedi-ence. If those who hear this word do not accept it, the it is up to the Holy Spirit to convict them. Mother Teresa has received a true prophetic word about the dignity of the poor and about loving Christ in every one of our neighbors. But she does not to presume to insist that all Catholics must live among them as she does. She allows the Holy Spirit to draw young women to her order. And if one should come to her and say, "Mother, I feel called to a life of study and contemplation and teaching," Mother Teresa would not condemn her. As superior of the Missionaries of Charity, she would point her toward another order or religious group whose apostolate is study and teaching.
Unordained leaders serve the Church in valuable ways. But their authority can never extend to the entire Church. Neither can it extend to the soul and conscience of their followers or members of the groups they head. By her prophetic charism Mother Teresa reminds us all that what we do for the least of our brethren, we do for Christ. But it is only members of her order that she can command to work in this house or serve in that way.
Christ has given his authority in a fuller way to the bishops and through them to the priests who help them. This authority flows directly from their sacramental ordina-tion. They are ordained and authorized to preach the Gospel authoritatively, especially in the Liturgy, and to sanctify the People of God through the sacraments. Christ's death and resurrection - and nothing else - are the acts that redeem and sanctify us. The way Christ "applies" these to us is through the sacraments: In Baptism we are joined to him in his death and burial. In Confirmation the Spirit of the Risen Christ is poured out to strengthen us. In the Eucharist we receive and are joined to the suffering and dying Lord. In the sacraments alone do we fully encounter Christ to be sanctified by him. Our Savior has given authority over these sacraments to the bishops and priests of his Church.
This is what gives the bishop the authority to tell any Catholic what must be be-lieved. He watches over Christian doctrine. By his sacramental authority he can tell a Catholic whose sin is grave or public, "You may not approach Communion." And by that same authority the priest requires a penance of the sinner in confession and pro-nounces to the bride and groom that they are now husband and wife. If he turns out to be an inspiring preacher, a com-passionate and sensitive confessor, an effective teacher of the young, his ministry will be more effective. But these personal gifts are not the basis for his author-ity. That basis is the work of Christ himself, a work that the priest accom-plishes in his sacramental ministry.
The P.O.T.'s authority, on the other hand, is his own. What we see too often in those who fall into this role is that they become spiritual bullies. They push and per-suade, wheedle and manipulate, command and intimidate. Instead of leaving it to the Holy Spirit to convict their hearer's hearts, they try to overpower their hearers by sheer force of personality. The P.O.T.'s confidence, then, is not in the cross of Christ, but in the world's techniques. Through the sacraments Christ meets each person in his or her own freedom; the P.O.T. is above freedom and ultimately against it. The only freedom he acknowledges is the "freedom to obey".
In one respect the P.O.T. trap is the most destructive. The P.O.T. has an un-canny knack for using the other spiritual traps against his followers to ensnare and manipu-late them. By his actions he institutionalizes his own sin of pride. The P.O.T. trap is the one that undergirds cults or "mind-control" groups. The Prophet for Our Time is always a powerful, compelling personality - someone dynamic, able to touch hearts and move them. Usually he is far bet-ter at this than most ordained clergy. But he cannot deliver the spiritual goods. What he delivers is a suffo-cating, exploitative spiritual trap. At times the trap may even turn deadly.
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