The Post-Vatican II Pseudo-Spiritual Movement

'The misinterpretation of “discernment” is still being used to deceive the faithful—not just at ground level but at the highest level in the Church, as we have already witnessed in Rome.'

From Crisis

By David Torkington

With the demise of the traditional, God-centered spirituality that once thrived in the Church, new secular missionaries rushed in to introduce their man-centered sociopsychological therapies of one form or another.

After the Second Vatican Council, having received no help to inspire a new spiritual revival and reluctant to reintroduce the old moral spirituality that had failed before, there was a new “pseudo-spiritual movement,” seen most clearly in religious life. This new “movement” was to do what the old moral spirituality had failed to do.

While Marxism was developed into Liberation Theology in South America and was seen as the way to change the world, it was Depth Psychology that was developed in Europe, which was seen as the way to change oneself. In both cases, returning to authentic, traditional, Catholic, God-given wisdom was rejected in favor of the latest wisdom of the world. 

St. Augustine would turn in his grave, for the Pelagianism that he had spent his lifetime trying to destroy was alive and well and taking over the helm on the Barque of Peter. The slow and gradual spiritual deterioration that had set in since Quietism was now to gather a pace after the Second Vatican Council. For, if nothing else, the strong atmosphere of authoritarianism that had held the Church together before was suddenly lifted. The same sort of libertarianism that prevailed in the “swinging sixties” began to seep into the members of the Church, who soon began to vote with their feet.

The gap that was left when no document—nor any teaching—on the spiritual life was given at the Second Vatican Council was filled by the teaching of Depth Psychology, mainly implemented by ungifted amateurs. With the demise of the traditional, God-centered spirituality that once thrived in the Church, new secular missionaries rushed in to introduce their man-centered sociopsychological therapies of one form or another. All methods, all ways, and all courses, no matter how bizarre, that promised greater personal psychological well-being and maturity were in, while all courses that offered traditional spiritual growth in Christ were out. 

My knowledge of these divisive times comes not from sifting through contemporary documents but from experiencing these horrors for myself, although it has to be said that they mainly affected those living in religious life. The laity continued with the same sort of moral spirituality as before, although the quality of a person’s religious identity tended to be assessed by their liturgical preferences, by which other Catholics judged them.

From 1969-1981, I was the director of a diocesan retreat and conference center in London, so I was well positioned to see what other such centers were doing in the United Kingdom and in Ireland. The center that I was running belonged to the Dominican Sisters of Oakford in South Africa. The Dominican General, finding no clear spiritual guidance from the Vatican Council, sent her sisters to seek it elsewhere. On the advice of the Dominican Fathers in Rome, Sr. Margaret Mary Sexton sent sisters to a yearlong course on Dominican spirituality in Rome. Acting on the advice of a Dominican sister who had studied Depth Psychology in Rome under Professor Rulla, S.J., another group was sent to study psychological renewal in Denver, Colorado, under the Jesuits in the United States. 

Each year, different groups were sent to both Rome and Denver. The inevitable clash took place under a new General, Sr. Dolores, who sympathized with the sisters who were sent to Denver, Colorado, where professor Rulla’s teaching was disseminated and put into the hands of ungifted and ill-prepared amateurs. As Professor Rulla was a Jesuit, he had himself experienced the failure of that old moral spirituality in his own formation and in the formation of so many of his peers. He became convinced that a person’s “actual self” could only be transformed into their “ideal self” not by traditional methods of formation, which had been tried and found wanting, but by Depth Psychology.

Since I lectured in Mystical Theology at the Dominican renewal course in Rome, and as I was the director of the Dominican conference and retreat center in London, I was seen as the opposition. So, I was immediately sacked. Half of the community in the convent next to the retreat center, including the prioress and the novice mistress, moved from the convent into stables that I had renovated at the rear of the conference center. Here they awaited the approval of Rome for the new congregation that now thrives in New Forest. 

Fortunately, a young American Dominican priest, late of the Angelicum, Fr. Gabriel O’Donnell, had been staying with the sisters while completing his doctorate on Anglican Orders. He not only supported them at the time, but he has been supporting them ever since. He surprised me by telling me what was happening on our side of the Atlantic had been happening in the U.S. for years. While the small group of Dominican Sisters who originally sought to return to the “Classical Dominican Tradition” are still thriving, their one-time adversaries have long since been lost in oblivion. What has happened to them has happened to myriad other congregations when they stopped seeking Divine Wisdom and sought, instead, the human wisdom that destroyed them. 

Their nemesis came when clerical fraudsters masquerading as traditional retreat masters came to visit congregations under the pretext of helping them to “discern” their charisms only to convert them to their own instead. They devalued and desacralized the words charism and discernment so that they could lead the unwary away from the Wisdom of God in order to introduce them to their problematic version of the wisdom of the world. The misinterpretation of “discernment” is still being used to deceive the faithful—not just at ground level but at the highest level in the Church, as we have already witnessed in Rome.

When this happened, the whole emphasis that had once prevailed in religious life was reversed. Originally, the vows not only set priests and religious apart but gave them the space and time in which to be totally available to God. Then, as ordinary prayer led them into contemplative loving, they received God’s love in return, enabling them to receive all the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit contained within that love. This made them into the perfect apostles to transform the world in the name of Christ, who now lived in and worked through them. 

However, the new brand of “converted” religious saw that the availability given to them by the vows gave them a new freedom that enabled them to be radically open not to God but to the world, which they would change with the human wisdom that they believed had changed themselves. They had forgotten the words of Christ: “Without me you have no power to do anything.” Pride led them to their own destruction, and in such a short time. 

Far from renewing them, the new man-centered psychological spiritualities that prevailed after the Vatican Council destroyed them, and on an industrial scale. They asked for bread and the Council without a soul gave them a stone instead, so they turned to the world for the wisdom that would destroy them. 

Before leaving this subject, I must mention that psychology was used as a weapon with which to destroy those who opposed the new psychotherapeutic ideology. Many of those who still tried to championed traditional Catholic spirituality were ridiculed and, if they persisted, psychologically broken into little pieces. I have seen this for myself—not just pride at work but devilry. With even a smattering of psychology, it is easy to break a person; but rebuilding them is the work of half a lifetime if not longer. Yes, I have seen devilry at work many times over as the purveyors of this new heresy were prepared to stop at nothing to achieve their satanic objectives.

Fortunately, this new psychotherapeutic spirituality was not disseminated in general among the laity, who continued with the old moral spirituality and the self-chosen devotional practices that would never be sufficient to change them. However, the purveyors of the new secular wisdom and their mentors in Rome have abandoned every semblance of tradition for a new tradition that they seem to make up on the hoof to suit their own wills, not the will of God.

The myriad congregations of women that I remember during my upbringing in the 1940s and ’50s have simply disappeared, and the personnel of male religious orders slowly followed suit. The graces of Mass and the sacraments of the Church have not disappeared, but the spirituality that teaches believers how best to receive them has been denied them thanks to Quietism. Sadly, it was this moral spirituality that formed generation after generation after Quietism and then, finally, the bishops and their theological advisors who ran the Second Vatican Council.

The strange anomaly is that although Quietism was condemned for leading people back into Protestantism, it was, in fact, the Catholic reaction to Quietism that leads people back into Protestantism, at least in practice. By that I mean in the practice of the new moral spirituality that they share in common with Protestants. Needless to say, the main differences still lie in the Sacrifice of the Mass. However, without a Mystical Theology that teaches believers how to practice the divine, sacrificial, and redemptive loving learned in the prayer that Christ Himself practiced, they are ill prepared to access fully the fruits of our redemption. 
Modern Catholics, therefore, are only a hair’s breadth away from Protestantism. It is only the profound contemplative loving, as practiced by their first Christian forebears in imitation of Christ, that can give us the same access to the graces poured out in the Mass. That is why the present regime in Rome, for whom Mystical Theology has no meaning at all, see no barrier to the Christian unity that is just another step on the way to the New Globalism to which they aspire. The Mass is no problem for them anyway because it is little more than a memorial meal. 

The Second Vatican Council may well have produced a conciliar document that was trying to bring back the way the Early Church expressed its profound spirituality in liturgy, but it did so without any serious attempts to detail that spirituality for the faithful who were—and still are—lost without it. And that means without the profound sacrificial, redemptive, and contemplative spirituality that have long since been lost to view after the condemnation of Quietism. 

Contemporary liturgists, both professional and amateur, still fight to maintain the sacrificial character of the Mass. But they seem far less concerned about the way we practice the sacrificial and contemplative spirituality in our daily lives than in celebrating it in liturgy. It is not their fault but the fault of a prolonged exposure to a moralistic spirituality that must be overturned in favor of the Christ-given spirituality that once transformed a pagan world into a Christian world in such a short time that it still baffles secular historians.

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If you want to study and make this profound spirituality your own, please go to Essentialistpress.com, where I have summarized it in fifteen free lectures on video. I have also been collaborating with Ryan Moreau, the editor at Essentialist Press, in devising and encouraging parish priests to introduce this sublime, God-given spirituality into their parishes so that once again it can be lived by the laity who were the first to practice it years before monasticism was even thought of.