THE CHURCH AS HOLY A Paper Written and Delivered by The Rev ...

on the one hand and British psychoanalytic theory and practice on the other hand.
My last ministry as a non-parochial Episcopal priest was as an associate professor for
three years at Loyola College of Maryland in Columbia, Maryland. There I taught
and did clinical supervision of clergy and vowed religious who were doing Ph.D.
studies in pastoral counseling. Most of my students were preparing to become fulltime
pastoral counselors and psychotherapists within Christian parishes or within
their vowed religious communities.
One day, when I had just turned 50, in a supervision group at Loyola, a
Roman Catholic Franciscan priest in his mid-40’s presented a tape. He was
counseling an AIDS patient as part of his doctoral internship with an area hospice.
The patient, a young man from Baltimore who was in his mid-twenties, spoke on the
tape with great strain and anxiety. He knew that he was in the late end stage of his
life. His Franciscan counselor listened in silence. Then, as the young man signaled
by his hesitant speech that he was afraid, perhaps having feelings of unnamed guilt
and dread, his counselor spoke, “It is time to let go. Release your spirit. Don’t be
afraid.” The dying man was quiet for a few long seconds. Then he said, “But I am
not ready to die yet!” At this point, the Franciscan shut off his tape recorder and
looked around the classroom at the group which was made up of two nuns, a
Seventh Day Adventist pastor, the presenter and myself. I asked the presenter,
“What would you like from the group” The Franciscan answered, “I am so
frustrated. This man has already passed through the stages of denial, bargaining and
anger. Now, he refuses to move into the last stages of acceptance. What must I do”
At that moment, filled as I was by a curious mixture of empathy for the dying man
and antipathy toward the Franciscan, I asked a question: “Is the man who is dying a
Roman Catholic” The answer came back, “Yes, but why do you ask” I replied,
“Does he have a priest who is preparing him for death” The Franciscan looked at
me, his eyebrows raised and his expression one of surprise. “That is what I am
doing” he said in contemptuous tone of voice. “That is why I am asking the group’s
help.” The other group members nodded in understanding. “I am trying to get this
man to accept his death.” With a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye, I
responded, “Oh yes, of course.”
The Franciscan student, the dying young man and the members of the group
had made eternally important choices as to the nature of the holy. They had been
taught by their ecumenical faculty, and had accepted, that holiness was to be
operationally defined in their counseling ministries by the psychological concept of
wholeness. As a result of this unnoticed yet dramatic deconstruction and
reconstruction of the meaning of the term holy, each of these ministers was now
operating with an understanding of holiness which was devoid of transcendence.
Whatever Catholic theology of the holy that these students had left, it had been
separated from the pastoral counseling task. In its place was a psychological theory
developed by a kindly atheist psychiatrist. I appeared to be the only person in the
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