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‘Discernment’ is one of those words I have come to detest because of its repeated misuse and abuse by the reigning pope and his minions. I am glad someone has tackled the subject of this misuse and abuse of a word to the point where it has lost its original positive meaning….
Does Bergoglian discernment have anything
to do with what Ignatius meant by the word?
Translated from
July 12, 2018
One of the central words in Pope Francis’s teaching is certainly ‘discernment’. As a son of St. Ignatius, Bergoglio knows the rules written in the 16th century by the Jesuit founder and therefore is fully aware of the importance of ‘discernment’ in spiritual life.
To discern means to sift carefully – it means to distinguish and to choose. But in what sense? To choose the good and refuse the bad. To choose that which brings us closer to God and refuse that which keeps us away from him. To choose virtue and reject sin.
But in this pope’s magisterium, the concept of discernment appears to have taken on a different connotation, to the point that we are made to understand discernment means, above all, to see up to what point it is possible for the individual to follow doctrine, and to what degree it is possible to choose instead what personal conscience suggests.
This way, it seems more like justifying human limitations, to separate that which is considered to be ‘rigid’ law which is supposed to be 'distant' from ordinary human beings and therefore ‘impossible’ to follow, but to replace it with a friendly and comprehensive accompaniment that is able to grasp the specific conditions to which the individual is exposed and therefore exonerate him of any fault or sin.
[Do Bergoglio and his followers not realize that it is, above all, the Ten Commandments they reject as being 'rigid, distant from ordinary human beings and therefore impossible to follow'? How 'foolish' it was of God to lay down his law - a series of 'don'ts', as it happens - on stone tablets, no less, so that early in the 21st century, the supposed Vicar of his Son on earth, would excuse any violation of his law, his rules for human conduct, on an individual's existential circumstances to the point for nothing counts as a sin against God any more!]
To face this issue of discernment in the context of the present papal magisterium means grappling with the model of faith and pastorality that this pope is indicating for ‘the Church’. [Quotation marks mine – because I would never attribute anything uncatholic said or done by this pope to the Church, as in the one true Church of Christ, but only to ‘the Church’ which is de facto the church of Bergoglio. The Jesuit motto is 'Ad majorem Dei gloriam" - For the greater glory of God. Can Bergoglio or his fellow Jesuits say that any of this pope's pet obsessions, actions and statements are for the greater glory of God?]
Therefore I find the essay I am reprinting herewith highly instructive. Written by Prof. Benedetto Rocchi of the University of Florence, it does not hide its dismay at the abuse of the term ‘discernment’ in many ecclesial circles today.
The professor wrote in an introduction to the text that he kindly sent me: “I belonged to the Comunita di Vita Cristiana where I had the good fortune to practice the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius – in which, however, discernment is something else completely!” I offer Rocchi’s essay, with my gratitude, as a contribution to the debate.
Discernment according to Ignatius of Loyola
By Benedetto Rocchi
There is one word that has been resounding more frequently in ‘the Church’ under Pope Francis: discernment. Which is invoked most of all on the most red-hot issues concerning morality, particularly those that have to do with matrimony and sexuality. But its use has since extended even to areas that are most specifically linked to doctrine, as in allowing access to Communion for remarried divorcees [without need to amend their life of adultery], and more recently, to non-Catholics married to Catholics.
Some permissive interpretations of passages in Amoris Laetitia and some progressivist statements on moral matters (such as homosexual acts) increasingly invoke the primacy of conscience on the formulation of doctrine [or on the discretion whether to follow doctrine at all], with doctrine being described as a cold and blunt list of do’s and dont’s, instead of the pulsing heart of Christianity, where faith and reason intertwine and are mutually supportive.
We are being told that through ‘discernment’, personal conscience can guide the believer to bypass and go beyond doctrine towards a ‘dynamic’ understanding of that which is God’s will for him, in his concrete existential condition. Mons. Paglia did so recently – clearly in consonance with many of his brother bishops – during a ‘formative’ session organized by the Dioecese of Oppido Palma (as recounted by Avvenire on May 17, 2018), in which he said that AL invites ‘the Church’ “to perform pastoral and personal discernment which allows, within the path of accompanying couples and in specific cases, that they can both have access to all the sacraments while continuing with what is, to all intents and purposes, a conjugal life”. He added that this helps overcome ‘facile schematics’ which often “closes off the way of grace and of growth” and “would discourage ways of sanctification that give glory to God”.
I do not wish to dispute the obvious ‘stretch’ made by Paglia on a passage in AL (which was ambiguous to begin with) which the pope has never deigned to clarify officially, leaving each one the freedom to understand it as he wishes. I say that Mons. Paglia is clearly in error.
But I think it is more urgent to reflect on the increasingly abused word and subject of ‘discernment’ because conscience is the essential place in which our personal relationship with God takes place, and erroneous teaching on discernment can well bring many Christians away from the right path to God.
Since the reigning pope is a Jesuit, the emphasis on the word ‘discernment’ should not be surprising. “Discernment of spirits” (Spiritual Exercises 176b) is a characteristic feature of St. Ignatius’s teaching and is typically experienced by those who practice the Exercises he proposed.
Since I was a member of the Comunita di Vita Cristiani during my formative years, I had the gift of experiencing these exercises many times and benefiting from Ignatian spirituality. But I do not recall that we were ever encouraged to an examination of conscience totally dissociated from the Church’s consolidated body of teaching.
[Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, published in 1548, are a plan of contemplation to be carried out over about a month They were intended for use during a retreat and are a central part of the first-year training of Jesuit novices. But one does not have to be a Jesuit-in-training to take advantage of the Exercises: Increasingly, lay people and even non-Catholics follow this path.]
So, after so many years, I looked up a copy of the Spiritual Exercises in the library to check exactly what Ignatius wrote about discernment. And what I found does not bear the least resemblance to what Mons. Paglia and other prelates like him [starting from, including and especially the reigning pope] have been preaching. [Well, if Bergoglio feels free to take liberties with editing what Jesus said or cherrypicking only what he finds acceptable in Jesus’s teaching, as he continually does, why would we expect him to respect Ignatius’s words any better?]
At the end of the second week of exercises, Ignatius explains how the Christian should face a choice about his status in life. In his dry style, which is nonetheless full of fervor and tension towards God, Ignatius guides the practicant, that is, anyone who understands he is making an important life choice and wishes to make that before God.
In Point 169, he starts off from a fundamental premise: In every good choice, our intention must be pure, “putting his creation, life and state for the glory and praise of God our Lord and the salvation of his own soul” (169a).
Any choice one makes must be subordinated to that end. With his healthy realism, Ignatius recognized that very often, men do the exact opposite: first, they make their choice based on their ‘disordered desires’ and then seek to see if they can serve God within this context. [Interesting that Ignatius used the adjective ‘disordered’, as the Catechism does to describe homosexuality as ‘intrinsically disordered’ – that description which LGBT ‘patron saint’ James Martin, a Jesuit, wishes to be removed from the Catechism. Perhaps Martin has never given a thought to, much less a look at, Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises since his first novitiate year!]
"In practice, it happens that many choose marriage, and then, serve the Lord God through marriage, whereas to serve God is the real goal… In this way, they are not approaching God directly, but they want God to ‘be aligned’ to their disordered desires, thus making of the end a means, and of the means an end, which means that they end up considering first what they should be considering only afterwards." (169b-c)
This is a general premise to all the choices one makes in order to live oriented to “the service of God our Lord” (169e), i.e., correctly oriented towards the will of God. As, for example, when we observe the failure of human relationship with a spouse, and above all, when we acknowledge that the choice of getting married was done not “to give praise to God and for the salvation of our soul” but simply to satisfy our personal desire.
The ideal Ignatius proposes to the Christian is a life in which every choice, big or small, is done for the glory of God. In reality, because we are sinners, we find ourselves, sooner or later, reconsidering all our past choices to assess their consequences for our soul, seeking to recover our orientation towards the will of God. Ignatius, who is a true teacher of souls, obviously knows this very well and leads the practitioner of his exercises to face these difficult and oftentimes painful decisions in our life of faith.
In this case, he introduces a fundamental distinction between ‘immmutable’ choices and ‘mutable’ choices. There are those that are the object of immutable choice, such as priesthood and matrimony, and others of mutable choice, such as accepting or giving up benefits, taking or refusing temporal goods (171).
In the first case, Ignatius is clear that we cannot turn back: In an immutable choice, when the choice has been made, there is nothing more to choose, because the choice cannot be annulled, as when we choose matrimony or priesthood. (172a).
I find it significant that in the matter of a few lines, Ignatius repeats as the only two examples of immutable choice the two ‘states of life’ that Catholics can assume only by way of a sacrament. They are choices that involve not just our will but that of the Father, too. Substantially, the saint tells us: The Lord calls us, out of love for us, to a state of life that he has intended for us and for our own good. So we must conform our choice to his call (and it is for this, precisely, that one should make use of discernment). Nonetheless, God respects our freedom and works through the sacraments with his creative and redemptive power even when our choice is ‘disordered and distorted’ (172c) by our desires, and not the response to “a divine calling, as some erroneously think.”
Because of God’s respect for us, the choices we make which imply a specific state of grace – as in marriage and priesthood – are immutable. And so, even if we then acknowledge that we made a choice to follow our own desires rather than what God desires for us, we cannot turn back. We have no choice but to serve God in the way we claimed God has led us to choose. So if that choice was not made correctly and in the way it ought to have been done – namely without our disordered inclinations – then we must seek to repent and to live an honest life in the status we chose (172b).
This interpretation of some passages in the Exercises that I have cited is consistent with what Ignatius affirms elsewhere in the book. His advice on choices follow the exercises that have to do with “state of life’. In 135d, the saint proposes an exercise about “how we should behave in order to arrive at perfection in whatever state and condition of life God our Lord allows us to choose" (2135d). For Ignatius, God allows us to choose in the full sense, meaning we can choose even that which is NOT our divine calling. [The true sense of free will: we are free to choose good or evil, but we must be responsible – and answerable to God - for the bad choices we make.]
In the case of an immutable choice following our disordered inclination, Ignatius says we must “live an honest life in the choice we made”. How then should we interpret this ‘honest life’ that he recommends? In the case of a marriage which now seems to have been wrong, or a choice that does not correspond to our true calling, what does it mean to live an honest life?
Any interpretation that allows a conjugal relationship with someone whom God has not made our spouse through the sacrament of matrimony doesn’t seem plausible. I wouldn’t want to be in Mons. Paglia’s shoes if, by chance, he has to explain to St. Ignatius his interpretation of AL! [And what about Jorge Bergoglio, SJ? Does he really care what Ignatius would say? He doesn’t care what Jesus would say to his many heterodoxies and apostate tendencies – and yet he is supposed to be the Vicar of Christ on earth. Did the plotting and scheming of the Sankt-Gallen Mafia, with Bergoglio’s complicity, represent the will of God? Or is Bergoglio the current ‘Vicar of Christ on earth’ merely through political chicanery – and, one must lament, the full complicity of at least two-thirds of the cardinal electors!]
For Ignatius, living honestly cannot mean other than living faithfully to the sacramental character of marriage: Whether we like it or not, we have become one flesh with our spouse even if we no longer love each other, quite obvious when there are children but even when there are none. God does not take back his graces, and the grace he conceded for a marriage that perhaps we claimed as a ‘right’ rather than accepted as a ‘gift’, nonetheless remains, ever ready to act on us if we allow it to.
This fundamental premise on the correct orientation to follow in carrying out an immutable choice is followed by very beautiful suggestions on how to exercise ‘discernment’ on mutable choices. In which not only must we seek to “perfect ourselves as much as we can” when we made the choice “correctly and in the right way, without regard for sensuality and the world” (173), but one can somehow correct wrong choices, or abandon them by making a new choice but this time with the right orientation… (but) if the mutable choice was not made correctly and sincerely, then one must choose again properly so that the new choice "will bear fruit that is good and pleasing to God" (174).
In other annotations by Ignatius (173-189), reason dialogs with faith and serves it, while faith continually illumines reason. Discernment, according to St. Ignatius, is not a narcissistic self-interrogation on one’s own desires, as many sentimental catechists today seem to think, but on the contrary, it should be an effort to detach oneself from one’s own desires in order to allow God to guide us, with his eyes, and according to truth.
After reminding himself of the end for which man was created, the Christian should then remain ‘indifferent’, that is, without any disordered propensity to be inclined or motivated to accept a choice under consideration or to reject it, or vice versa” (179b). Because it is only when we become ‘indifferent’ that we can ask God to orient our choice by praying to him (180a) and “reflecting well and faithfully with one’s own intellect” (180b).
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/07/2018 05:26] |