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ROGERIAN THEORIES HURT RELIGIOUS ORDERS, SAYS LOCAL PSYCHOLOGIST

By George Neumayr

In the 1960s, psychologist William Coulson counseled priests and nuns to "get in touch with their feelings." Now Coulson views that advice with horror. "My theories made priests and nuns feel good about being bad," said Coulson in a September 24 interview from his home in Mendocino County.

Working with his mentor Carl Rogers, a psychologist famous for his morally relativistic non-directive therapy, Coulson conducted sensitivity training and self-esteem workshops for numerous religious orders in the Bay Area and elsewhere: "During 1967-1969, Rogers and I and others worked with the Immaculate Heart Sisters, the Franciscans, who are now headquartered in the Bay Area, the Sisters of Mercy in Burlingame, the Congregation of the Sacred Heart (which was then at Lone Mountain in San Francisco), and the Jesuits at Alma Collge, which was then their theologate in the woods outside of Los Gatos."

Eager to absorb the "wisdom" of the secular social sciences after Vatican II, these orders turned to Rogerian psychology for "refreshment," said Coulson. Instead, they got revolution.

"They became persuaded of this subjective theory of morality which says that the highest morality is the one you locate within you. And after awhile these religious forgot about the teachings of the Church. They thought that they didn't need to go to anything outside of themselves. In fact, our non-directive method seems to have suggested to them that it was a sign of bad faith if they did; it said, in effect, look within you and if you don't find discomfort with breaking the rules, then go ahead and break them."

Coulson recalled how the "warm," permissive, non-judgmental Rogerian workshops encouraged priests and nuns to explore temptation.

"Once we began to peel the onion at these workshops, there was no end to the shocking things people would say. I remember one group where a religious grew increasingly red in the face as the weekend went on. There was obviously something he wanted to say but couldn't. But our attitude was: 'I think if you want to say that, you will; if you don't, that is okay, too.' So eventually he says it. Well, it is about masturbation. He felt so ashamed, but one after another a number of people in that group said that they had the same problem. So the net effect, I'm afraid, at the end of the group was that everybody felt better about masturbation, since everybody was being so open and non-judgmental about it."

And the sordid confessions were just the beginning, according to Coulson. "Emotional liberation" soon led to contempt for religious life.

"After our workshop at Alma, one of the young Jesuits wrote, 'Never in my life before that group experience had I experienced me so intently. And then to have that me so confirmed and loved by the group, who by this time were sensitive and reacting to my phoniness, was like receiving a gift I could never repay.' So this young Jesuit goes onto to get ordained and then leaves the priesthood and goes to a humanistic university and gets himself a doctorate in psychology and tries to repay the gift by going out and getting other people to do it."

"We worked with the Immaculate Heart sisters. It followed up an earlier series of interventions by a team of psychologists from Duquesne, the Catholic university in Pittsburgh. There were workshops for the sisters in the Bay Area as well as in Southern California. More than half of them petitioned Rome en masse to be released from their vows and they became a lay non-canonical group."

"And then there were the Franciscans who were so enamored with our psychology that they introduced it to Saint Anthony's seminary in Santa Barbara. Years later, 11 or 12 friars were accused of molesting 34 high school boys. I'm afraid that we planted the seeds and they carried the seeds to the next generation and they germinated."

(Not all the religious at his workshops fell under Rogers' spell, Coulson pointed out. One priest bluntly told Rogers and his facilitators off, "You want me to talk like a therapy client; I want to talk like a Catholic priest.")

In 1971, Coulson quit his work as a Rogerian therapist. Later, Rogers himself would repudiate Rogerianism, saying, "I greatly underestimated the reality of evil," and, "I hope Rogerian theory goes down the drain." (The reversal came, Coulson said, after a tragedy in Rogers' life: "There was a time when his three granddaughters didn't have a mother at home because she had walked out on them in the name of self-actualization.")

But Coulson says that Rogerianism's influence on Catholic life continues.

"The master himself has renounced what he created, but it has been impossible to call it back because it is in all these printed curricula in Catholic schools.

"I get calls now and then from Catholic parents who have a traditional commitment to the Catholic faith who are appalled by the level of flakiness in parochial schools...I recently visited a Catholic school to see a family life education book called New Creation. I found on page 86 of the sixth grade textbook the statement, 'God wants us to be sexual.' This is a textbook for sixth graders!

"There are Catholics who are in charge of school systems who still don't see the folly of the relativism promoted by Rogers and others. Common sense, no less than Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, suggests that if you have done something wrong, you tend to justify it. So when orthodox Catholics question these people about their practices, they react defensively, sometimes accusing their critics of being 'rigid' and 'fearful of change.' I suspect that, in their heart of hearts, they worry that the complaints are actually justified."

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