There’s a strange phenomenon that’s been at work within the Church for the past sixty years or so.
A number of groups have sprung up within the Catholic Church that have become more or less full-blown cults. These groups present themselves as Catholic, but they share several of the following characteristics with cults …
- An “us vs. them” mentality
- The attempt to control every aspect of the lives of their members
- Secrecy – not being open about who they are or what their intentions are
- Recruitment of new members is done thorough “love bombing” and false friendships
- Members are isolated – cut off from their families and from society at large
- An emphasis on sex – either sexual purity or sexual license – which becomes almost obsessive
- Members are abused either psychologically, physically or sexually
- The founder is adored, and his sins or flaws are hidden or excused away
- Totalitarian techniques are used: history is rewritten, dissidents are shamed, expelled and stripped of their dignity and humanity, and brainwashing is practiced
- A spirit of sadism and masochism can begin to flourish
- Esotericism – the full truth of the aims of the cult is revealed only to a select few who have become sensitive and keen enough to appreciate the secret, after a long process of initiation; the true aims of the cult are hidden from the public and from new members
- A narrow and bizarre doctrine is taught and sick and perverse discipline is followed
Many Catholic sub-groups like this make a lot of money and cultivate a large following of powerful people.
The response by bishops and the Vatican to the formation of cults withing the Church? Typically they sit on their thumbs, or else praise the cult leaders, until, like the founder of the Legionaries, the founders are demonstrated to be wolves in sheep’s clothing, or worse.
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My question is this.
Is there a tendency within the “devout” demographic of the Church toward seeing the divinely constituted Body of Christ itself as being nothing more than a narrow, sick cult?
Here’s a character sketch of what I mean. It may even describe some readers of this blog! Let’s call this guy Vince. Vince …
- Operates on a strict “us vs. them” mentality: either Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, Christian vs. Secularist, etc. All good resides with “us”, all bad is found in “them”.
- Has a kind of nascent obsessive-compulsive disorder. Only by doing things in exactly the right kind of way can Vince find salvation. Thus a free spirit like Pope Francis who operates entirely off the cuff is horrifying to Vince, not merely because Francis emphasizes things “they” also emphasize, but because he’s spontaneous, and spontaneity frustrates the desire for strict control within the cult.
- Lying and immoral behavior are means that are justified by the ends, and our ends, the ends for “us” within the cult, are always laudable, by definition
- Our primary aim as cult-Catholics is to seal ourselves off from the rest of creation and hunker down. Power, security and control – over our own lives and over others – becomes our Unholy Trinity.
- Since an extended family always includes people who disagree with you – the boorish secular uncle, the spiteful liberal sister-in-law, etc. – family members are sometimes denigrated or even disowned if they don’t stick to the program. Even the bonds of natural affection are severed. The cult replaces the family.
- Sex is either Puritanically repressed at all costs, or made into a kind of magic rite that expresses our deepest longings for God. It’s never just sex and it’s never just fun – and it’s never what the Church teaches it is.
- Brutality is king – internal dissidents and external opponents who aren’t with the program are to be treated with a heartless and violent contempt, even if they’re bloggers or Facebook friends.
- Certain Catholic Media Celebrities are adored and may never be criticized, questioned or looked upon as normal fallible human beings.
- Vince might find salvation not by means of the sacraments, but through things like Gluten Free Whole Foods, Raw Milk, Multi-Level Marketing, Yoga, Yogurt, End Times Seminars, Guns, specific devotions or media apostolates, etc.
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Now an “us vs. them” mentality can help us to remember that we, as Christians, are to be in the world and not of the world, and to keep in mind that much of what passes for culture around us is degenerate and dangerous – and to remember that sometimes it is, in fact, “them vs. us”. Such an attitude can help us to be on guard – but if there’s anything antithetical to Christian compassion it’s letting your whole life be infused with the spirit of “us vs. them”. The more we think like that, the less we will love “them” and the more we will seek to destroy “them” (whether “them” are the liberals, the atheists, the Protestants, the “neo-Catholics”, the gays, the Democrats, the Jews, etc.) for “them’s” the ones who keep bursting our pretty little soap bubble. Them’s our enemies, dammit! and we’re not foolish enough to love our enemies! That’s certainly not why we’re Christian!
Vince, then, attempts to live in a cult that satisfies his need for control, power and security, rather than in the Church, which offers none of the above. The Church offers much more than control, power and security, but Vince and his fellow cultists won’t see that.
And then you have to remember the cult of the noncultists, who are, of course, superior to “all that.” People used to wonder why John Paul II went out of his way to bring the Society of St. Pius X back into the fold, especially when his overtures seemed to be rebuffed. Lest we become the cult of the noncultists, excluding the cults…..
And at its opposite paranoid extreme, it becomes the flat gray landscape of John Lennon’s Imagineland, where no one is allowed to be exclude anyone, not even themselves….
Beautifully put! I’m not a Catholic, more of a fallen away Cof E man trying to rediscover Christianity through God’s Grace, but I agree with every word of this article. The “Us vs Them” mentality is so destructive and yet so terribly human…
Spot on!
I confess, this is the first time I’ve ever heard of a Catholic cult like that. Are they in cities? I do think the us vs. them mentality has always been the basis for all belief in that Jesus said he who is not with me is against me, and of course the Jews were notoroious for keeping racial purity. Also, I think it rather natural for bonding to have an us vs. them agreement in carrying out effective foreign policies etc. in politics, developing a healthy cultural identity, etc. and I find the only people who don’t have an us vs. them mentality are liberals who seem to crave a one world order with nationalism and patriotism being bad things. They just have an ‘us’ mentality. It’s all about us and there are no ‘them’…the them have negligible value. Just sayin’.
Having just read Dena Hunt’s reply, I think I agree, if I’m interpreting her correctly. I can’t imagine not having an us vs. them mentality. Our family was a unit. Versus can be ‘in comparison to’ rather than opposed to or against. Our family was not the Smith family. Our family was Christian rather than Buddhists. Our family was American as ‘opposed’ to being Russian…capitalists rather than communists, ad infinitum. How can people sort themselves out if they don’t determine what they are not? How can they not be versus many things and keep a strong identity? As a Catholic, I pretty much feel versus the entire world. We’re to be in the world (evangelizing, eg) but not of the world. Just as you can’t know love if you don’t also hate, you can’t be someone if you’re not not something else. I often feel in opposition to gravity, too. haha I have to tie myself down to keep from floating clean away! ;o)