When I read of the death of Anita Caspary on October 5 at the age of 95, I wondered where I had come across her before. And then it all came back. Many years ago when the late Doris Manly, author of The Facilitators and editor of the Ballintrillick Review, was investigating the influence of Carl Rogers on Catholic life and education, she and I read William Coulson’s tragic account of Sister Mary Humiliata IHM/Anita Caspary in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council.
In 1966, Sister Humiliata was the superior of the order of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, commonly known as the IHMs, in the Los Angeles archdiocese. At that time, it was a flourishing and progressive order of nuns, numbering 615, with a steady flow of young vocations. In the postwar population boom of America’s West Coast, the IHMs were a major force in the Church’s education and healthcare programmes, staffing some 60 parochial schools built to cater for the influx of young Catholic families. Yet, within a few years, this thriving and much-admired congregation had imploded, and by 1970 a mere 50 impoverished and demoralised sisters were all that was left of it.
All this happened in the heady days after the Council, when religious orders were instructed to “renew” their way of life from top to bottom. They were asked to examine their rules and customs, and to change them, the better “to fulfil the apostolate for which they were founded”, and to take into account the major cultural changes of the time. Despite the clear instructions of the decree Perfectae caritatis which insisted on the “importance of common life, as expressed in prayer” and the need for religious to retain some external symbol of consecration, pretty much everything was seen as up for grabs.
In 1967, after a series of all-embracing discussion, the IHMs voted that each sister could choose whatever work she preferred, that there would be no fixed times for community prayer, nor any recognisable religious habit. At this juncture, Cardinal James McIntyre, Archbishop of Los Angeles, told them that, if they went ahead with these radical changes, they could no longer teach in his parochial schools, and Pope Paul VI refused to bless such “experiments” in religious life.
A Highly Publicised Confrontation
By then, most of the nuns had little respect for Church authority, and community life barely existed. Under Sister Humiliata’s leadership, the IHMs refused to accept the archbishop’s authority, claiming that they were following the Council’s directions. The confrontation became highly publicised in the American media, and only ended in 1970 when most of the remaining sisters, dispensed from their vows, left to form the Immaculate Heart Community, a lay group, devoted to various forms of social activism, and open to anyone, married or single, of any Christian denomination. This group still exists in Los Angeles with some 160 members (although what constitutes membership is far from clear).
Not all the sisters followed Sister Humiliata’s revolutionary agenda in 1970. Some 50 or so chose to remain in religious life as understood by the Church—then and now. However, they soon found themselves both homeless and penniless. Unknown to them, before her exit from religious life, Anita Caspary, as she was now known, had illegally transferred the order’s possessions—a college, a high school, a hospital and a retreat house, as well as financial assets—to a secular trust controlled by the new community.
After Cardinal McIntyre’s resignation in 1970, his successor, Dr Timothy Manning, persuaded Caspary of the injustice of her action, and she agreed to transfer a quarter of a million dollars to the beleaguered sisters, while he himself provided them with a temporary residence. He also decided that taking Caspary to court, however justified, would not have been prudent in the heated atmosphere that then existed. In 1976 the remaining sisters left Los Angeles for the diocese of Wichita, Kansas, where they have continued to work as teaching sisters, have attracted vocations, and, judging from their website, have survived the upheavals of the Sixties.
The transformation of a vibrant and orthodox religious order into a free-wheeling experiment to “rebirth new forms” of religious life was imitated by many other religious orders in the American Church. Today, the results are clear—empty convents, practically no vocations and small groups of retired and elderly religious reconciled to their order’s demise. Another body blow to the American Church at this time was the wholesale departure of religious sisters from the parochial schools, often to take well-paid positions in universities and in the federal and state welfare programmes.
Carl Rogers’ Humanistic Psychology
The secular media and the National Catholic Reporter created the myth of the “heroic nun” who refused to back down when faced with the “intransigence” of the “staunch conservative” Cardinal McIntyre and the “rigid” Vatican. While the influences of feminism, sexual liberation and the civil rights movement played a part in these tragic events, the immediate cause of this radical split from Catholic tradition was the intervention of humanistic psychology in the form of Carl Rogers and his team of facilitators.
In the Sixties, Rogers was perhaps the best known psychotherapist in North America. In 1963 he had set up the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California. Encouraged by William Coulson, Roger’s chief of staff, the IHMs had invited the renowned psychologist in the summer of 1967 to prepare them “for an intensive look” at their life of vowed consecration. Rogers, Coulson and a team of 58 “facilitators” arrived at the motherhouse of the IHMs, and organised sessions of “encounter groups”, “non-directive self-exploration” and “sensitivity training” with the six hundred plus nuns. The experiment was a psychologist’s dream, but for the Church, it turned into a nightmare.
Why were Catholics so welcoming to Carl Rogers who, after all, was a professed agnostic, if not actively hostile to Catholicism? Why did William Coulson, a practicing Catholic, work for many years as Rogers’ most trusted deputy? Why did Catholic priests—and some still do—embrace humanistic psychology as a pastoral instrument, often displacing the Church’s traditional wisdom?
Humanistic psychology—variously named non-directive, person-centred and self-directed therapy—seemed far more in harmony with the Catholic understanding of the human person than either Skinner’s Behavourism or Freudian Psychoanalysis. For Skinner, man was just a superior machine, not really different from an animal whose behaviour is automatically determined by outside stimuli. For him, freewill, good and evil, and conscience meant nothing. Freud, on the other hand, emphasised the unconscious and destructive urges within us that determine our behaviour, and rejected religion as a “fairy tale”.
In contrast, Rogers seemed to recognise the unique dignity of the individual, his freedom and his “potential” for growth as a person (the title of his famous book was On Becoming a Person). He believed in the innate goodness of everyone, blaming external influences for the mental problems and destructive behaviour he encountered in his psychiatric work. Parents, families, school and church, and social conventions, he said, too often repress or inhibit the personal growth of individuals.
This chimed with the Council’s emphasis on receiving what is good in modern culture, as well as with the then-popular belief among Catholics that the pre-conciliar Church was obsessed with sin and temptation. Rogers’ non-judgmentalism was treated by many Catholics as a welcome change from what they judged to have been the guilt-producing morality of pre-conciliar Catholicism. The authority of the “inner self”, the “real Me”, or “my feelings” seemed much the same as one’s conscience, likened to the “voice of God” by William James, an earlier American philosopher and psychologist.
Therapy for Normals
The therapeutic process devised by Rogers aimed to “empower” the patient to discover the solution of his problem from within himself. Instead of handing down a diagnosis, as traditionally done by Freudians, the Rogerian therapist merely facilitated the patient’s discovery of the solution to his problem within himself. Therapy, according to Rogers, should lead to the discovery of the real Self, allow authentic decision-making and true growth. Through free-flowing discussion groups and interacting with others, people could “get in touch with their feelings” and begin to live authentically and so realise their potential. By the Sixties, Rogers’ interest had moved away from treating those with recognisable mental disorders to the general population, and had devised a “therapy for normals”, believing that, under the surface, many people needed to be “free to be themselves”.
Rogerians claimed that the results of their therapy proved its benefits. People were better at the end of their programmes than when they started. They were, it was claimed, more open and friendly with each other, better able to express their emotions, less deceitful and more willing to be honest with each other in working out differences.
No doubt, Carl Rogers and William Coulson believed that their therapy would make the nuns “better persons”. Both men believed that religious life caused all kinds of emotional repression. Rogers inherited a suspicion of things Catholic from his Protestant background, while Coulson, although a Catholic, was caught up with the iconoclastic euphoria of the post-conciliar era. No doubt, there were features of religious life that needed attention, but the Rogerian experiment turned out to be a lethal remedy for those it was intended to help.
What followed this experiment of non-directive therapy was a near-total collapse of religious life, and for not a few the loss of their Catholic faith. Within a year, 300 nuns had asked to be dispensed from their vows, and most of the remainder would follow their example by the close of 1970. After convincing the nuns that their desires and feelings were good, and should be acted on, not suppressed, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that what had begun as a questioning of religious dress and customs became a full-scale rebellion against all forms of Church teaching and authority. Religious vows, constitutions, rules and traditions, even the Ten Commandments, had little value when set against the dictates of the imperial Self.
An Epidemic of Sexual Misconduct
Nothing better illustrates the disastrous consequences of Rogerian therapy on religious life than Lesbian Nuns, Breaking the Silence, a book published in 1985. It contained a collection of 49 confessional accounts of nuns and ex-nuns, some of them IHMs, who were “empowered” to identify themselves and act as lesbians. One of the authors, an IHM nun in 1966, described how she was seduced by a “liberated” sister in the community. Later, plagued with guilt, she consulted a local priest. However, Rogers had got there first, and the priest told her he could not judge her actions. It was, he said, up to her to decide what for her was right or wrong. No prizes for guessing what happened next.
Both Rogers and Coulson were shocked at the results of their “therapy”, and cut short the original programme of “facilitation”, but not before giving it to two dozen other religious orders including the Jesuits and Franciscans, again with the same lamentable results including the sexual abuse of minors. Viewing the growing carnage in the Church, Coulson would change his mind about the benefits of Rogerian therapy, and would spend his later years warning all who would listen of the dangers of encounter groups and non-directive therapy.
In 1994, a deeply contrite Coulson confessed, “We thought we could make the IHMs better than they were; and we destroyed them…We provoked an epidemic of sexual misconduct among clergy and therapists… We overcame their traditions, we overcame their faith.”
Addendum: Recently a blogger wrote about a development in another province of the IHMs somewhere on the eastern side of America. The IHM leadership announced that the novices, the retired sisters and the active nuns would all live in one spacious building. However, since there are no novices, the seniors are soon to leave this world, and the active sisters prefer to live in their own apartments elsewhere, one may wonder who will inhabit this spacious building in a few years time.
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