No doubt we need to find effective ways to counter and combat the tragic anti-body heritage of Christianity in our psyches so that we may manifest body-positivity and sex-positivity.
Now, because of the extremely well-publicized tragic priest sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, you might think that American Catholics today would be crying out for the Roman Catholic Church to repeal the church law that requires diocesan priests to practice celibacy. But you would be mistaken to expect such an outcry from American Catholics. In the years since American Catholics started hearing about the well-publicized sex abuse scandal, conservative American Catholics have cultivated what the American Jesuit theologian Mark Massa of Boston College refers to in his new 2025 book as Catholic Fundamentalism in America (Oxford University Press).
In Pete Walker's Chapter 10: "Facilitating Spiritual Repair and Development" in his 2024 book Holistically Treating Complex PTSD (An Azure Coyote Book, pp. 333-349), he devotes a subsection to "Musings for Survivors of Fundamentalistic Catholicism" (pp. 337-338).
In any event, in the presidential election on November 5, 2024, many conservative American Catholics voted for Donald Trump.
Now, in various OEN articles, I have noted that Trump and his male supporters are misogynists. Because Trump and his male supporters are misogynists, they are not psychologically ready to experience the liberation of endogamous kinship libido that is "married within" their psyches that Ong writes about in his 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, pp. 10-11) his succinct summary of the Jungian analyst Erich Neumann's account of the eight stages of consciousness in his book The Origins and history of Consciousness, translated by R. f. C. Hull (Pantheon Books, 1954; original German edition, 1949):
"The stages of psychic development as treated by Neumann are successively (1) the infantile undifferentiated self-contained whole symbolized by the uroboros (tail-eater), the serpent with its tail in its mouth, as well as by other circular or global mythological figures [including Nietzsche's imagery about the eternal return?], (2) the Great Mother (the impersonal womb from which each human infant, male or female, comes, the impersonal femininity which may swallow him [or her] up again), (3) the separation of the world parents (the principle of opposites, differentiation, possibility of change, (4) the birth of the hero (rise of masculinity and of the personalized ego) with its sequels in (5) the slaying of the mother (fight with the dragon: victory over primal creative but consuming femininity, chthonic forces), and (6) the slaying of the father (symbol of thwarting obstruction of individual achievement, [thwarting] what is new), (7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [i.e., "married" within one's psyche] kinship libido and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness), and finally (8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism [such as Nietzsche's overman] - or, more properly, personalism - of modern man [sic])."
Ong also succinctly sums up Neumann's Jungian account of the eight stages of consciousness in his (Ong's) 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, pp. 18-19; but also see the "Index" for further references to Neumann [p. 228]), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.
In addition, taking various hints from Ong, I discuss Neumann's Jungian account of the eight stages of consciousness in my essay "Secondary Orality and Consciousness Today" in the well-organized anthology Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Studies of Walter Ong's Thought, edited by Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup (Sage Publishing, 1991, pp. 194-209).
Now, Robert Moore comments on the Roman Catholic requirement of celibacy in his 2003 book Facing the Dragon: "It might help the holy Father to have an articulate, brilliant, passionate, sexual wife. It would help him ground his infantile grandiosity, and his spiritual director would have a lot less to worry about. The boy king in him would have some help in coming down. I am not arguing for or against celibacy, but I can imagine the benefits the pope would get from marriage. Remember how archetypal projections can [further] inflate your grandiosity. Think if you were the pope. It would be a real spiritual problem to deal with your grandiosity because everyone constantly dumps their idealizing projections onto you. It would be a tremendous problem. If you think the priest [e.g., the priests in the sex abuse scandal] has a problem [with the idealizing projections dumped on him], the bishop [think of the many bishops involved in covering up the priest sex abuse scandal] has a greater problem, the archbishop has an even worse one, and if you were trying to be the spiritual leader of all the millions of Roman Catholics in the world, think of carrying that archetypal burden. Think about going around the world and having 400,00 people gathered in front of you idealizing you while you do Mass. This man obviously has to be relatively healthy emotionally in many respects or he would become greatly disturbed.
"So clergy have a huge emotional challenge. Just because you are ordained doesn't mean that your shadow disappears. I deal with clergy all the time who have massive problems managing their own grandiosity. They tend to act out a lot. In fact, the phenomena of clergy acting out sexually, or in substance abuse, workaholism, or any other compulsive behavior, relate directly to the problem of managing their inner grandiosity. Clergy burnout is nothing in in the world but a manifestation of grandiosity and the inability to regulate it. We need to work with this a lot to get more conscious of the problem. If we are going to pretend to provide spiritual leadership to the planet, we have to provide some spiritual leadership at home first, in terms of getting up every day and having our own ritualization to help us contain and channel our grandiose energies" (pp. 149-150).
Amen!
In short, Robert Moore sees grandiosity as a universal human problem. But ordinary grandiosity is compounded for the clergy and for others who have idealizing projections thrust upon them by other people. Robert Moore sees the universal problem of grandiosity as a problem that we have to "get more conscious of the problem."
Now, Philip Shenon discusses the priest sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church as well as the Roman Catholic Church's moral vision for individual and personal development in his new 2025 book Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church (Alfred A. Knopf).
I have discussed Philip Shenon's new 2025 book Jesus Wept in my OEN article "Philip Shenon on the Last Seven Popes" (dated March 11, 2025; viewed 559 times as of July 21, 2025):
Now, I did not vote for Donald Trump on November 5, 2024. I was appalled that my fellow Americans elected him to serve a second term as the president of the United States. In terms of what Robert Moore says about the pope and other clergy carrying the burden of the archetypal projections cast on them by the faithful, I recognize that my fellow Americans who voted for Trump on November 5, 2024, cast their idealizing projections on to him - as we Americans usually cast our idealizing projections on each president of the United States. No doubt this is an enormous burden for President Trump to carry - just as it is an enormous burden for each people to carry.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).