Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) October 30, 2024: I should begin this article with a personal disclosure: I was in the Jesuit order (known formally as the Society of Jesus) from 1979 to 1987. As part of my standard Jesuit novitiate experience, I made a 30-day directed retreat in silence (except for the daily conferences with the retreat director), following the succinct instructions in the short book of spiritual exercises titled the Spiritual Exercises and written by the Spanish Renaissance mystic St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556). In any event, my 30-day directed retreat was a memorable event in my life.
Consequently, when the Argentinian Jesuit Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (born in 1936) was elected pope in March 2013, I decided to read up about him and then follow him and his papacy. He took the name Pope Francis in honor of the medieval Italian saint and founder of the Franciscan order, St. Francis of Assisi (c.1181-1226).
Now, because the Roman Catholic Church is a worldwide church and has an enormous number of faithful members, all popes are well covered by the news media, including Pope Francis. In his interactions with journalists, he turned out to be golden-tongued. Journalists did their jobs diligently and reported his golden-sounding words in the news media. Some of his golden-sounding soundbites sounded like music to the ears of certain liberals who had long considered the Roman Catholic Church a bastion of conservative views on several well-known issues.
Against this backdrop, I wrote my widely read OEN article "Pope Francis on Evil and Satan" (dated March 24, 2019):
It is a profile of the doctrinally conservative Pope Francis.
More recently, I wrote a critique of the Roman Catholic Church's moral vision of individual personal development in my OEN article "Robert Moore on Optimal Human Psychological Development" (dated September 17, 2024):
Briefly, I use the thought of the late Jungian psychotherapist and psychological theorist Robert Moore (1942-2016; Ph.D. in religion and psychology, University of Chicago, 1975) to discuss the two "shadow" forms of the masculine Lover archetype and the feminine Lover archetype in the human psyche: (1) The Impotent Lover "shadow" form of each; and (2) The Addicted Lover "shadow" form of each.
According to Robert Moore's psychological theory, there is only one optimal form of the masculine Lover archetype and of the feminine Lover archetype in the human psyche.
In any event, in my critique of the Roman Catholic Church's moral vision for individual personal psychological development, I claim that that vision embodies The Impotent Lover "shadow form of the masculine Lover archetype in the human psyche; and The Impotent Lover "shadow" form of the feminine Lover archetype in the human psyche.
I mention in passing that the women and men who work in the porn industry are mainlining The Addicted Lover "shadow" forms of the masculine Lover archetype and The Addicted Lover "shadow" form of the feminine Lover archetype in the human psyche. In addition, they tend to be strongly exhibitionistic. (I will return briefly below to the men and women in the porn industry, many of whom come from a Christian background, in connection with a certain passage in Pope Francis' new 2024 encyclical.)
In the meantime, no doubt many other ordinary Americans are also mainlining The Addicted Lover "shadow" forms of the masculine and the feminine Lover archetypes in the human psyche. But most ordinary Americans do not tend to be strongly exhibitionistic, as men and women in porn tend to be.
Similarly, a good many other Americans are mainlining The Impotent Lover "shadow" forms of the masculine Lover archetype and the feminine Lover archetypes in the human psyches.
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