I just finished a novel set in Poland in 1942-1943. Nazi Germany had invaded, and Warsaw was turned into a living hell, full of rubble and ashes, starvation and disease.
The main character, Pawel, has endured a living hell for most of his life. He’s a man in his thirties, a loner, someone the world would deem a loser. He owns and runs a book shop his family inherited. It sits in the middle of an abandoned and bombed out street in Warsaw.
Excitement begins when a Jewish youth makes a harrowing escape out of the Jewish Ghetto, a small section of the city Jews were not allowed to leave. With bullets whizzing over his head, the youth ends up hiding outside the back of the bookstore. Without really deliberating on it, Pawel hauls the youth, a teenage boy, inside. He decides to hide him. And with that decision he joins the boy as one marked for death.
After a few months hiding out in the bookstore’s attic, the academically gifted and very religious boy begins sorting endless boxes of donated books up in the attic. He arranges them in various stacks. His biggest stack he calls “the borderlands” for, as he explains to Pawel, it contains “territory between the poles of wisdom and foolishness.”
A subset in “the borderlands” stack includes books from Shakespeare and the German novelist Thomas Mann. The Jewish youth calls this subset “the house of the righteous gentile.” Another subset he names “the house of the clever fools,” which includes works by the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who, like the youth, was Jewish.
Psychoanalysis was (is) a theory and therapy developed by Sigmund Freud in the 1890s. It “explores past experiences and unconscious (repressed) thoughts to help one gain personal insight and resolve emotional conflicts.” In 1949, Bishop Fulton Sheen, who will be beatified tomorrow, published a book titled Peace of Soul. In the book, Sheen rationally and thoroughly exposed the foolish cleverness of Freud’s version of psychoanalysis. (A foundational element of that foolishness, taught as science for decades, was Freud’s idea that every young boy had a repressed urge to kill his father and marry his own mother.)
In 1948, Sheen published Communism and the Conscience of the West, a book and topic not unrelated to Freud’s psychoanalysis—for Freudians and communists both begin with the false premise that man is an animal and nothing more. He is an animal with no soul; therefore, he has no personal responsibility. He has no guilt. And therefore, no sins to confess.
Sheen noted that, until Freud, no one in the modern world (except the Church) believed in confession of sins. But with Freud, people started believing in confession again. The difference this time around was that people were now paying money to confess the sins…of other people.
Why? Well, the world had thrown Christian truths in the wastebasket. But then, Sheen wrote, it pulled some of those truths out in isolated, secularized form. The deluded world thought it had made a great discovery in having people lie on a couch and confess things.
The world found it could not get along without some release for its inner unhappiness. Once it had rejected [the sacrament of] confession, and denied both God and guilt, it had to find a substitute.
Sheen explained:
When a man does wrong, he wants to avow it (own up to it). Because he knows it to be a wrong, he will not tell it to anyone who happens by, but only to some representative of the moral order. For what he seeks is a pardon. And to get back on the right track, man wants some ideal higher than himself or even his fellow man, some unfailing standard, with a spokesman willing to help him to that ideal.
Sheen wrote that no human being feels satisfied with uneasiness in his heart, where it rankles and festers. Rotten food causes the stomach to revolt and to vomit up the cause of the trouble. The painful and tear-filled eye demands the speck be removed. Is it any different with our consciences? Every sin seeks release. Just like the shard of glass under the skin that will cause great discomfort and infection if not dug out by a doctor and stitched up by a nurse, so will sin infect and disease one’s soul.
But what does our world do? It does the exact opposite of what Christ said to do. It represses the infection, the guilt, when it should be repressing bad behavior. It tells people to abandon themselves to evil and that will make them free and happy. It tells them to forget all the moral “totems and taboos,” which was Sigmund Freud’s mocking description of traditional morality. Of course, human experience has shown this to be horrible advice. People who commit evil are invariably more neurotic and troubled than those who do not.
The bad behaving people, modern psychiatry has discovered, need help for the diseased mind, just as doctors have always done for the body. They need, Sheen wrote, what religion has done for the soul from time immemorial—to get a release, get a confession.
…to keep sin to oneself is worse than keeping a disease to oneself. A patient confides his physical or mental sickness to the doctor, as a student offers his ignorance to the teacher; why should not sin also have its confidante?
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, thanks in part to Bishop Sheen, is generally laughed off today. Unfortunately, so is the Sacrament of Confession. If you are one of the laughers, and there is a good chance you are, then listen to Bishop Sheen explain something very fundamental and very psychological about Confession. He begins with the proven fact that no one is made better by having someone else tell him how bad or rotten he is.
Everyone wants to do his own telling, for he knows he can be made better by avowing the guilt himself. “Let me tell it,” expresses a primary right of the human heart. The individual alone has the right to repudiate a part of himself as the condition of betterment […] No trial is complete unless the defendant has a chance to take the witness stand to testify in his own case […] each person wants to be his own witness for the prosecution—to conduct his case against himself, not that he may be condemned, but that he may not.
The self-accused get forgiven. They merit pardon. Sheen wrote how a mother tells her child, “Tell me, and I will not punish you.” A man who pleads guilty before the judge will have a reduced sentence. This is true on the natural level, why not the supernatural level? If men can pardon other men who humbly admit their faults, why can’t God?
Let the scoundrel forsake his way, and the wicked his thoughts; let him turn to the LORD for mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving.
That is what Isaiah wrote to the Israelites. He was prepping them for what was to come centuries later in the flesh. And why did He come in the flesh? So that that flesh could be nailed to the cross for our sins.
It takes no courage to admit that one is guiltless, but it takes a heroism of which few are capable to take the burden of one’s guilt to Calvary and to say to Christ on the Cross: “That Crown of Thorns my pride placed there; those nails were driven by the hammer of my avarice; the scourges that fell on Thy flesh were swung by my lusts and cupidities.” (Peace of Soul, 128)
So have courage my friends. Have courage living in this earthly borderland between heaven and hell; this territory between the two poles of wisdom and foolishness. Have the courage to live as one marked for death. Because you are already marked for death. That’s a fact.
Quit looking for substitutes for Christ. He, and no one else, is your unfailing standard. He is your source of mercy on the supernatural level. In confession, you can get on your knees and say, “Let me tell it.” Then, when your trial against yourself is complete, you can leave the confessional and breathe the free air, with peace of mind. And peace of soul.
Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash
