¿El ser "sacerdote" es una enfermedad mental?

¿Qué diferencia hay entre una persona promedio y otra que afirma dedicarse de tiempo completo al "servicio de Dios"? La diferencia estribe en que los últimos afirman seguir un "destino", es decir, creen que "Dios" - claro, encarnado en una jerarquía humana, casi siempre de hombres ancianos y ricos - les confiere un destino especial para servirlo. Así lo creen desde numerarios del Opus Dei hasta sacerdotes y monjas por ejemplo. Pero hay más... Este cambio empieza con una historia, donde estas personas se sienten perdidas o alejadas del "mundo" y dicen que Dios los llama a seguirlo, salvándolos así del mundo mismo y todo lo que puede conllevar: como tener pareja o una familia. Comenta Walter Davis:

"This story is the key to the nature of the transformation it celebrates and the absolute split that transformation produces. A subject finds itself lost in a world of sin, prey to all the evils that have taken control of one's life. A despair seizes the soul. One is powerless to deal with one's problems or heal oneself because there is nothing within the self that one can draw on to make that project possible. The inner world is a foul and pestilent congregation of sin and sinfulness. And there's no way out. One has hit rock bottom and (so the story goes when it's told best) teeters on the brink of suicide. And then in darkest night one lets Him into one's life. And all is transformed. Changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Before one was a sinner doing the bidding of Satan. Now one is saved and does the work of the Lord. The old self is extinguished. Utterly. One has achieved a new identity, a oneness with Christ that persists as long as one follows one condition: one must let him take over one's life. Totally. All decisions are now in Jesus' hands. He tells one what to do and one's fealty to his plan must be absolute. There can be no questioning, no doubt. For that would be the sign of only one thing-the voice of Satan and with it the danger of slipping back into those ways of being that one has, through one's conversion, put an end to forever. The person or self one once was is no more so complete is the power of conversion. A psyche has been delivered from itself. And it's all so simple finally, a matter of delivering oneself into His will, of following His plan as set forth in the Book and of letting nothing be within oneself but the voice of Jesus spreading peace and love throughout one's being.

The most striking thing about this narrative is the transparent nature of the psychological defense mechanism from which it derives and the rigidity with which it employs that mechanism. Splitting. Which as Freud and Klein show is the most primitive mechanism of defense employed by a psyche terrified of its inner world. The conversion story raises that mechanism to the status of a theological pathos. Though the story depends on recounting how sinful one's life once was(often in great even "loving" detail) the psychological meaning of conversion lies in its power to wipe all of that away. Magically one attains a totally new psyche, cleansed, pristine, and impermeable. One has, in fact, attained a totally new self-reference. The self is a function of one's total identification with Jesus. Consciousness is bathed in his presence. It has become the scene in which his love expresses itself in the beatific smile that fills ones face whenever one thinks of one's redemption, the tears that flood one's blessed cheeks, the saccharine tone that raises the voice to an eerie self-hypnotizing pitch whenever one finds another opportunity to express the joyous emotions that one must pump up at every opportunity in order to keep up the hyperconsciousness required to sustain the assurance of one's redemption. The whole process is a monument to the power of magical thinking to blow away inner reality, and as such a further sign of the primitive nature of the psychological mechanisms on which conversion depends."

Esta nueva identidad se ve en el catolicismo de forma grotesca cuando los novicios agregan a sus nombres las siglas de su nueva identidad: LC (Legionarios de Cristo), SJ ( Sociedad de Jesús), OP (Domínicos)... Como un tatuaje en la piel, pero de forma más permanente, porque el nombre es visible mucho más que un simple tatuaje... y claro, dejan de ser simples humanos, o laicos, porque se supone que ahora son superiores, son parte de la "jerarquía"... Davis continúa:

"Conversion is thus the antithesis of what happens in an authentic psychoanalysis. A contrast between the two will bring out what happens within the psyche when it embraces conversion. The key to an authentic analysis is the assumption of full responsibility for who one is through the attainment of a concrete and intimate knowledge of one's psyche, of the unconscious desires and conflicts that have structured the history of one's life. Attaining such knowledge entails three steps. (1) Recognition that one is the author of one's condition; not Satan, not the parents, not demon rum in its effects on a pre-existing physiological condition. The state of one's psyche in its bankruptcy is the function and fruition of a desire. That is why, as Freud said, one must listen to the details of one's illness-not the appeal of remote and general causes-because it is in those details that much that is of value to one's future life must be derived. (2) Through the second recognition: that the problem of the psyche is not to extinguish desire but to reclaim it by freeing oneself from the self-defeating ways one has lied to oneself about it. To do that one must see that the trauma or traumatic event that has produced a crisis or breakdown in the psyche is the fulfillment of its own plan for itself. It is the thing one has brought upon oneself, like Oedipus, through one's effort to avoid it. As such it is what first puts one in the position to know oneself. As a being defined by conflicts that cannot be transcended but must be sustained.. The task is not to escape them but to enter into them in the right way. Conflict is and remains the reality ­and burden-of the psyche. (3) Which begets the third recognition. The recognition that one never escapes one's psyche nor achieves some form of ego-identity that guarantees a stability outside or beyond conflict. Change requires a radically different discipline-and change is what psychoanalysis is all about. What it teaches is that the possibility of change involves taking on a total responsibility for one's psyche. One does so not by fleeing one's conflicts but by deepening one's engagement in them. Life is a process of becoming responsible for oneself by deepening one's awareness of all that within oneself for which one must assume responsibility..."

Un gran texto, que Davis enfatiza en el caso de los fundamentalistas, pero también se aplica bien a todos quienes creen que sirven a Dios poniéndose en segundo lugar, olvidándose de la segunda parte del resumen de toda la ley: Amarás a tu prójimo, como a tí mismo. Y es notorio ver como en la jerarquía se olvidan de amarse a sí mismos, tratando se llenar ese vacío de amor con riqueza (sólo vean el BMW del párroco de San Jacinto en San Angel, la Ciudad de México), alcohol (la creciente cantidad de sacerdores con adicciones en impactante) o el sexo casual (dejando de lado los casos de pederastas, es llamativo saber como los novicios tienen relaciones sexuales con sus superiores, y como crece el número de sacerdotes con sida...)... Y todo por olvidar la segunda parte de toda la ley, y como la cumplen, tampoco cumplen la primera. Así, quienes se supone deben "pastorear", se convierten en lo que quisieron no ser, lobos.

Otro texto interesante es un artículo de Luis A. Várguez Pasos (archivo en pdf), de la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán. Titulado "La "guerra espiritual" como discernimiento vocacional: ¿ser sacerdote o estar en el mundo?", el artículo analiza las experiencias de doce ex seminaristas del Seminario Conciliar de Yucatán, ante la decisión, de primero, entrar a esta institución y, luego, salir de ella. Fue publicado en el número de invierno 2006 de la revista Relaciones de El Colegio de Michoacán.