There is only one thing missing in the movement to reform the reforms says Eugene Kennedy: “the fuel of neurotic guilt” needed to make people feel bad even about being good.
Catholicism has always made room for forgiveness and offered comfort to sinners. There are “reformers of the reform” who present a distortion of the church’s humane and understanding pilgrimage with its people, he says
“These zealots do not understand the profound pastoral majesty of a Servant Church whose energy source is the Spirit; they want a Church as Master that exercises power to control and condemn, if need be, every believer’s slightest thought or impulse.”
Eugene Cullen Kennedy is emeritus professor of psychology at Loyola University, Chicago.