Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, head of the Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care, this week is running an international conference on depression, a mental illness which he described as the “number one killer” of our time. The gathering brings distinguished psychiatrists and medical professionals together with leaders in the church to outline a Catholic response to the problem.
This gesture of cooperation with the discipline of psychiatry comes at an interesting time, since another Vatican department, the Congregation for Catholic Education, is currently studying the use of psychiatric instruments in seminary formation with an eye towards issuing a document on the subject. Behind that initiative lie concerns inside and outside the Vatican that modern psychiatry sometimes rests on assumptions hostile to orthodox religious faith. To take an extreme case, belief in angels and demons is taken by some mental health professionals as prima facie evidence of disturbance.
I asked Lozano Barragán about this on Nov. 12, and he gave an essentially positive response about the application of psychiatry.
“Sometimes the use of psychiatry may be exaggerated,” he said. “But science, true science, is never contrary to religious truth. Thus psychiatry should be very welcome in the church.”
Lozano Barragán said that obviously if a given psychiatrist sets himself or herself up in opposition to religious practice, there could be conflicts. It must never come to a choice between “counseling or confession,” he said.
“In the end, the gifts of God that we administer are more important,” he said. “But psychiatry and the spiritual life of the church should accompany one another. What’s needed is a profound dialogue with the experts in this field.”
On Nov. 13, Lozano Barragán opened the conference with a fascinating overview of 20th century philosophical trends. His basic contention was that the root cause of today’s epidemic of depression (one estimate says 12 percent of the world’s population is depressed) is post-modernity, and especially its embrace of “weak thinking,” meaning relativism and skepticism. Given the collapse of confidence in human reason and in the rationality of the world — we can’t know anything, and we can’t trust anything — it’s no wonder, Lozano Barragán suggested, lots of people are depressed.
Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for Saints, argued that authentic Christian spirituality is the best antidote.
“Whoever truly believes in the paschal mystery of Christ, and in his or her own likeness to him, can never be depressed,” Martins said. “Depression is not Christian, it’s not part of Biblical anthropology, or of the Catholic faith.”
Martins meant, it should be noted, that Christian faith in itself does not produce depression, not that individual Christians who find themselves depressed have somehow failed in the spiritual life. That point was made at the Nov. 12 press conference by Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the spokesperson for the Vatican and himself a psychiatrist.
“Depression is an illness of the body, not the soul,” Navarro said. “It can happen to the most holy person and to the least holy, just like a broken leg.”
Case in point for my comment about America.