In 2021 Catholics in France were deeply shaken by the publication of a report revealing the dimensions of abuse within the Catholic Church there: content known at least in part by some, suspected by others, but which had never been documented as such, en masse. In the same period, Dom Dysmas de Lassus, Superior General of the Carthusians, emerged from the silence characteristic of his order and published a 446-page book entitled Risks and Aberrations in the Religious Life. For Catholics in France at that moment, it was striking that the voice that wanted to address this question was that of the superior of an almost thousand-year-old monastic community, known for its radicality and austerity and one that has never needed to undergo reform. The title, however, was dissuasive, as was the length. The blow of the 2021 revelations had struck hard, and many Catholics were already demoralized about the scandal in the Church at large. Who had the energy to immerse themselves in 446 pages of risks and aberrant behavior? (Not me.)
Happily, in its English translation, the book was renamed, a fact for which we can be grateful. Not primarily because more people might read it (no doubt a good thing), but mainly because the new, more inviting title better indicates what the book is actually about. It isn’t a forensic review of abuse cases, let alone a salacious exposé of clerical criminality. Rather, it is a clearsighted, thoughtful, and pastoral examination of what either makes for or undermines healthy religious life.
Dom Dysmas asks a twofold question: what patterns allow aberrant behavior and a “leadership” style capable of exploiting people—which he distinguishes from “authority”—to take hold of and damage communities and persons? And what subtly but profoundly distorted version of Christianity has been used to justify such dehumanizing patterns in some religious communities? As he proposes his responses, what emerges with surprising simplicity as a “path to healing” and counterweight is, paradoxically, the great “Yes” that God has pronounced to man in Christ, the trust that he has in our redeemed human nature, and the beauty with which this redemption can become visible to the world in the communal consecrated life to which he calls certain men and women.
Thus Dom Dysmas moves beyond French religious life. His words are pertinent for the universal Church whose members can be weighed down, here by traces of Jansenism and its nervous mistrust of human nature, there by an unconscious acceptance of modernity’s dialectical competition between man and God—thus held in a stranglehold by the twin hands of moralism and spiritualism. These are wounds in the Body as a whole, which can emerge in any Christian community whose nature and vocation is to be a concrete expression of this Body.
At his ordination, the priest is not changed from a frog into a prince whose role makes him automatically immune to poor judgment or even to evil. His ordination is a covenant, though, with Christ. If he lives it in truth, his whole person is transformed.
In fact, Dom Dysmas, begins to address explicit sexual abuse only in chapter 10. The first 162 pages of the book are dedicated to community life, in particular to “different aspects of religious life [that] can be hijacked and diverted from their proper goal, to be put instead at the service of a sickness that has more than a passing resemblance to cancer.” The first seven chapters touch on themes such as the inherent radicality in the call to religious life, the relationship between charism and institution, common life, obedience, ascesis, and renunciation. We also find a chapter dedicated to behaviors commonly found when these essential aspects take on distorted forms and end up congealing a community of men or women—who initially seemed perfectly normal—into something like a sect.
While not stated explicitly, the structure and sequence of this book seem to rest on the presupposition that the path to healthy, sanctifying relationships of authority, spiritual guidance, and affection between individual persons in the Church grows only from the good soil of the community in which these are rooted. What is this good soil? Many of the communities that faced serious crises seemed to embrace traditional practices of the Church: emphasis on the unity between members, the embrace of fasting and other sacrifices, carefully prepared liturgies, emphasis on frequent recourse to the sacraments of Eucharist and confession. How is it possible that communities that seemed so faithful to the Church’s practices could become places of such profound unfreedom?
As the reader progresses through the thick of Dom Dysmas’s analysis, one aspect of this good soil of a Christian community becomes clear: the absolute priority of created and redeemed reality and, in particular, that of the person. This includes his being embodied, sexually differentiated, maturing in time; his desire for totality together with his reason and his intuitions of good sense; his duty before God to form his conscience and live according to its voice. This means, above all, that he is irreducible to any other creature and irreplaceable—even by God—who is the very source of his freedom. He stands fundamentally in relation to His mystery and before His mystery, he must constantly remove his sandals.
The Carthusian moves as though through a room of treasures turned topsy-turvy, gently picking each one up and placing it back into its upright position and its original place. Regarding a hyperspiritualized and irrational approach to the world, he says, “Of course, there ought to be a place in our lives for a spiritual interpretation of what happens to us.” But he also warns that:
faith in the supernatural must not short-circuit our contact with reality. By means of […] spiritual interpretations, we risk giving significance to events that have none and, conversely, we may legitimize what is going on at the risk of whitewashing even serious errors, until it becomes impossible to differentiate between what is good and what is evil.
Or, in a substantial chapter on obedience: “Obedience … involves the intellect of the one who is obeying. This is characteristic of any human act.” And because obedience concerns precisely an act, “the abbot can ask a monk to bring the chairs back inside because he thinks that it is going to rain tomorrow; he cannot ask him to think it is going to rain tomorrow.” In every case, Dom Dysmas insists: “Obedience is a virtue of a free person. Any kind of subhuman obedience is a counterfeit…If we really are to be obedient, we must be capable of disobeying.” Obedience, lived in a true way, summons the whole of a person’s faculties and spirit and is never against the integrity of the person who obeys.
The Carthusian is firm when he comes across the tendency to place the person in an oppositional relationship with God: “We do not have to make a choice between the human and the divine.” “Humility is not a question of saying ‘I am nothing,’ but of saying ‘I have received everything, without any merit on my part.’ […] Of ourselves, we are nothing, but by grace we are everything.” God does not need us to disappear in order that He appear, any more than the sun needs the stars to turn themselves off so that it can rise. Likewise, I do not have to deny my positive qualities for fear of pride, as if “everything that is natural has to be replaced by something supernatural.” If I did, Dom Dysmas thoughtfully asks, “How could I ever know that God loves me? It would surely not be ‘me’ that He loves, but rather the thing he so desires (apparently) to put in my place—in other words, Himself.”
He is equally firm regarding that misguided ascesis that imagines that death somehow automatically leads to life. He cites the case of a nun who described herself as having come “little by little to feel like a dead tree, like a tree that had had its branches cut off and… there was only the trunk left.” She relayed her distressing experience to her superiors who celebrated it: “This is really wonderful, this means that you are really being pruned for Heaven…Look at the wood of the cross. It is a dead tree and yet it is this that gives life.” Dom Dysmas reflects on the distortion thus: “It is a wonderful thing; you are dying, but Christ is alive… Can it really be the case that it is the nun who gives life to Christ by means of her death? This seems a very strange inversion indeed.”
We’re dealing here with a contempt for human nature. It is noteworthy, in fact, that a common feature of communities manifesting sect-like characteristics is the extreme importance given to ascesis regarding food. However, as our author emphasizes, “Anyone who has lived in a religious community knows that there is nothing angelic about it.” Nor need there be, for Christianity reveals that
everything that makes up the human person is compatible with God … the only exception to this is sin. The humanity of Christ … comprises flesh, our sensible nature, the world of the emotions, imagination, the passions—neutral in themselves—pleasure, a complete psychology (the unconscious is no exception)—and all of this not only during his earthly pilgrimage but in his glorified humanity too, to this very day.
Chapters 8–10 treat those insidious relationships of spiritual accompaniment in which the absolute priority not only of God but of the person’s free and intimate relationship with the mystery of Christ is trampled underfoot. Persons damaged by such relationships use terms such as the “rape of my inner self,” or the “violation of the chastity of the heart.” Quoting Dominican Adrian Candiard, Dom Dysmas stresses that in a relationship of spiritual accompaniment “the priority, the only one, is that the person who is confiding in me in some way or other should grow in freedom, that he should love God more freely.” Candiard describes how a spiritual guide might be tempted to see his role as that of an efficient “problem-solver” and names the shortcut as the “devil’s signature way of working: if you manipulate things a bit, you can attain your goal more quickly.”
Dom Dysmas’s intention, though, is not to sow seeds of mistrust against spiritual directors. Rather, he wants to preserve two goods that should not in principle be in tension: to safeguard the person’s integrity before God and the possibility for him to approach the guide in filial trust, precisely because this latter has the utmost respect for his conscience. This idea, of trusting a guide and being accompanied deeply as a fundamental part of a person’s good, is refreshing in current cultural-ecclesial discourse and would have been worth treating in greater depth.
Is it valid to identify the cause of the abuses that the Church has suffered with the word clericalism? It’s true that clericalism—understood broadly as “sliding away from power for the sheep toward power over the sheep”—provides the necessary context for abuse to occur. But Dom Dysmas wants to look more closely, for example, at the fact that these cases almost always involve an egocentric mentality and a corruption of spiritual authority. For him the danger area is not an ordained priesthood as such or the fact of close relationships of authority and obedience.
Because those asymmetrical relationships are essential to social and ecclesial life, Dom Dysmas proposes that “moral authority should flow from a consonance with moral values rather than from a particular role,” that “the sacred dimension of a priest’s life is connected with the sacraments; it does not extend to his whole person or his every word” (emphasis mine). He is right: realism is essential. At his ordination, the priest is not changed from a frog into a prince whose role makes him automatically immune to poor judgment or even to evil. His ordination is a covenant, though, with Christ. If he lives it in truth, his whole person is transformed. For him, holiness will not pass alongside his priestly authority nor despite it, but in and through it, as its nature is to unite him to Christ’s own filial, self-sacrificing priesthood and thus make of his life an acceptable offering to God.
Facing the abuses in religious life, the question inevitably arises as to the response of the Church qua institution. The author has a sober and realistic esteem for the institution of the Church, which he considers the more exterior aspect of any community’s “immune system,” including the rule, canon law, chapters, visitations, councils. He is realistic, too, regarding the gaps in the Church’s juridical capacity to respond, especially to problems in new communities, movements, and associations. Resolving such questions will not be easy, he recognizes directly, and in the meantime, there are people who suffer and don’t know where to turn.
It is to these that Dom Dysmas turns our attention. Whether in the denial that sought to protect, or in mediatic accusation and condemnation, we have always seemed to pay more attention to the abusers than to their victims. Those who have suffered abuse in the name of God or under the camouflage of ecclesiastical practices deserve our listening, and our willingness to believe. For a long time, it was impossible to imagine that such crimes could take place in these ecclesial contexts, and victims who sought help were often met with: What’s not possible doesn’t exist—you must be exaggerating or lying. It is justice, insists Dom Dysmas, that will allow “us to give victims their dignity back, despite their wounds, and to reform perpetrators, despite the judgement against them.”
The structure of this book is not linear. The reader moves through a dense smattering of themes more akin to a long late-night conversation between deep-thinking and articulate friends than to an argument laid out according to a single guiding thought. This is also due to the fact that, as the author states in the first sentence of his preface, “[t]his book is not a work written in isolation.” It is the fruit of exchanges with other abbots or abbesses with whom the Carthusian collaborated and with Dominican theologians from whom he received substantive contributions. There is though, in the end, something beautiful about this organic, not-perfectly-airtight structure that reflects what it is to live and work in real life, in the flesh, when the soil is good in the Church.
