EWTN News reports that David Shellenberger, president and CEO of the Saint John Vianney Center, called for greater psychological support for clergy and religious, emphasizing their humanity and stressors. This appeal, while cloaked in concern, reveals the profound spiritual bankruptcy of the post-conciliar Church, which has replaced the supernatural life of grace with secular therapeutic models, reducing priests to mere patients in need of clinical management rather than souls called to sanctity and sacrifice.
The Reduction of the Priesthood to Naturalistic Humanism
The language employed by Shellenberger is symptomatic of the modernist infiltration into the heart of the Church’s self-understanding. When he states, “While they’re called to ministry, they are human first,” he inverts the proper order of Catholic theology. The priest is not “human first” and then a minister; he is alter Christus—another Christ—by virtue of the sacramental character imprinted upon his soul at ordination. This character is indelible and elevates him above the laity for the service of God and souls. To place his humanity as the primary lens through which his vocation is viewed is to deny the supernatural reality of Holy Orders and reduce the sacred priesthood to a mere function or profession, akin to social work or counseling.
This naturalistic reduction is further evident in the center’s approach, described as addressing “the multi-dimensional nature of the healing process — the integration of spiritual, human, intellectual, and pastoral well-being.” While the inclusion of “spiritual” may seem reassuring, its placement alongside “human, intellectual, and pastoral” as mere dimensions of a therapeutic model reveals a fundamental confusion. In Catholic doctrine, the spiritual life is not one dimension among many but the very foundation and end of all human activity. The Council of Trent teaches that justification is not merely the remission of sins but the sanctification and renewal of the interior man through the voluntary reception of the grace and gifts whereby an unrighteous man becomes righteous (Session VI, Chapter VII). To treat the spiritual as a component of a holistic health model is to subordinate grace to psychology, a hallmark of the modernist error condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which sought to subordinate the supernatural to the natural and the divine to the human.
The Omission of the Supernatural: Sin, Grace, and the Cross
The most glaring omission in Shellenberger’s discourse is any mention of the primary causes of spiritual and psychological distress in the clergy: sin, the lack of sanctifying grace, and the abandonment of the ascetical life. The Catholic tradition has always taught that the root of all spiritual suffering is sin—mortal sin, which deprives the soul of sanctifying grace, and venial sin, which weakens the soul’s resistance to temptation. The remedy is not psychotherapy but the sacraments: Confession, the Holy Eucharist, and a life of prayer and mortification.
The Saint John Vianney Center, despite bearing the name of the patron saint of parish priests, betrays his legacy. St. John Vianney, the Curé of Ars, was renowned not for his psychological well-being but for his heroic penance, his hours in the confessional, and his unwavering fidelity to the supernatural life. He slept little, ate little, and fasted rigorously, not because he was mentally ill but because he understood that the priest must die to himself to live for Christ. His “stressors” were not managed through clinical services but through prayer, sacrifice, and union with God. To invoke his name while promoting a model that ignores these realities is a blasphemous appropriation of his memory.
Furthermore, the article’s focus on “stress, anxiety, addiction, vocational transitions” as if they were merely natural afflictions to be managed clinically, without reference to their spiritual causes or remedies, reveals a worldview that has abandoned the Catholic understanding of the human person. The Church has always taught that suffering, when united to the Cross of Christ, has redemptive value. To pathologize all suffering and seek its elimination through therapeutic means is to reject the Gospel itself, where Our Lord declares, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). The conciliar sect, in its embrace of secular psychology, has effectively denied the salvific value of suffering, replacing the Cross with the couch.
The Complicity of the Laity and the Inversion of Roles
Shellenberger’s call for the laity to support clergy “with our time and our talent, and also, most importantly, our prayers” is a subtle but dangerous inversion of the proper relationship between the priest and the faithful. While the laity certainly have a duty to pray for their priests, the primary responsibility for the sanctity and well-being of the clergy rests with the bishops, who are the guardians of discipline and the formators of seminarians. The crisis in the clergy is not a mental health crisis but a crisis of faith, discipline, and fidelity to Tradition. It is the direct result of the post-conciliar reforms that gutted seminaries, abandoned the traditional formation, and introduced modernist theology and pastoral practices.
By shifting the focus to the laity’s role in supporting clergy through “time and talent,” the conciliar sect deflects attention from its own culpability. The bishops who implemented the reforms of Vatican II, who allowed seminaries to become breeding grounds for dissent and immorality, who suppressed the Traditional Latin Mass and its rich spiritual heritage, are the true authors of the clergy’s distress. To ask the laity to compensate for this systemic failure is to perpetuate the very structures that caused the crisis.
Moreover, the emphasis on “prayers” as the laity’s primary contribution, while seemingly pious, is rendered hollow in a context where the conciliar sect has emptied the liturgy of its sacrificial character and reduced the Mass to a communal meal. Praying for priests who celebrate the Novus Ordo Missae, a rite that obscures the propitiatory nature of the sacrifice and fosters a false sense of community, is to pray for men who are themselves in need of conversion to the true faith. The laity’s first duty is not to support the conciliar clergy but to seek out the true Mass and the true sacraments, wherever they may be found, and to pray for the restoration of the Church.
The Saint John Vianney Center: A Product of the Conciliar Revolution
The Saint John Vianney Center, founded in 1946, may have originally served a legitimate purpose in addressing the natural afflictions of clergy within a framework that respected the supernatural life. However, its continued operation within the conciliar structures, its integration of secular psychology with Catholic “spirituality,” and its promotion by outlets like EWTN, a mouthpiece of the post-conciliar establishment, reveal its true function: to manage the symptoms of the conciar revolution without addressing its causes.
The center’s website claims to integrate “Catholic spirituality with clinical excellence,” but this integration is inherently problematic. Catholic spirituality is not a complement to clinical psychology; it is the supreme science of the soul, ordered to the beatific vision. To integrate it with a secular discipline that often denies the existence of the soul, the reality of sin, and the necessity of grace is to subordinate the faith to the world. This is precisely the error condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, which rejects the proposition that “the Church is not a true and perfect society, entirely free—nor is she endowed with proper and perpetual rights of her own, conferred upon her by her Divine Founder” (Proposition 19) and that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80).
The center’s expansion to the West Coast through a partnership with the Kairos Psychology Group further demonstrates its alignment with secular therapeutic models. The name “Kairos,” while having Christian origins, is co-opted here to lend a veneer of spirituality to what is fundamentally a clinical enterprise. This syncretism—blending Catholic language with secular psychology—is characteristic of the conciar sect’s approach to every aspect of ecclesial life, from liturgy to catechesis to pastoral care.
The True Remedy: Return to Tradition
The crisis in the clergy will not be resolved by more clinical services, more wellness initiatives, or more laity involvement. It will be resolved only by a return to the unchanging Tradition of the Church: the restoration of the Traditional Latin Mass, the revival of orthodox seminary formation, the enforcement of clerical discipline, and the rejection of the modernist errors that have infected every aspect of conciliar life.
The priest is not a patient but a shepherd, a soldier of Christ, an alter Christus. His strength comes not from psychological techniques but from prayer, fasting, the sacraments, and union with God. The conciliar sect, in its embrace of secular psychology and its denial of the supernatural, has betrayed the priesthood and led countless souls to ruin. The faithful must reject this false pastoral care and seek the true medicine of the soul: the unchanging faith of the Catholic Church, preserved in the Traditional Latin Mass and the teachings of the pre-conciliar Magisterium.
As Pope Pius XI declared in Quas Primas, “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men… His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The Saint John Vianney Center, by subjecting the clergy to the authority of secular psychology rather than the authority of Christ the King, stands in direct defiance of this teaching. The faithful must pray for the conversion of the conciar sect and the restoration of the true Church, in which the priest is what he was always meant to be: a man of God, configured to Christ, and dedicated to the salvation of souls.
Source:
Catholic mental health leader calls for greater support for clergy and religious (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 19.06.2026