Sick Souls

TRANSCRIPT

Even before the COVID scamdemic, countless people suffered from mental and emotional illnesses. Many of you know that my own mother, whose sufferings and offerings on my behalf returned me to the Faith, suffered enormously from mental illness. She had crippling bipolar depression as well as acute obsessive-compulsive disorder — massive crosses not only for her, but for the whole family.

Her mental pains were likely brought on by an occasion when she was just 20, where she was brutally raped by her father in law while my father was temporarily away on short-term military duty. He had married her in England and, a few months later, brought his new bride back to his hometown near Dayton, Ohio, as he was decommissioning from the U.S. Air Force.

I knew none of this until the evening of the day when my father and I buried my mom — and my dad unburdened himself of a torturous secret he kept for over 50 years. That rape became the unknown, quiet horror at the center of our family, its tentacles reaching into every aspect of our lives and emotionally crippling my mother.

Through it all, it was the Faith of her childhood, instilled in her by fiercely-Catholic Irish parents, which kept her hanging on, and, yes, sometimes it was by the barest of threads. It was only years afterward that I learned from her that, while I was in high school one afternoon, she sat on the edge of the bed with a lethal amount of sleeping pills in her hand — ready to end the pain of her life.

A split moment before she ingested them, she had the inspiration to call information (411 for those of you who remember those days) and be connected to a random parish — where a priest actually answered the phone. I have no idea who that priest was, but he was able to convince my mom to put the pills down, speaking with her about eternity.

I share this with you to underscore that, in the end, the only real cure for a soul afflicted with mental anguish is God. Current psychotherapy has been completely divorced from the Divine for decades, and it is the patients who suffer even more as a result. Because of the increase in mental problems (which are, at their base, problems in the soul), Church Militant has produced a brand new Premium program on mental health.

Our expert is Thomistic psychologist Dr. G.C. Dilsaver, a man so respected in his field Catholic University Press said of him, in 2007, he "is rightly considered by many to be the father of Christian psychology." Dr. Dilsaver has been around the field a long time and published a book on dealing with mental pain, Imago Dei Psychotherapy.

One of the most reliable priests you will ever meet, Fr. Kenneth Baker, editor of Homiletic and Pastoral Review for years, said of the book: 

In this treatise on clinical psychology, we find a current presentation which is fully in accord with traditional scholastic philosophy and theology. The whole Catholic worldview of man, made in the image of God, a composite being of spirit and matter, is the philosophical basis of Imago Dei Psychotherapy. This is an invaluable tool for Catholic counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists whose goal it is to bring their therapants to a state of mental health which is in accord with both the natural law and divine revelation.

It would be foolish to think that every institution except the field of mental health has been invaded by anti-Christian forces. Of course it has been invaded. Nothing has escaped the taint and stench of the diabolical. And, just as in the field of media (like us here at Church Militant and many other faithful Catholics laboring in their own fields of expertise), it will be faithful Catholics that will help restore and claim back what the Devil has so thoroughly corrupted. Psychology is no exception.

New episodes of our Premium program on mental health and the Catholic life come out each Friday every week, and, of course, all of them are available for viewing at any time for Premium members. If you are not yet a Premium member here at Church Militant, we highly encourage you to sign up today. For only $10 a month, you not only get access to this newest addition to the Premium lineup, but on-demand access to hundreds of other episodes covering a wide range of topics in the Catholic life.

Church Militant has not changed the cost of being a Premium member since we first rolled out this feature more than a decade ago, and we have no plans to do so. We know money is tight for many people these days — thanks to the current political climate producing increasingly harsh economic conditions for families — and we want to keep our Premium content always available.

So please, click on the link and sign up today so you can enjoy hundreds and hundreds of hours of content for the good of your soul. This newest show (Mental Health: Catholic Perspective) carries the very message that convinced my mother to put down those pills and pick up her Cross, as mightily heavy as it was. Catholicism is life, eternal life, and it is this Faith which teaches us that pain is temporary. Victory is forever.