This is a
brief follow up of my papers which explored the phenomenon of a covert narcissist
priest.
There I argued that a narcissist priest (who during the Mass is supposed to be
an icon of Jesus Christ), in the reality the antipode of Christ, subverts and eventually
erases the presence of Christ in the minds of his congregation and swaps it
with his own, overbearing and entirely self-centered, presence [‘The Antipriest’, ‘The heart of
the New Testament’].
The only remaining
“intact” form of the presence of Christ in the church now is the Real Presence,
in the Eucharistic species, the Body and Blood of Christ [‘Vectors of the soul’].
I also
argued that the mechanics of abuse in a narcissistic church (the ecclesial
gathering which enables narcissistic abuse by the clergy and those close to
them) are identical with abuse done by a narcissistic mother, now being
“upgraded” from the temporal realm to the realm of the absolute (God’s church)
– hence the deadly impact of abuse in the church for those who already were
abused in childhood [‘The
loop: a formula of the spiritual abuse in the true i.e. with valid sacraments,
Church’]. I concluded that it was Jesus Christ in the Holy Communion,
His objective Real Presence (something that the believer cannot obtain outside of
the Church) that keeps the believer being imprisoned in the narcissistic church.
Christ thus seems to play the role of bait or even an enabler of the abuse, and
this impossible image, of Life and Love used by Evil and Death, crushes the believer’s mind.
Some things
are better grasped via a picture than via a logical argument. A believer knows
perfectly well that Jesus Christ the Redeemer and Liberator cannot be used by
evil or collaborate with it and yet he feels it when he is presented
with the sight of the abuser distributing that very Christ. What he sees and experiences
now in the narcissistic church overwrites what he knows.
I tried,
via making visual representations of the situation, to grasp the role of Our
Lord in the narcissistic church and to solve the impossible dilemma of a
believer “staying with Christ and having no life” or “leaving Christ and having
a life”.
* * *
A typical
human society consists of individuals with [relatively] normal psyche – i.e.
capable of empathy and genuine engagement with the others (red squares). Any
society always has some individuals with pathologies who for some reason are unable
to empathize or to relate to others in a genuine way (black squares).
Obviously, the more devoid of empathy/pathological individuals that are present,
the less healthy is the society.
Pic 1. The
earthly ministry of Jesus Christ
The above is what Jesus Christ had to deal with while walking in Galilee and preaching. His words and He Himself could be accepted or rejected by the others but he was never ignored, “not seen” or “walled off by silence” (this is something that happened to Him much later, close to Golgotha).
