Transcription
He was first trained to heal with a scalpel and later called to heal in the confessional.
God knows absolutely everything. Father Wes Lao Vial is a priest and professor at the Pontipical University of the Holy Cross working at the meeting point of medicine, psychology and faith.
They are very intertwined. We have to see them together.
Through books like psychology and Christian life and his study on Victor Frankle, he takes on a question many people don't know how to respond to. How can psychology help confessors? In this interview, EWTN Vatican correspondent Magdalena Volinska Riedi speaks with Father Vial about what confession can give that therapy cannot.
What does it mean for you personally to be a confessor and on the other hand to be a doctor on psychology and spiritual life?
It helps me because I get into what the dimensions of the human being are. That is the human being must always be seen in three dimensions. The body, psychological and spiritual. We cannot neglect any of them. Sometimes there are people who suffer greatly because they don't take care of their body or because they don't take care of their psyche or because they don't take care of their spiritual dimension. In the spiritual dimension, we don't only have the encounter with God or difficulties of conscience. We also have everything that refers to the search for the meaning of life and interpersonal relationships.
How does confession help a person psychologically? And how can psychology help confessors? Confession and reconciliation seek forgiveness and this is related to the person who confesses and repents and the repentance in itself has a healing power. What does sacramental confession give to a person that psychology even at its best cannot achieve.
The first thing it gives is forgiveness that is God's forgiveness. No psychotherapy gives that. No psychotherapy puts a model of a person in front of you. Whereas confession and spiritual accompanyment put Christ before you. In other words, that's what it gives. And what it also gives is grace, God's grace, that created supernatural good that helps us. In other words, it's an interior force that transforms you, that converts you, and finally gives you peace.
Is there anything that the therapy session can give can provide to someone that confessions cannot?
The fact is that the goals are actually different because psychotherapy or psychology or medical treatment, psychiatric treatment, I'm a doctor, gives a person something different. It gives or seeks psychological health perhaps seeks to restore some difficulties of personality or way of being that exist or that come from even before birth. And all of that all that restoration that strengthening of the personality with psychological healing which is the ultimate goal or at least psychological stability is what psychotherapy gives.
Have you ever seen therapy undermine confession or confession undermine therapy?
When there's a lack of understanding between the two fields, when there's a lack of knowledge, when the psychotherapist or psychologist or doctor distrusts spiritual life or the priest, the confessor distrust psychology, that lack of knowledge causes distrust that goes against the person, against the good of the person, which is what is being sought. The priest has to listen a lot. The psychotherapist has to listen a lot as well. And both must know the field in which the other operates and thus help.
When a penitant confesses something that looks like a symptom more than a freely chosen act, how do you handle culpability and absolution?
This depends a lot on the situation you find yourself in. But indeed, sometimes there's a penitant who says something. Well, this isn't properly a sin. They're not confessing something because it hurts them, because they've harmed themselves, because they've harmed others, because it pains God who loves us, because he sees us destroying ourselves, which is the true meaning of sin, right? Instead, they're saying it perhaps through an obsessive mechanism, a mechanism of anticipatory anxiety like the typical mechanism of obsession. So then one can realize that and very delicately listening first make them see it. Make them see the importance of God's love, the importance of the true meaning of sin. The priest doesn't have a cinnometer to see whether this is a sin or not. And neither does God. But God seeks and God knows everything besides. If a person gets complicated, that's the first thing you have to tell them. Look, God knows absolutely everything.
And now I wanted to ask you at the end about this research group you grounded actually at the University of Santa Roa um a research group on psychology and spiritual life together. What does it exactly consist in? What does it work on?
Well, this group is called Juan Batista toll. It has the name of a priest and psychiatrist who taught here at the university and passed away in 2011. He was a very good friend of Victor Frankle. In 1970, Juan Batista Toello brought Victor Frankle to Rome, introduced him to Paul V 6th and he was able to meet with Paul V 6th which for Victor Frankle was something very very interesting. He also met with St. Jose Maria the founder of Opus Day and well here at the university we wanted to form this group with this name precisely to seek these interconnections between spiritual life and psychology. For a long time it has been thought that they were distant fields even contrary to each other when in fact they are very intertwined. We have to see them together.
Father thank you so much.
Thank you very much. You're welcome.