The project was spurred by a 2018 report by the Society of Jesus that publicly disclosed the names of its members who were credibly accused of sexually abusing minors, as well as a report that year by a Pennsylvania grand jury that found similar findings in diocesan priests. It was funded by a $1 million gift from a private donation.

On Thursday, Jan. 26, the group released its final report, featuring research projects conducted by 18 teams from 10 Jesuit universities. In addition to Fordham, the initiative included lay and clergy faculty from Creighton, Gonzaga, Georgetown, Loyola Chicago, Loyola Maryland, Marquette, Rockhurst, Santa Clara, and Xavier universities.

The research projects addressed topics connected to the Society of Jesus, but were not limited strictly to it. There was often overlap with other parts of the Roman Catholic Church, such as specific parishes. They covered six themes: Jesuits and Jesuit Education; Education; Institutional Reform; Moral Injury and Spiritual Struggle; Race and Colonialism; and Survivors and Survivor Stories.

In addition to team projects, the initiative featured a three-day conference hosted at Fordham in April 2022 as well as eight webinars, four of which were devoted to historically marginalized U.S. communities.

Bradford Hinze, Ph.D., the Karl Rahner Professor of Theology and director of the initiative, said after two and half years, he is more impressed than ever with how much time and energy scholars have devoted to try to address past wrongs and prevent future ones. Their dedication has been “a bit overwhelming,” given how painful the subject is, but is also a source for optimism.

“My big take away is that we need to find ways of building greater relationships of collaboration and more transparency,” he said, “because here we have a lot of lay people—not all are lay people, but most are—who are committed to the Jesuit identity and mission.”

That commitment manifested itself in reports that varied from one about an individual abuser by the team at Creighton University to one examining the best way to tell survivors’ stories by Georgetown University’s Gerard J. McGlone, S.J. A report from Fordham professor C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D., that focused on reforming Jesuit schools noted that “pastoral care principles influence disciplinary processes.”

“There is an emphasis on being patient and merciful that allows for inferior performance and outright misbehavior,” he wrote.

“As a member of a religious order told us, there is confusion between what is simply sinful and what is criminal.”

Key Findings and Recommendations

The report includes six key findings and specific recommendations for learning and action.

The first of the group’s findings is that there is “a divide emerging in research and practice between those focused primarily on “safeguarding” and those focused on what the group is calling “historical memory work.” Safeguarding is focused on preventing present and future abuse, while historical memory work produces research on what happened in the past, in many cases performing a very close analysis of instances of abuse.

Hinze said the group chose to emphasize the importance of historical memory work in response to the forward-facing nature of the Society of Jesus’ most recent Universal Apostolic Preferences, which are in essence the religious order’s list of priorities. He noted that representatives from the Society of Jesus in Rome had been very cooperative, but the group still felt the need to highlight the importance of looking to the past.

“The Apostolic preferences all aim to start from right now and look forward. But if you only do that, you don’t really spend time pondering, reflecting upon, and truly meditating on what were the causes and contributing factors that led up to this, and what were the historical, institutional, and cultural repercussions,” he said.

Another finding highlights the fact that although the first sexual abuse cases in the United States were widely reported as early as 2002, very little research has been done to examine how much abuse was committed against Black, Latin American, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American populations.

Fordham Faculty Perspectives

Bryan N. Massingale, S.T.D., the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham, contributed in this area; his study, “Clergy Sexual Abuse in African American Communities,” will be published in October. He surveyed the literature about the sexual abuse crisis to see how many church dioceses tracked the race and ethnicity of survivors and found that only one did, and it only started doing so in 2015.

This is a glaring omission, he said.

“We know for a fact that in many cases, dioceses and religious orders deliberately sent priests with problematic histories into Latino and Black communities, precisely because these communities would be the least likely to report instances of abuse,” he said.

It’s for this reason, Massingale said, that although 4% of American Catholics are Black, it’s fair to assume that more than 4% have experienced sexual abuse. Compounding the problem, he said, is the fact that Black people may not relate to the ways others are processing their abuse. In the course of his research, he spoke informally with two Black men who’d experienced abuse, and discovered that they refused to accept the popular “victim survivor” label.

“They said ‘I’m not surviving anything. I’m coping.’ And it struck me that maybe another reason why we need to pay attention to this is because even the language we use doesn’t resonate universally across human communities,” he said.

Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., associate professor of mental health counseling and spiritual integration at Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, said her future teaching will forever be informed by the work she did with the initiative. In her research project “Bearing Witness When ‘They’ Are Us: Toward a Trauma-Informed Perspective on Complicity, Moral Injury, and Moral Witnessing,” Cataldo attempted to answer a question she asked herself when the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report was published: Why am I still shocked?

“We’ve been hearing about this since 2002, if not before,” she said.

“I realized that this cycle of being OK, and then being overwhelmed with shock and horror, and then having the feeling sort of recede into the background, is the same cycle that a trauma survivor experiences.”

No solution to a trauma-based problem can work unless it addresses the trauma, she said.

“All the safeguarding that has been put in place has been very effective, and it’s absolutely vitally important. I’m not discounting any of that, but you will never heal without addressing the trauma, and that means having accountability, responsibility, dialogue, honesty, and truth telling,” she said.

“It’s like closing the barn door after the horses are out.”

Telling It Like It Feels

Cataldo suggested that a crucial part of the healing process should involve people who Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit dubbed the “moral witnesses.”

“In order to really stand up for and call attention to the suffering imposed on one group by another group of people, the moral witness has to be someone who speaks the truth,” she said.

“But the moral witness doesn’t just tell it like it is. The moral witness tells it like it feels. To be a moral witness, the person needs to have been either a survivor themselves or have something at stake. You have to have skin in the game.”

The participants in Taking Responsibility fit that bill, she said, by virtue of working for Catholic institutions and working to highlight the painful truth.

The project has inspired Cataldo to do more herself. This fall, she will oversee the unveiling of GRE’s Advanced Certificate in Trauma-Informed Care program. Importantly, she said, the certificate program explores how spirituality can be both a balm for people healing from trauma and a shield that prevents them from acknowledging their own trauma.

“It’s very important to understand how unexamined religious practices and religious structures like the Catholic Church can sometimes re-traumatize or compound the trauma of people if they don’t understand how trauma and faith intersect,” she said.

“[Prayer] builds hope. People feel connected to a loving force in the universe, and that can help them feel hopeful and held when life puts them into difficult circumstances,” said Rebecca Randall, GRE ’14, a licensed mental health counselor in New York City. 

With so many people turning to pastoral counselors for solace during the pandemic, these mental health professionals have had to wrestle with tough questions and adapt to caring for their clients from afar. In phone interviews, Randall and her fellow alumni and faculty from the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education’s pastoral mental health counseling program described the impact of the pandemic on their clients and how COVID-19 has changed the nature of spiritual care. 

‘Where is God in All of This?’

For years, many of Cynthia Wicker Williams’s clients came to her with anxieties concerning their everyday lives. But when the pandemic arrived in March, the reasons for their anxiety changed significantly, Williams said. Many older folks in church communities are now experiencing loneliness and fear of dying alone from COVID-19. Other clients are on the brink of an existential crisis. 

“What’s going on? Is the world falling apart? How am I to live in this chaotic world?” said Williams, GRE ’09, a licensed mental health counselor and pastoral psychotherapist in Connecticut, recanting some of the questions her clients are grappling with. “It’s an existential kind of anxiety that people are presenting right now.”  

Two months later, another bombshell hit the nation: the murder of George Floyd. Williams said her clients became more anxious about race relations in the U.S. How did I not know that people were being treated so badly, they wondered? What do I do now that I know this? And how can I live a more meaningful and moral life? 

“The existential questions people are asking right now are exactly the reason why we need pastoral psychotherapists,” Williams said. “We are trained to lean into the question of, what does it mean? Where is God in all of this? Why is God not fixing this? Why did God let this happen?”

Living with Ambiguity

Williams said she helps her clients find those answers within. She might explore the teachings and holy writings of their religion with them and see if those lead to answers. Sometimes she explores a client’s strengths and what gives meaning to their life. 

Randall, a pastoral counselor at the St. Francis Counseling Center in Manhattan, said that there’s power in prayer, too. 

“An active prayer life can anchor people, give them hope, and connect them to a larger [faith]community,” Randall said. “They feel less alone and isolated, even if they’re praying alone.”

Another way to deal with pandemic-related anxiety at home is to use “contemplative spiritual practices” that calm the stress and anxiety regions of the brain, said Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., associate professor of pastoral mental health counseling and pastoral psychotherapist at the Lutheran Counseling Center in New York. 

Life hasn’t been easy for counselors, either. Bingaman said his students who are pastoral care providers are no longer able to provide care in person to clients with the coronavirus. They can speak over the phone, but it’s not the same. 

“Historically, it’s always been the bedside thing of being there in person, praying for the person. We have the technology to still do that [from afar], but this is such a shift, and I don’t know if it’s going to change anytime soon,” Bingaman said. “We all hope a vaccine comes our way sooner than later, but this is kind of the way of the future, even if we get to the other side of this.” 

‘We’re in the Same World as Our Patients Now’

But people have also shown incredible resilience and adaptability, said Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., assistant professor of pastoral counseling and a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice. In a matter of days, her clients transitioned to working from home and being with their families in a different light. Cataldo herself figured out how to conduct virtual therapy in both an efficient and ethical manner—how to properly light herself on camera, how to create an environment as safe and comfortable for her clients as her physical office once was. 

When the pandemic is over, our society is going to feel the collective impact of hundreds of thousands of people who have died, said Cataldo. But she’s also inspired by many of her long-term patients who have shown a tremendous amount of growth over the past few months. In the midst of a pandemic, they’re slowly finding their center, she said. 

“In a crisis situation, people’s priorities have shifted. They realize life is short and precarious. So not a lot of time to just spin your wheels about stuff you’ve been struggling with for a long time,” said Cataldo. “That’s inspiring to me. That helps me, because clinicians are struggling too. We’re in the same world as our patients now.” 

“We are to care for the habitat because it is essential to our care for others. To care for our habitat is to care for ourselves,” said the guest speaker, Ryan LaMothe, Ph.D., professor of pastoral care and counseling at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in St. Meinrad, Indiana. “We can continue to care for people who are suffering from various maladies, psychological and physical, yet we must also keep in mind these larger forces and consider ways to intervene.” 

This year, the annual conference was called “Between Hope and Despair: Caring in the Age of Climate Crisis.” In a series of three hour-long lectures, LaMothe spoke about how climate change could affect pastoral theology and care, identifying challenges for caregivers and offering solutions. 

A Lesson from Mister Rogers

The effects of climate change are more significant than ever, said LaMothe. Over the past three centuries, global carbon dioxide levels have risen from 270 parts per million to well over 400, he said, adding that today’s situation is serious. The rise of greenhouse gases have melted glaciers, increased sea levels, and created catastrophic storms; those who receive the brunt of the damage are the poor and people of color. And people around the world—including his clients—are starting to feel anxious, said LaMothe. 

Our biggest challenges toward making our world green again include global capitalism, which exploits people and natural resources in the pursuit of profit, and nationalism, which keeps us from working toward the common good on a global scale, he said. 

It’s also difficult to change our lives for the Earth’s well-being. We’re all busy—with our careers, with raising kids, and being involved in our local communities, he said. But people, including pastoral caregivers, can still make a difference. 

“In terms of pastoral theology and pastoral care, we need to become more versed in making use of our disciplines as we seek to organize and cooperate with others with the aim of caring for the Earth and its residents,” LaMothe said, to an audience of more than 50 educators, students, spiritual care providers, and clinical practitioners. 

With clients, pastoral caregivers can use spiritual practices to facilitate mindfulness about the environment, he said. He encouraged the audience to view their vocation through a more communal lens—to see the Earth and humanity as a whole. He asked the audience to practice “personal recognition”—recognizing every client for who they are—as most famously shown by Fred Rogers, an American television personality and Presbyterian minister who hosted the preschool television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Lastly, he described the importance of “inoperative care,” in which a caregiver supports a client without following the rules and expectations set by society. He said a good example is a scene in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood where, on a particularly hot day, Mister Rogers invites a black police officer to cool his feet in a plastic pool with him. Despite the racial tensions in their lifetime, the two share a simple, routine conversation—like any two human beings, LaMothe said. 

“Inoperative care meant that Mr. Rogers was not operating out of the dominant cultural representations of the day,” LaMothe said. “Both men, in this moment of mutual care, were not operating under the delusions and contending disciplinary apparatuses of white superiority. They were operating under a mutual personal recognition and care.”

‘The Reality of Working With Human Beings’

In response to LaMothe’s lecture, Mary Beth Werdel, Ph.D., director of the pastoral mental health counseling program at Fordham, spoke about how pastoral caregivers can treat clients experiencing trauma related to climate change or natural disasters. 

Climate change can cause negative psychological effects, including a decreased sense of predictability and control that can lead to acute stress and anxiety, said Werdel. She urged the audience to help clients find meaning in their post-traumatic experiences, especially those related to climate change. 

“Stress and trauma remain intrinsically negative,” Werdel said. “But it’s moving through and enduring the stress and trauma that we come to find and feel and see something different about our world, about ourselves, and about others.” 

She also encouraged the audience to explore psychological and spiritual questions with their clients—not as separate issues, but as one.

“The reality of working with human beings is this: When someone is sitting in front of you … they don’t parcel out, this is my psychological question and this is my spiritual question,” she said, to laughter from the audience. “They just come to you whole. And so we, who spend time thinking about the realities of stress and trauma induced by climate change, have to consider both of these questions together.” 

Towards the end of the conference, LaMothe and Werdel held a panel discussion with two faculty members in the pastoral mental health counseling department: Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., and Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D. 

Bingaman thanked LaMothe for encouraging the audience to neither look away from nor discount the impacts of climate change. Cataldo urged the pastoral caregivers in the room to enter every clinical encounter without memory, understanding, or desire—three things that could impede their work. 

‘The Simple Power of Connection’

An audience member, who identified herself as a hospital chaplain who has supported new amputees and young mothers with traumatic brain injuries, shared a personal story. She said she was a quadriplegic who was once told she would live in a nursing home for the rest of her life. But now, she works as a chaplain who provides emotional and spiritual support. She noted the importance of hope and the place where it is born—“the simple power of connection” with others. 

In the last minutes of the conference, another audience member commented on the positive ways that society is combating climate change, from efforts as wide as New York’s recent ban on single-use plastic bags, to the conference committee’s decision to use paper plates during the breakfast buffet. 

“Any last comments on how we can go forward and encourage our children to be positive and hopeful and do concrete actions to help the environment?” the audience member asked the panelists. 

On a projector screen, Werdel had shared her son’s recent elementary school assignment. He and his classmates were asked to write their wishes for the New Year. “My wish for 2020 is … save white rhinos,” he wrote, beneath a hand-drawn sketch of two rhinos smiling under a sunny sky.  

“I cannot save these rhinos, or the thousand other species that will die because the rhinos die,” Werdel told the woman in the audience. “But I can instill a sense of, hopefully, optimism and agency for what he can do, encourage him to speak out loud his sadness and his loss … Caring about other things—people and places and spaces—that are outside of what he normally sees.”

If you enter the office of the congregation, a big golden retriever might greet you with a stuffed animal while Alpha, the congregation’s betta fish, wiggles by in a tank nearby. A garden walkway is a sanctuary for wandering minds. The church also offers yoga classes to members of the Newtown community. 

But the classes are less about learning how to perfect a Downward-Facing Dog and more about providing a portal for trauma recovery, said Crebbin.

“The feeling of trauma—the depths of it—is that ‘my life is never going to be the same,’” he said. “If you have this image that ‘I’m going to be healed or I’m going to go back to the way my life was,’ that’s not helpful because people will never get there.”

Crebbin reflected on the 2012 massacre of 20 Sandy Hook Elementary first-graders and six school officials, at Calming the Chaos: Clinical and Pastoral Responses in Traumatic Times, a pastoral conference organized  by Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., assistant professor of pastoral counseling, and Mary Beth Werdel, Ph.D., director of the pastoral counseling and spiritual care program at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. The March 2 event also featured certified trauma professional and Fordham adjunct professor Cheryl Fisher, Ph.D. The goal was to provide strategies for trauma care.

“It’s like you have a broken leg that has never quite healed right, and so you always have a limp, but you learn to dance with the limp,” Crebbin said, paraphrasing a quote from bestselling author Anne Lamott. “I think those images are more helpful to us than images that suggest that life will return to normal.” 

First Responders of Trauma

Roughly two weeks after the Feb. 14 shooting rampage in a Parkland, Florida high school claimed the lives of 17 people, Crebbin stressed that simply being present for people who are traumatized can be transformative.

“Over time, there are ups and downs, but slowly we find ourselves somewhere down the path to new wisdom [or]a life where the trauma hopefully for the community is integrated in such a way that there isn’t a denial of what happened,” he said.

Fisher, an advocate of nature-based interventions for trauma treatment, cautioned practitioners, as first responders to trauma, not to neglect their self-care.

“When we [ourselves]are overwhelmed, we silence the responses of our clients, patients, and community because we can’t take anymore,” she said. “If we ever had an argument for self-care, that’s it. If we’re not taking care of ourselves, we run the risk of dismissing their stories and causing harm to them.”

Activism in Traumatic Times

Taking on an activist role has helped some Newtown parents and community leaders to reclaim their power, said Crebbin. Some residents have joined gun reform coalitions while others have established foundations in memory of their children.

The Parkland teens have taken their activism a step further, he said, with a televised gun control rally shortly after the shooting, as well as a forthcoming March for Our Lives protest and nationwide walkout for gun reform.

“The response [to mass shooting]has changed from Newtown,” he said. “People were reflective. Now, people are angrier [because of]the lack of change,” he said.

Pastors and other spiritual leaders have also been called to take their ministry beyond the pulpit.

“Prayers are not nothing, and action is everything,” said Fisher. “We have to get out of our offices, off of our chairs, and take action.”

Crebbin argued that gun violence in communities of color should also be a national concern.

“If you’re only paying attention to [Newtown and Parkland] then you’re not paying attention to the ongoing issues of trauma,” he said.

 Finding Light in the Cracks

 Fisher proposed several nature-based exercises for communities ravished by trauma, including yoga, bird watching, gardening, nature walks, and bonding with animals.

Through her work, she found that these practices can create “natural examples of awe, wonder, and hope.”

“When I sit with clients and hear their stories, my role is to be a vessel,” she said. “I’m not expected to have the answer. What I do know is that at the end of the day, there is a tomorrow.”

Crebbin said in spite of the Sandy Hook tragedy, there isn’t a “dark cloud” that sits over the Newtown community.

“We have hope,” he said. “We’re trying to be a little more authentic. We admit that we’re cracked, but we admit that there is light that gets into those cracks, and I think that’s a gift that was given to us.”

Earlier this fall, Lisa Cataldo, PhD, an assistant professor of pastoral counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, ran a workshop for a group of interfaith clergy in Newtown, Connecticut in anticipation of the third anniversary.

“In any community that suffers a massive event like what happened in Newtown, faith groups are often the first place that people turn for consolation and connection,” said Cataldo, who is a practicing psychotherapist.

“The workshop was about dealing with the aftermath of a communal trauma over the long term, because when anniversaries come around, all sorts of memories and emotions get reawakened.”

Three years later, Newtown is working toward healing while also dealing with continual reminders of the trauma whenever a new tragedy occurs, such as the shootings in San Bernardino and Colorado Springs.

But the families of Newtown—as well as the victims of the latest wave of mass violence—are not the only ones whose grief is magnified at this time of year, Cataldo said. For many of us, the holiday season brings up poignant reminders of people and places we’re missing.

“People think they’re supposed to be happy during the holidays. This is supposed to be a time of sharing with your family, of positive relationships, of celebration and joy,” Cataldo said. “Many people feel alienated, because they’re not in that space, and that idealized image of the holidays only makes them feel the lack of those things more acutely.”

Even if one gets beyond the “shoulds” attached to the idealized holiday season, there still remains the stark reality that someone or something has been lost.

“This is true for people who are in the midst of active mourning, but also for anyone who has experienced loss,” Cataldo said. “On holidays, the absence of the people we’ve lost is louder.”

Coping With Grief During the Holidays

The holiday season presents a challenge for many people, Cataldo said, but not everyone is open about his or her suffering. One reason for this is that our society tends to overvalue strength and resiliency, leaving little, if any, any room for vulnerability.

The key to coping with holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, and other difficult days is to make room for the grief, rather than shutting it out.

“We put pressure on ourselves to be strong when what we really need is to be more compassionate toward ourselves—to say that I need more time, that I’m not okay yet,” Cataldo said.

“Many people fear, ‘What if I can’t handle the holidays?’ The thing is, you don’t have to. It’s perfectly okay to say that you need to take this year off, that you can’t engage in these types of celebrations right now.”

For some people, she said, it can be helpful to deliberately include the loss into holiday rituals and customs. This might involve creating new traditions that honor lost loved ones, such as going to a certain religious service or writing a letter to them.

“It’s important to support people in moving through this time in the way that is best for them,” she said.

A New Normal

Holidays also serve as cues to reflect on the previous year. For those who have experienced hardship and heartbreak, the resounding question at these milestones is, “When am I finally going to be okay? When will I feel normal again?”

The reality is that there might not be a return to normal, Cataldo said.

“Any kind of significant loss creates a new normal,” she said. “Things won’t go back to the way they were before the loss, because life has changed.

“But it is absolutely possible to feel okay again. The memories won’t always be a source of pain—they might one day be a source of comfort and connection. Life won’t look the same, but it can still be wonderful.”

After receiving an M.B.A. from Columbia University, she secured a job in Manhattan working for Chemical Bank and spent the next eight years carving out her place in the world of corporate real estate financing.

Something, however, was lacking.

“On some level I didn’t feel fulfilled, and I didn’t feel like I was contributing anything to the world,” said Cataldo, Ph.D., assistant professor of pastoral counseling at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE) and a licensed psychoanalyst. “Ultimately, it just didn’t feel like me.”

She quit her job and traveled about as far away from corporate real estate as she could get: India and Nepal. For several months, she journeyed on a spiritual pilgrimage, visiting temples, monasteries, ashrams, and other places of worship, hoping that one of them might contain the missing piece.

“I was very interested in spirituality, and that study of eastern religions ultimately brought me home to my Christian roots,” she said.

Entertaining the idea of pursuing theology, she returned to New York, taking inspiration from a speech given by the late priest and spiritual writer Henri Nouwen. Nouwen was pastor of L’Arche Daybreak Toronto, a community for individuals with cognitive disabilities and the volunteers who assist them.

“I went there on a retreat because I was attracted to the idea of this place,” said Cataldo. “But once I got there, I realized it wasn’t an idea—it was real life. And I had to move in.”

Cataldo stayed for several months, and remains closely connected with L’Arche. “It was a real, lived experience. It wasn’t just going to ashrams and meditating. This was about how real spiritual growth takes place in relationship with other people, who show you what it means to be human.”

She returned, again, to Manhattan and enrolled at Union Theological Seminary to study psychology and religion. Her own experience in psychoanalysis, coupled with her experiences both in India and Toronto, drew her to the disciplines.

While some hold that the duo is incompatible, Cataldo considers psychology and religion a natural combination.

“In each of those worlds there are people that see the two disciplines as having a real basis for dialogue, because they both deal with higher-order questions: Who am I? What am I doing here? What’s my purpose? What’s meaningful in my life?” she said.

Trained in relational psychoanalysis—a branch that emphasizes interpersonal relationships in one’s life—Cataldo works today both as an academician and clinician to bridge the two domains.

Despite a growing interest in spirituality within the psychoanalytic community, Cataldo said, there is still no thorough understanding about religion and religious practice and their actual role in an individual’s experience. Some psychoanalysts—including Freud—reduce religion and spirituality to mere defense mechanisms against existential fears, but Cataldo maintains that faith facilitates the basic human need for connection and thus warrants higher regard.

“Whether the analyst is familiar with religion or not, a vast majority of the patients who come to see us have some kind of religious life,” she said. “And if we can’t make room for it without being reductive or dismissive, we’re really not making room for the patient as a whole person.”

In addition to helping the psychoanalytic community to better understand the connection between psychology and religion and spirituality, Cataldo also strives to illuminate the latter from a psychoanalytic standpoint.

“People experience life through their religion; but people also experience their religion through their psychology,” she said. “My primary work is to look at spiritual and religious experience through a psychoanalytic lens, without reducing it to a psychological phenomenon.

“As an analyst, I don’t advocate for religion or spirituality any more than I would advocate that a person should change careers, or get married, or get divorced,” she said. “I want to be curious with the person about what their spiritual life or religion means for them, how it functions for them, and whether it’s expansive or limiting.”

As a member of GRE faculty, Cataldo draws from her psychoanalytic training to shed light on theological issues. Her primary research addresses the multiplicity of self—images of ourselves that arise in response to our various experiences and relationships—and how this multiplicity yields diverse images of God. Her work questions the possible psychological influences that may contribute to the emphasis on the image of God as a father, rather than imaging God normatively as a mother.

Relatively novel in the worlds of psychoanalysis and religion, Cataldo’s views have been well received nonetheless. In June, she was awarded the Stephen A. Mitchell Author’s Award from the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Next year she will lecture at Tao Fong Shan Christian Center in Hong Kong, which hosts the first program in psychotherapy and spirituality in China.

In the meantime, she continues to teach pastoral counseling, an area that particularly reveals the impact of uniting psychology and religion.

“In places where there are very few mental health services, or people are reluctant to use them, having the clergy trained to do counseling and pastoral care from a deeper base of knowledge, and then teaching people in their home diocese about this—it’s actually changing the world, one person at a time.”

A faculty panel with expertise in pastoral counseling and spiritually informed social work tackled these questions on April 13 at Fordham Westchester.

Spirituality, the transcendent feeling that occurs with a person feels connected to something larger than himself or herself, is first experienced in the gaze between infant and mother, said Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., assistant professor of pastoral counseling at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE).

“Developmental psychologies talk about the ritual experience between infant and mother as the first experience that actually feels divine to

Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., says spiritual development begins in infancy. Photo by Janet Sassi

the baby,” said Cataldo, a specialist in psychology and religion. “So the mother is the first God, and what could be more ordinary than that?”

It is, in fact, the ordinary, everyday experiences mediated through the human body—including its psychological makeup—that put people in touch with the spiritual thing larger than themselves, she said.

The panel discussed Descartes’ rationalist idea that reason is based on existing knowledge, independent of any sense experiences. Zulema Suárez, Ph.D., an expert in spiritually informed social work, recounted her inability to find spiritual fulfillment through traditional religions or through the “normal” road to success.  Even though she was working as a successful scholar at the University of Michigan, Suárez said she felt so spiritually void that she “just wanted to hide.”

“I had my spiritual crisis when I was at the height of my career,” said Suárez, an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS). “I felt no integration between who I was and what I did.”

It wasn’t until she began exploring Eastern religions and meditation, she said, that she began to experience “God in everyday things.”

“Until then,” she said, “I felt like I’d only experienced the world through my head.”

Speaking on “Youth and God in the Era of Technology,” panelist Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., assistant professor of pastoral care and counseling, said that the spiritual development of young people today is inexorably tied to technology.

Bingaman recalled the recent string of suicides by teenagers who have been the victims of cyber-bullying, however, as examples of the “inherent dangers in cyberspace.”

“All of us can be a lot more disinhibited on the Internet,” said Bingaman, who is researching forms of therapy for “new anxiety” that stems from a high-tech society. “You can say whatever you want when someone is not there face to face.

“From a spiritual standpoint, [these incidences]raise the issue of the Great Commandment—that you will love your neighbor as yourself,” he said. “What does that mean, now, in this technological age?”

Conversely, said Bingaman, promise lies in the fact that today’s rapid-fire stream of information makes young people more aware of global events, and more “spiritually minded”—even though they are less traditionally religious.

“They are less interested in the Doctrine of Original Sin and much more interested in what the church is doing about poverty, racism, war, climate change and so on,” he said.

What adult generations can do to help guide young people spirituality, said Bingaman, is to listen to them.

“We should probably do more listening than talking,” he said.

The event, “Journey Inward, Journey Outward: Psychology and Spirituality,” was sponsored by GRE and GSS, and moderated by Dale Lindquist, Ph.D., director of the Beck Institute on Religion and Poverty.