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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
and tries to explain it. It has no desire to discount personal
responsibility or to eliminate guilt, but it is deeply concerned to
understand the guilty person and help him to become free of
his burden.
In practice, this point of view about the cure of souls and
confession does not introduce into morality as much relativism as
might be feared. The moral law remains unimpared. The
concept of moral disease or psychic symptoms does not displace the
idea of sin; the two are merely seen and compared, so that every
aspect of reality relevant to the task is taken into account in the
care of souls.
The spiritual adviser and confessor must also be prepared to
deal with the effects of disease in the more usual sense of the
word. Disease in all its forms; periods of physical crisis during
which a person is hardly himself and so behaves in a manner of
which he would normally be incapable; and aberrations of
conduct due to grief or shock or other vicissitudes that
temporarily undermine morale and upset mental poise.
The confessor receives confidences about severe hardships to
which people have been subjected and as a result of which they
have been guilty of wrongdoing that has later seemed
inexplicable to themselves and perhaps to others as well. To take
account of such circumstances and conditions is a task in the
service of love, of morality and of men and women. To be
willing to do so implies that as an evangelical Christian one has
adopted a casuistic method of approach to human problems.
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