When Pathology Becomes Theology

Sick Things Happen

I feel sorry for Donald Wuerl's step mother.
He must have been the brattiest kid. I bet she had to whack him. I bet he didn't like her a lot of the time. Like JPII he lost his mother when he was young and his
father remarried.
If that happens to a young boy, it causes profound trauma and they start to idealize and even idolize their deceased parent projecting her as this almost mythically larger than life figure in heaven. He migiht have found himself as a young child trying to talk to her and wishing she would show up to talk to him. She may in fact have in his dreams. If you are catholic, this notion can easily conflate into the understanding of the Virgin Mary, as an etherial otherworldly being in heaven. You grow up with a very distorted view of women, and have difficulty possibly forming healthy relationships with women. No one can possibly measure up to the idealized version in the sky. Your love for your birth mother takes on then on a fierce loyalty and you resent that your father remarried- it somehow disgraced the memory of your birthmother in your mind as a young boy.
You become fiercely loyal to that image of motherhood/womanhood.

So real girls mean nothing. They are inconsequential. Insignificant by comparison, and to think otherwise is a betrayal of your mother, and thus in a sense viewed as a betrayal of your own existence.
You construct a world of men, where only men rank. Women are accoutrement and dispensible- except to the extent that they facilitate this illusion by financially supporting it. They can be treated cruelly if they challenge the order, just like he probably gave his step mother hell.

The way that some priests were raised and their own personal traumas color their theology without them realizing it. It has profound implication regarding how they treat people. There are other priests with other traumas. Divorce. If you blame your mother for a divorce you may even hate women subconsciously-- and I am thinking of a priest in particular here. What kind of man constructs a world with all men and is happy in it? If you look deeper you can often find a pathology mistaken for a theology.
Do you think that God only wanted this type of man to become a priest?
I have a vision of a healthier church.
There is a profoundly good reason why it states in the book of Timothy that those who preach against marriage are in sin, error and wrong. If a man cannot maturely respectfully relate to a real flesh and blood woman (like the Holy Spirit did and Jesus did) then he should be disqualified as a Bishop. A Bishop MUST be the husband of one wife.
Because Honor has EVERYTHING to do with how you treat real women.