The Rediscovery and Rebirth of Spiritual Direction

Rev. Fr. Michael Doyle

Summary: At the threshold of the third millennium Pope John Paul II declared that holiness must become the organising principle of every pastoral undertaking in the Church, and not an ornament added once the practical work is done. This chapter takes that declaration at its word and follows it to its conclusion. If holiness is the goal, then the Church requires priests and lay faithful who are themselves walking the road of holiness and who have been trained in depth in the art of accompanying others along it. That requirement exposes a grave deficiency in the way candidates for the priesthood are presently formed: across the long years of seminary a man may receive no systematic help either in pursuing his own sanctification or in learning how to lead his parishioners towards theirs.

The chapter argues for the recovery of the ancient name for the priest’s spiritual work — cura animarum, the cure of souls — and examines why that understanding of priesthood fell into abeyance: the collapse of priestly confidence in the aftermath of four decades of abuse scandal, and the ascendancy of psychology and therapy as our culture’s default account of human distress. It answers the charge that organised religion is the source rather than the remedy of that distress, conceding without reserve the damage done by Jansenist rigorism, while defending the well-formed conscience and the healthy sense of guilt that belongs to it. Grounding the whole argument in St Augustine’s teaching that the human person is capax Dei — constituted with a capacity for God — and in St Bernard’s development of that insight, it sets out what must change: a root-and-branch reordering of seminary formation that gives the spiritual pillar precedence over the other three, formation personnel wholly committed to that vision, a place for trained lay and religious directors alongside the ordained, and a clear grasp of both the distinction and the convergence between the Sacrament of Penance and spiritual direction. The renewal of the Church in the twenty-first century will be a renewal in holiness or it will not be a renewal at all; and it will be led by priests who have rediscovered that the care of souls is not one task among many but the very substance of what they were ordained to do.

Introduction: A Choice Filled with Consequences

On 6 January 2001, with the Great Jubilee of the Incarnation behind him and a new century opening in front of him, Pope John Paul II published the apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte. It is a document written in the imperative mood. Having asked what the Church should now do, he declined to give the answer a strategist would have given. He did not call, in the first place, for new structures, new programmes or new methods. He said that every pastoral initiative must be set in relation to holiness, and that to place pastoral planning under the heading of holiness is a choice filled with consequences.[1]

That claim is easily domesticated, and it usually is. Bishops and priests have grown accustomed to hearing holiness invoked at the close of a document, where it serves as a pious signature upon work whose real content lies elsewhere. John Paul II meant something altogether different, and he said so plainly. Holiness was not to be the ornament of the Church’s pastoral labour in the twenty-first century. It was to be its organising principle: the criterion against which every plan, every budget, every appointment and every hour of formation would be measured. He knew exactly what he was asking. He wrote that such a choice carries consequences, and he was right. It carries consequences which the Church has still, a quarter of a century later, very largely declined to draw.

He went further. A focus on holiness, he insisted, would have ramifications for the whole life of the Church, because holiness is not an elevated condition reserved to a few but the vocation of every baptised person without exception. The Council had taught this in the fifth chapter of Lumen Gentium, and John Paul II asked that the practical significance of that chapter now be rediscovered.[2] He asked that our communities become genuine schools of prayer, and he read the widespread contemporary hunger for spirituality as one of the signs of the times to which the Church must respond.[3]

One consequence stands out above the others, and it is the subject of this chapter. If the whole people of God is called to holiness, and if pastoral life is to be reorganised around that call, then the Church needs men and women — priests first, and lay people and religious with them — who are themselves on the journey of holiness and who have received in-depth training in the art of spiritual direction. She needs them not in ones and twos but in numbers; not in retreat houses only but in parishes; not for a spiritual élite but for ordinary people in ordinary places. This is not a specialist requirement to be met by a handful of monasteries. It is a structural requirement of the vision John Paul II set before the Church, and it bears with particular force on the way we form our priests.

To meet this clarion call, expressed so challengingly by the late Pope, requires a complete revisiting of how seminarians are formed on their journey towards priesthood — and in particular of the place we give to spiritual formation and to training in spiritual direction, which ought to be the central driving force of seminary life and are at present very nearly its afterthought.

The Lacuna at the Heart of Seminary Formation

I write as a seminary formator of many years’ standing, and one thing has never ceased to astonish me. Across the long years in which a man is prepared for the priesthood — years of philosophy and theology, of pastoral placements, of liturgical training, of essays and examinations and evaluations — he is given, as a rule, no systematic help in two matters which ought to stand at the very centre of his preparation. He is not taught how to make his own journey into holiness. And he is not taught how to lead the people who will be entrusted to him into theirs.

This is not a complaint about individuals. Seminaries are staffed, in my experience, by devoted and generous men who work far harder than anyone outside knows. The deficiency is structural, and structures are stronger than the people who inhabit them. Spiritual formation is certainly present in every ratio and on every prospectus; it is one of the four pillars, and it is named first in the documents that matter most.[4] But in the ordinary life of a house of formation it is the pillar most easily bent. The intellectual pillar is examined, and examinations command time. The pastoral pillar is assessed by supervisors who write reports. The human pillar is now scrutinised with professional instruments and considerable rigour. The spiritual pillar alone is entrusted to a private conversation between a man and his spiritual director — unexamined by design, and therefore, in practice, unaccounted for. What is not accounted for is not, in the end, taken seriously.

Worse, spiritual direction itself is assumed rather than taught. A seminarian receives direction, because the arrangement is required of him; he is rarely taught what it is. He is seldom shown the tradition it stands in, or how it differs from counselling and from confession, or what the classical stages of the spiritual life are, or how to recognise where a particular soul stands, or how to discern spirits, or when to press a man and when to leave him alone. He departs for his first parish with a respectable theological education and almost nothing at all in the one art his people will most need from him.

I use the word lacuna deliberately. A lacuna is a gap where something ought to be. And this gap stands in direct contradiction to what the Church herself has said. Optatam Totius required that spiritual formation be given pride of place.[5] Pastores Dabo Vobis teaches that spiritual formation is the core which unifies and gives life to a man’s being a priest and his acting as a priest. The 2016 Ratio Fundamentalis insists that formation is a single integrated process and not four parallel tracks running side by side.[6] The words are on the page. The timetable tells another story, and the timetable is what forms men.

The Hunger of a Generation

Something is happening at the Easter Vigil. In France, at the Vigil of 2026, more than twenty-one thousand adults and adolescents were baptised or received into the Catholic Church — some thirteen thousand two hundred adults and some eight thousand one hundred adolescents. This was an increase of roughly a fifth on the previous year, which had itself been a record; adult baptisms in France have more than tripled in a single decade, and more than four in five of those adults were between eighteen and forty years of age.[7] Comparable, if less exactly documented, movements are reported across the English-speaking world. Secular journalists have found no better word for it than astonishing.

These are not, for the most part, lapsed Catholics returning. They are young men and women with no religious background whatever, who have come to the door of a church on their own initiative. The French bishops asked them why, and the answers are sobering: a great many began the journey in the aftermath of a personal trial — an illness, a death, a rupture — which had forced upon them questions that nothing in the surrounding culture was able to answer.[8]Many priests in Britain and North America report a particularly striking presence of young men among their enquirers, a reversal of everything we were told to expect.[9]

If this good news is to continue, and above all if it is to bear lasting fruit, it behoves the Church, her bishops and her priests to set before these young people good spiritual food. They are hungry — that is the whole point of the phenomenon. They are hungry for holiness, and they are hungry for someone who can tell them, concretely and in detail, how to grow in it. And the tragedy, if we fail them, will be entirely of our own making, because we possess precisely what they are asking for.

The Catholic Church holds in trust one of the richest traditions of spiritual guidance in the history of the human race. The desert fathers on the discernment of thoughts; Cassian on the eight principal faults; Benedict on obedience and stability; the Cistercians on the school of charity; Ignatius on the discernment of spirits; Teresa of Ávila on the mansions of the interior castle; John of the Cross on the nights of sense and spirit; Francis de Sales on devotion in the midst of the world; Thérèse of Lisieux on the little way. Here is a body of practical knowledge about the human soul under grace, tested over two thousand years, more detailed and more exact than anything the modern disciplines have produced. It is one of the principal treasures of the Roman Catholic Church.

And it has been treated, for most of the last several centuries, as the private property of a special few. The knowledge was available to those who entered the cloister and closed to everybody else. A young woman who takes vows will be taught the interior life systematically, by someone trained to teach it. A young woman who is baptised at the Easter Vigil and goes home to a flat and a job will, in most parishes in the Western world, be taught nothing of the kind. The treasure is real; the door has been shut.

And Those Who Have Waited a Lifetime

We must rejoice in this worldwide upswing of young people entering the Church, and we must give them serious guidance in the ways of holiness within the tradition. But I am not blind to another group, and it would be an injustice to pass over them. There are lifelong faithful Catholics — in every parish, in considerable numbers — who long to be led deeper and have never been offered the means. They have kept the faith through decades. They have raised children in it, buried parents in it, sat in the same pew for fifty years. And not once has anyone sat down with them and asked how they pray, or told them that there is a road with stages on it, or offered to walk any part of it beside them.

They too are called to holiness, and they are called to it by virtue of their Baptism — not by virtue of a religious vocation, not by special aptitude, not by permission. If the universal call to holiness means anything at all, it means that the woman who has arranged the flowers for thirty years has exactly the same vocation as the Carmelite, and exactly the same right to be helped towards it. Any renewal of spiritual direction that serves the newly baptised while leaving the long-faithful where they have always been will have missed the point entirely.

The Three Objections

When this is put to priests, three answers come back, and they deserve a serious hearing rather than a rebuke.

The first: “Nobody ever asks for spiritual direction.” This is usually true, and it proves nothing. Nobody asks for what he has never been offered and cannot name. A man does not request of his doctor a procedure he has never heard of; his silence is not evidence that he is well. The absence of demand here is an artefact of the absence of supply, compounded by the absence of vocabulary. Where direction is genuinely offered — announced from the pulpit in plain words, explained, made available at practical hours — it is taken up, and the waiting list forms quickly. I have watched this happen more than once, in unpromising places.

The second: “I am running three parishes. I have no time.” This is a real burden, honestly felt, and it is growing heavier each year. But notice what the objection quietly assumes: that spiritual direction is an addition to the priest’s proper work rather than its substance. Much of what fills a priest’s week — the buildings, the accounts, the committees, the correspondence — is not, in any theological sense, the work he was ordained to do, and a great deal of it could be done by somebody else, often better. The care of souls is what only he can do. If the timetable does not permit it, the timetable is wrong, and the diocese that constructed the timetable has a question to answer. Beyond that, the answer to three parishes is not that one exhausted man directs six hundred souls; it is that he forms and oversees a body of trained lay and religious directors around him.

The third: “I do not know how to give spiritual direction, let alone find it for myself.” This is the honest objection, and it is by far the most serious. It is also not the priest’s fault. A man who was never taught cannot be blamed for not knowing, and a man who has never had a spiritual director himself can hardly be expected to become one for others. This objection is not a reason for inaction. It is an indictment of the system that ordained him without teaching him, and it points with complete precision at where the remedy must be applied.

Cura Animarum: The Forgotten Name of the Priest’s Work

There is an old name for what I am describing, and it is worth recovering because a thing without a name is difficult to ask for. The tradition called the priest’s spiritual work the cura animarum: the cure of souls.

The Latin cura is richer than either English word that renders it. It means care — solicitude, watchfulness, the burden a man carries for something that has been entrusted to him. It also means cure — the healing of what is diseased. Both senses are needed, and the English phrase “the cure of souls”, which strikes the modern ear as archaic or faintly medical, in fact holds them together better than any modern alternative. The French curé preserves it: the parish priest is named after the thing he does.

The concept has a long and serious history. Gregory Nazianzen, defending his flight from ordination, called the guidance of the human person the art of arts and the science of sciences, because the human person is the most variable of creatures. Gregory the Great built his Regula Pastoralis on the same judgement and made it the handbook of the Western episcopate for a thousand years.[10] John Chrysostom devoted an entire treatise to the terrifying responsibility of the priesthood, understood precisely as responsibility for souls.[11] The Council of Trent established diocesan seminaries in order that men might be formed for this work and not merely licensed to perform ceremonies.[12] Canon law still carries the language: a parish is a community of the faithful whose pastoral care is entrusted to a parish priest as its proper shepherd, who is bound to know his people, to visit their families, and to share their burdens.[13]

And yet, over the last century, the phrase has been quietly consigned to the rubbish heap of history. It survives in canonical formulae and in the occasional antiquarian sermon. It has almost entirely vanished from the way priests describe themselves, from the way dioceses plan, and from the way seminaries teach. It deserves better, because it names the truth about the priest’s role as shepherd of the flock more accurately than anything that has replaced it.

A Definition

By the cure of souls the tradition has meant this: the sustained, personal and prayerful responsibility of a pastor for the progress of particular souls towards God.

Each element of that sentence carries weight. Sustained: it is not an intervention but a relationship, measured in years. Personal: it is directed to this man and this woman, not to a congregation in the aggregate. Prayerful: the director carries those he directs in his own prayer, and what he says to them is the fruit of what he has said to God about them. Responsibility: he will answer for them, which is why the Fathers wrote about ordination with such dread. Particular souls: named individuals, known one by one. Progress towards God: the criterion is movement, and the direction of movement is not towards psychological equilibrium or social usefulness but towards union with God.

It follows that the cure of souls is not the administration of a territory, nor the maintenance of a plant, nor even, in the first place, the dispensing of sacraments to a queue. It is the shepherd’s knowledge of his own sheep — their names, their wounds, their besetting temptations, the point they have reached on the road, and the single next step that each of them is actually capable of taking.

Why the Cure of Souls Fell Silent: Two Wounds

Why has so central a concept fallen into abeyance, not merely among the laity but among bishops and priests themselves? Behind the neglect lies something more painful than forgetfulness. In recent decades a great many priests have simply lost confidence in their own spiritual role as the spiritual leaders of their people. I see two principal causes.

The First Wound: The Collapse of Priestly Confidence

The first is the sexual abuse crisis which has beset the Church over the last forty years and more. Everything that must be said about this has a proper order, and the first place in that order belongs to those who were harmed. They were harmed by priests, in the exercise of the very trust under discussion here, and the Church’s failure to protect them was catastrophic and prolonged. Nothing written in this chapter is offered in mitigation of that, and the reforms of the last two decades, however late, were owed.[14]

But there is a further consequence, felt inside the presbyterate and rarely spoken of, which bears directly on our subject. An entire generation of priests — the overwhelming majority of them wholly innocent — has come to doubt whether it has any standing to speak to another human being about his soul. The collar, which once signalled spiritual authority, became in many places a liability. The instinct to be a spiritual father to a person came to feel presumptuous, and in some settings actively unsafe. And so priests withdrew, by degrees and often without noticing, into the safe, the measurable and the administrative: into the tasks for which nobody could accuse them of overreach.

This must be named for what it is, because it will not be healed by pretending otherwise. To sit with another person and speak to him about the state of his soul requires a particular kind of confidence — not arrogance, but the settled conviction that one has been given something real to give. That confidence was badly damaged. Safeguarding, properly understood, is not the enemy of spiritual fatherhood; it is the condition under which spiritual fatherhood can now be exercised with integrity, and a priest who has internalised it should be more free to be a father, not less. But nobody has told him so, and until somebody does, the withdrawal will continue.

The Second Wound: The Rise of the Therapeutic

The second cause is the ascendancy of psychology and therapy as an alternative and quasi-modern solution to people’s struggles, and even to their spiritual malaise.

Let me be precise, because this is easily misheard as an attack on psychology, which it is not. Psychology is a genuine discipline with genuine achievements, and the Church has said clearly that its findings can serve priestly formation well.[15] There are conditions which spiritual direction cannot touch and which respond to competent clinical treatment; a director who cannot recognise them, or who tries to pray away a depressive illness, is dangerous. The problem is not the existence of therapy. The problem is displacement.

Where a parishioner would once have brought a trouble of the soul to a priest, the reflex now is to seek a therapist — and in very many cases the priest himself endorses the referral, believing it the responsible thing to do. Sometimes he is right. But the referral has become total. Every form of distress is now read as pathology, and the older categories have quietly disappeared from the repertoire of things a priest is expected to be able to recognise: acedia, desolation, purification, dryness in prayer, scrupulosity, the dark night, the ordinary and predictable crisis that comes to a soul after some years of fidelity. These are not symptoms. Several of them are signs of progress. Treated as symptoms, they are medicated or analysed, and the movement of grace which they accompany is interrupted.

Philip Rieff gave this settlement its name sixty years ago: the triumph of the therapeutic, a culture in which the self is to be managed rather than converted, and in which well-being has silently replaced salvation as the goal of human existence.[16] A Church that accepts this division of labour — the psyche to the clinic, the soul to nobody in particular — has conceded the field before the argument has begun.

The Charge Against Religion, and What Must Be Conceded

There is a view voiced from time to time by members of the psychological fraternity, and it runs roughly like this: when it comes to the psychological problems people face in life, organised religion is more often the problem than the solution; and the trouble is usually to be found somewhere around guilt.[17]

The temptation is to answer this defensively. I want to do the opposite, and concede at once everything that ought to be conceded, because an argument that begins with an evasion has already lost.

In those parts of the Church heavily influenced by the Jansenist movement, the Roman Catholic Church may as well come out with its hands up. Jansenism planted in the hearts and souls of the faithful an overwhelming and disproportionate sense of guilt about sin, and it did so with particular severity in the sensitive area of sexuality. Cornelius Jansen’s Augustinus gave it a theology; Arnauld’s treatise on frequent communion gave it a devotional practice, making the deferral of Holy Communion a mark of seriousness and the reception of it a presumption.[18] Rome condemned the propositions repeatedly — in 1653, and again in 1713 — and yet the movement survived its condemnation, because it had ceased to be a set of propositions and had become a temperature.[19] It spread from Louvain and Port-Royal through France and the Low Countries, and by way of the continental seminaries where Irish and English clergy were formed, into the whole of the English-speaking Catholic world, where it long outlived the memory of its origin.

Its effects are not hard to recognise, and many priests of my generation have spent their ministry undoing them: a God more easily offended than pleased; a tabernacle approached with dread rather than desire; a confessional in which matters of sexuality were handled with a harshness out of all proportion to the rest of the moral law; and, above all, souls formed to believe that the ordinary condition of a Christian before God is to be in the wrong. Where that formation took hold, the charge is simply true. Religion was the problem. People were made ill by what they were taught, and some of them never recovered.

Hopefully, in more recent years, we have as a Church gradually moved, and are still moving, away from the heavy burden we laid on people’s shoulders. St Alphonsus Liguori, the great pastoral counterweight to rigorism, has become the patron of moral theologians rather than a voice in the wilderness.[20] The Council recovered a theology of the human person made for communion. The Catechism’s treatment of conscience and of mercy would have been unrecognisable to a Jansenist. The movement is real and it is in the right direction. It is not complete, and rigorism of a different colour is always ready to take the vacated seat.

The Positive View of Guilt, and the Well-Formed Conscience

Having conceded all of that, I want now to contest the conclusion drawn from it. The therapeutic culture has moved from the true observation that some guilt is pathological to the false conclusion that guilt as such is a pathology. That conclusion is a disaster, and it is one of the principal reasons why modern people are so defenceless before their own consciences.

There is a more positive view of guilt in the tradition, and it is bound up with a well-developed and well-informed conscience. Guilt, rightly understood, is a faculty of perception and not a disease. A conscience that registers wrongdoing is doing precisely what a conscience is for, exactly as pain in the body is doing what pain is for. The man who feels nothing on having betrayed his wife is not healthier than the man who is kept awake by it. He is blind, and his blindness will cost him and everyone near him far more than the sleepless night would have cost.

The distinction that must be recovered is not between guilt and no guilt, but between two things our language unhelpfully calls by the same name.

  • True guilt is the accurate report of a well-formed conscience that a real wrong has been done. It is specific: it names an act. It is bounded in time. It points outward, towards repentance, restitution and amendment. And it has a remedy which actually works — a remedy the Church possesses and administers.
  • Neurotic guilt, or scrupulosity is something else entirely. It is unspecific and free-floating; it names no act because no particular act is its cause. It is insatiable, since nothing can discharge a debt that was never incurred. It points inward, towards self-contempt. It has no remedy in the confessional because it has no object, and it is a genuine affliction which often requires skilled help, sometimes clinical.

St Paul made the same distinction with great economy: godly sorrow produces a repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret behind it, whereas the sorrow of the world produces death.[21] One kind of sorrow moves a person forward; the other kills him slowly. They feel similar from the inside, which is exactly why people need a director who can tell them apart.

Behind true guilt stands conscience, which the Council described as the most secret core and sanctuary of a person, where he is alone with God and hears the voice that calls him to love good and avoid evil.[22] Newman called conscience the original vicar of Christ in the soul.[23] A conscience of that kind is one of the most useful possessions a human being can have: it is an instrument of navigation, and a person who has one is free in a way that a person without one never is.

What has been largely lost in our present age is therefore not guilt. Our age is awash with guilt of the diffuse and unfocused kind, which is why it is so anxious, and why it produces such savage and unforgiving public moralities. What has been lost is the well-formed conscience — the instrument that can tell a person which of his guilt is true, what to do about it, and when the matter is finished. Forming that instrument is one of the central tasks of spiritual direction, and there is almost nowhere else it is now done.

Capax Dei: The Ground of the Whole Argument

I return now to Pope John Paul II’s challenge to make holiness the centre of pastoral endeavour for the twenty-first century, and to what follows from it. That challenge is not a matter of pastoral strategy. It rests on a claim about what a human being is, and unless that claim is understood the whole proposal will look like enthusiasm.

St Augustine gave the claim its classic form. In the fourteenth book of De Trinitate he asks in what precisely the image of God in man consists, and answers that the mind is God’s image in this, that it is capable of him and can be a partaker of him.[24] The phrase the tradition drew from it is capax Dei: capable of God. Notice how strong the claim is. Augustine is not saying that human beings possess a religious faculty alongside their other faculties, as they possess a capacity for music or for mathematics. He is saying that the capacity for God is constitutive — that it is what a human being most fundamentally is. Remove it and you have not a secular man; you have no man at all.

The same insight opens the Confessions. Augustine writes that God has made us towards himself, and that our heart is restless until it rests in him.[25] The Latin preposition is directional: not merely made for God as an end eventually to be attained, but made towards God, so that the human being is by constitution a movement, an orientation, a creature leaning in a particular direction whether or not he has ever given the direction a name. The Catechism makes this the opening statement of its whole exposition of the faith: the desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God.[26]

The pastoral consequence is immediate, and it changes how a priest sees the people in front of him. Every person he meets is capax Dei — whether he knows it, whether he wants it, whether he would recognise the description. The young man at the back of the church who has come in out of curiosity; the woman who has arranged the flowers for thirty years; the man who appears once a year at a funeral and cannot meet anyone’s eye: each of them carries a capacity which nothing in creation can fill. The priest is not there to introduce something foreign into their lives. He is there to name something that is already present in them and working.

And in a culture as relentlessly extroverted as ours, that capacity is very easily smothered. It is not usually denied — denial would at least require attention. It is smothered: buried under noise, distraction, and the ceaseless commercial solicitation of the attention. A man may pass an entire life without once being still long enough to notice what he is. This is the precise condition of the generation now arriving at our doors, and it explains both their hunger and their inarticulacy. Something in them is awake. They have no words for it.

St Bernard: What Follows for the Guidance of Souls

St Bernard of Clairvaux takes Augustine’s insight and works out what it means in practice for anyone charged with the direction of souls. In On Loving God he begins from the dignity of the soul, which he locates in free will; but he adds at once that dignity without self-knowledge is worthless, and self-knowledge without the virtue that seeks God is sterile. A soul that does not know what it is will squander itself; a soul that knows what it is and does not act on the knowledge is merely better informed about its own ruin.[27]

In the Sermons on the Song of Songs he returns again and again to the greatness of the soul, and the argument he makes there is the decisive one for our purposes. The soul is great, he says, because it is capable of eternity; and precisely because it is capable of eternity, nothing less than the Eternal can fill it.[28] The soul made in the image of God cannot be satisfied by anything beneath the image. Bernard presses this without mercy. Every attempt to satisfy the soul with something less than God is not simply a moral failure; it is a category mistake, an attempt to fill an infinite vessel with a finite quantity. The restlessness that results is not a malfunction to be sedated. It is the most reliable evidence available to us of what the soul is for.

Here, then, is the ground on which John Paul II’s challenge stands, and it is not sentiment but anthropology. Holiness is not a refinement for the spiritually gifted. It is the actualisation of what every baptised person already is. To offer a human being anything less than holiness is to offer him less than himself — and, in the end, he will know it.

The Argument in Its Full Form

I can now state the argument plainly.

A.  Pope John Paul II holds that holiness is central to the life of a Christian and a Catholic in the twenty-first century, and that all pastoral endeavour must be ordered towards it.

B.  If that judgement is true — and I take it to be prophetic — then it must have real ramifications for the way spiritual theology is presented and taught, with holiness acknowledged as its primary goal, and for the way the Church’s ministry is arranged.

C.  Then it follows ipso facto that priests, who are icons of Christ and the appointed leaders of the Church’s spiritual life, must rediscover in a new way their role as curates of souls, in a manner that has real content, if what John Paul II prophetically proposes is to become a reality in the Church rather than a sentence in a document.

In order to achieve this, six things are required.

1.  They must regain their confidence in their priesthood as a vital spiritual tool in the hands of God, overcoming the lack of confidence in their own divinely inspired priestly vocation which I described above. This is first because it is foundational, and it is the hardest, because confidence cannot be legislated. It is restored only by truth — by a man being shown, repeatedly and credibly, what he actually is and what has actually been given to him. A priest who does not believe that his priesthood is a real spiritual power will not use it, and the people in front of him will sense the hesitation long before they can explain it.

2.  From the beginning of the long years of seminary formation they must be helped to realise the priority of their own journey into holiness. This is the sine qua non if they are to be effective in the important role of spiritual director and icon of Christ to the Church and to the world. A man cannot lead another where he has not gone. He may transmit doctrine he has not lived, because doctrine can travel through a mind alone; he cannot direct a soul through terrain he has never crossed himself, and any attempt to do so will produce either platitude or damage.

3.  For this there needs to be a root-and-branch reordering of seminary formation, placing the spiritual pillar in precedence over the other three. Precedence, not monopoly: the intellectual, pastoral and human dimensions are not to be diminished, and human formation in particular remains the necessary foundation of everything else.[29] But they are to be ordered towards the spiritual rather than set alongside it. Concretely, this means that the spiritual pillar sets the rhythm of the day; that it is given the best hours rather than the hours left over; that it is taught as a discipline with real content and not merely provided as a service; and that a man’s progress in it is a matter of serious and formal discernment, conducted with proper respect for the internal forum.

4.  In this challenging new vision of the seminary, with spiritual theology at its centre and training in spiritual direction as its fruit, there will of necessity have to be formation personnel committed wholeheartedly to that vision. This cannot be delegated to one man in one room at the end of a corridor. A seminary teaches most powerfully by what its staff evidently care about, and seminarians read that with great accuracy. If the rector, the dean of studies, and the professors of dogmatic and moral theology are not themselves men of prayer who can speak about the interior life from the inside, then the spiritual director will be an isolated voice, and the house will form men in what it actually values rather than in what it says it values.

5.  By stressing the centrality of the ordained priesthood in this rediscovered vision, I am not denigrating the role that lay people, and male and female religious, can also play in the whole field of spiritual direction and the guidance of souls — obviously after they have themselves followed in-depth training and remain under competent supervision. That contribution is not a concession to necessity; it is essential, and the Church cannot meet the present need without it. Some of the finest directors I have known have been lay women.

6.  This having been said, there is something unique in the efficacy of a priest in his role as spiritual director, combined as it is with his ability to forgive sins in the Sacrament of Confession or Penance. The two capacities held by one man are not merely a convenience of scheduling. They constitute a distinct spiritual reality, and the last section of this chapter is devoted to what it is and how it works.

The Sacrament of Penance and Spiritual Direction

The Sacrament of Penance or Confession has as its primary goal and focus the confession of sins and the reception of God’s merciful forgiveness through the action and the presence of an ordained Catholic priest. Where there is true repentance and a genuine desire to do better in the future course of one’s life, the sacrament, sincerely received, imparts a sacramental grace which directly heals the wound of sin, strengthens the penitent’s resolve to amend his or her ways, and guards against that future breakdown in the relationship with God which has caused them to sin in the past.[30]

Spiritual direction has a different object, and the difference matters. Its object is not the forgiveness of sins but the direction of a life. Penance asks: what have I done wrong, and how is it to be put right? Direction asks: where is God leading me, and what is standing in the way? Sin appears in both conversations, but in direction it appears as a pattern rather than as an act — not this lie, but the fear that keeps producing lies; not this failure of charity, but the wound underneath it that has never been looked at.

Four distinctions are worth holding clearly.

  • Object. Penance is concerned with sin and absolution. Direction is concerned with the whole movement of a life towards God: prayer, desire, vocation, temperament, consolation and desolation, the stage a person has reached and the next step available to them.
  • Structure. Penance is episodic and complete in itself; each absolution finishes what it begins, and a penitent may go to any priest, anywhere, once. Direction is cumulative and by nature unfinished; its value grows with the director’s knowledge of a particular person across years, and it cannot be conducted by strangers in rotation.
  • Mode of efficacy. Penance works ex opere operato. Its grace does not depend upon the holiness, the intelligence or the skill of the priest; a bad confessor validly absolves, and the penitent receives the full sacrament. Direction works through the director’s own discernment, experience and sanctity, and therefore depends on him entirely. This asymmetry has a sharp practical edge: a poor confessor still forgives, whereas a poor director does harm. St John of the Cross wrote about incompetent directors with a heat he reserved for very few subjects.[31]
  • Forum and confidentiality. The seal of confession is absolute and admits of no exception whatever. Direction is bound by a grave and strict confidentiality which is nevertheless of a different order. The two must not be blurred — neither in the mind of the director nor, still less, in the mind of the person. Nobody should ever feel that access to absolution is conditional upon submitting to direction, and the internal forum must be kept rigorously clear of the external forum, particularly in a house of formation. That is a requirement of justice, not merely of prudence.

Why the Two Belong Together in a Priest

Distinct, then — and the distinction must be maintained. But they were made for one another, and this is the heart of the matter.

The priest who hears a person’s confession over many years and who also directs that person holds two ends of the same thread. In the sacrament he applies the remedy; in direction he treats the causes. In the sacrament he speaks in the person of Christ, as judge and physician, with an authority that is not his own; in direction he speaks as a fellow pilgrim who has walked further along the same road and can say what lies around the next bend. The sacrament gives the grace; direction helps the person cooperate with the grace he has been given. Neither substitutes for the other, and each is weaker alone.

There is also a simple human fact here which theology should not be too proud to notice. People tell the truth in confession. Under the seal, with absolution in prospect, a man will say what he will say nowhere else, to no one else, in no other room. The priest who also directs him already knows the worst, and has already forgiven it in the name of Christ; there is nothing left to conceal, and therefore nothing to defend. Direction conducted on that foundation can begin where other conversations end.[32]

This convergence in one ordained man is the particular and irreplaceable gift of the priest as curate of souls. It does not diminish the lay director, whose work is genuine and needed. It does mean that when the Church considers who should be trained in this art and with what urgency, the priest has a claim that is not merely traditional but theological.

Theoretical Consequences

If the foregoing is accepted, a number of consequences follow at the level of theology itself, before any timetable is redrawn.

1.  Spiritual theology ceases to be a peripheral discipline. If holiness is the goal of Christian existence, then the science that studies the goal is architectonic and not optional. Spiritual theology moves from the margins of the curriculum to its ordering centre, and dogmatic and moral theology are understood as serving it rather than preceding it in importance. This is a substantial claim about the arrangement of the theological disciplines, and it will be resisted.

2.  The theology of the priesthood requires development. The formula in persona Christi Capitis has been expounded overwhelmingly with reference to the sacraments, and rightly so. The cure of souls requires that it also be expounded with reference to the priest as spiritual father and guide — that is, in terms of the priest’s participation in Christ’s own work of forming disciples, which occupied the greater part of the Lord’s public ministry.

3.  The anthropology of capax Dei becomes a working instrument. What has largely functioned as a scholastic thesis becomes the operative assumption of pastoral practice: that every person encountered is constituted by a capacity for God which nothing else will satisfy, and that pastoral method must be judged by whether it addresses that capacity or distracts from it.

4.  The relation of grace and nature must be restated for a therapeutic age. The Church needs a worked-out account of the relation between spiritual direction and psychological treatment: not a territorial truce, but a theology of complementarity with usable criteria — what belongs to which, how each recognises the limits of its competence, and how referral works in both directions. At present this is improvised, parish by parish, from instinct.

5.  The theology of conscience must be recovered from both its distorters. Against the Jansenist inheritance, conscience is not an accusing faculty whose normal report is condemnation. Against the therapeutic settlement, it is not a socialised anxiety to be dissolved. It is an instrument of moral perception which must be formed, and the distinction between true and neurotic guilt must be taught to those who will hear confessions.

6.  The universal call to holiness acquires operational content. The fifth chapter of Lumen Gentium has been affirmed for sixty years and implemented for perhaps ten. If every baptised person is genuinely called to the heights, then the means to the heights must be genuinely and universally available, and a Church that does not provide them has not in fact taught the doctrine — it has only announced it.

7.  The four pillars must be understood as a hierarchy of finality rather than a list. Human, intellectual, spiritual and pastoral formation are not four parallel tracks of equal weight running to the same terminus. They stand in an order: the human as foundation, the intellectual and pastoral as instruments, the spiritual as that towards which the others are ordered and from which they take their meaning.

8.  An ecclesiology of shared spiritual ministry is required. If lay men and women and religious are to direct souls in significant numbers, the Church needs a considered theology of their authority: on what it rests, how it is conferred and recognised, what its limits are, and how it relates to the ordained ministry without either absorbing it or being absorbed by it.

Practical Consequences

Theology that changes nothing on Monday morning has not been believed. The following are the concrete measures that this argument requires.

For Seminaries

  • Spiritual theology taught as a full, examined, multi-year course with real content — the stages of the spiritual life, the classical schools, the discernment of spirits, the pathologies of prayer — and not as an optional lecture series attached to the timetable’s edges.
  • A distinct and supervised practicum in the art of spiritual direction in the later years of formation: case studies, observed practice, role-play, and regular supervision, on the model long used in clinical training. Nobody learns this art from books alone, and nobody should be ordained having never once been watched attempting it.
  • The horarium reordered so that the spiritual pillar receives the best hours of the day rather than what survives after lectures and placements. What a house does at nine in the morning is what a house believes.
  • Formation staff appointed on the explicit criterion that they are men and women of prayer who can speak of the interior life from experience — applied to the rector and the professors of dogma and moral, and not only to the spiritual director.
  • A candidate’s progress in prayer and in self-knowledge treated as a formal element of discernment for advancement to orders, with the separation of the internal and external forum scrupulously respected and the mechanism for doing so clearly specified.
  • Every seminarian in regular direction with a trained and supervised director, and taught explicitly to distinguish direction, confession and counselling — three different rooms, three different competences.
  • The classic authors read in their own words: Cassian, Benedict, Bernard, Ignatius, Teresa, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Thérèse. Reading them, not reading about them in a textbook that summarises their conclusions and omits their method.
  • Clear protocols on the recognition of clinical conditions and on referral, so that a priest knows what he is not competent to treat and has somewhere specific to send it.

For Bishops and Dioceses

  • A diocesan school of spiritual direction, open to priests, deacons, religious and lay people, with a serious multi-year curriculum, supervised practice and a genuine qualification at the end of it.
  • Every priest of the diocese to have his own spiritual director — normal, expected, resourced, and protected in the diary. A diocese that will pay for a priest’s continuing education and not for his direction has declared its priorities.
  • Ongoing formation programmes that treat the cure of souls as a core competence of priestly life rather than as a special interest for those inclined that way.
  • A diocesan register of trained and supervised directors — ordained, religious and lay — so that a parish priest who is asked for direction and cannot provide it himself has somewhere specific to send the person, today.
  • Structures of supervision for all directors, lay and ordained alike. Direction without supervision is how harm is done by well-meaning people.
  • Safeguarding policy presented and taught as the condition of spiritual fatherhood rather than as an obstacle to it, with explicit guidance on how direction is to be conducted safely — so that priests stop inferring that the safest course is to do nothing.

For Parishes

  • The parish priest to make it publicly and repeatedly known, in plain words from the pulpit, that spiritual direction exists, what it is, and that it is available here. The demand will not appear before the offer does.
  • Preaching that names the spiritual life as a journey with recognisable stages, so that people acquire the vocabulary with which to ask for help. People cannot request what they cannot name.
  • A team of trained lay and religious directors formed in the parish and working under the priest’s oversight, so that the capacity of the parish is not limited to the capacity of one man.
  • Confession offered at hours when working people can actually attend, and offered generously — not as a concession but as the ordinary business of the parish.
  • Mystagogy for the newly baptised that lasts years rather than weeks, and that teaches prayer rather than merely providing companionship.

For the Newly Baptised and the Long Faithful

  • A named companion for every neophyte for at least three years after baptism — someone whose responsibility it is to notice if they stop coming.
  • Structured instruction in the actual practice of prayer: mental prayer, lectio divina, the daily examen, the use of the Psalter. Taught as skills are taught, with correction and progression.
  • The tradition itself offered rather than a diluted summary of it. The evidence suggests that young adults arriving at the Church now are not asking for something easier. They are asking for something that demands everything, because they have already tried everything that demands nothing.
  • An explicit and repeated invitation to the long-faithful, who will not put themselves forward and who must be asked by name.

For the Individual Priest, Beginning This Week

  • Find a spiritual director for yourself, and go. Nothing else on this list can be done by a man who is not himself being directed.
  • Read three of the classic texts properly this year, with a pen.
  • Announce from the pulpit, in plain language and without apology, that you are available for spiritual direction and what that means.
  • Begin with three people. Not thirty. Three — met monthly, prepared for, and prayed over by name.
  • Keep the forums distinct, and say out loud to those you direct what the difference is.
  • Find supervision, even informally, with a brother priest or an experienced religious. Do not do this alone.

Conclusion

The young woman who came to the font at the Easter Vigil this year did not come because the Church had improved her communications. She came because something in her was restless and would not be quieted by anything the age was able to offer her. Augustine named that restlessness sixteen hundred years ago and told us exactly what it is: the mark of a creature made towards God and incapable of resting anywhere short of him. Bernard added the consequence — that a soul capable of eternity cannot be filled by anything less than the Eternal, and that every attempt to fill it otherwise is not merely a sin but a mistake about what kind of thing a soul is. John Paul II, standing at the opening of this century, drew the pastoral conclusion and asked the Church to reorganise herself around it.

What that young woman needs now is not a programme. She needs a man or a woman who knows the road, who has walked some distance along it, who can tell her where she is standing and what the next step is, and who will still be there in five years’ time when the first fervour has gone and the real work has begun. She needs, in the old and exact word, cura: care that is also cure.

The Church possesses this treasure. She has possessed it for two thousand years, she has refined it in every century, and she has, for too long, declined to give it away. It has been kept behind enclosure walls and in specialist journals while the baptised were left to improvise their interior lives from whatever the surrounding culture provided. That was always indefensible. In a moment when a generation with no religious background is walking through our doors of its own accord, and when lifelong Catholics are still waiting after fifty years to be asked how they pray, it has become something close to a dereliction.

And the priest has been ordained for precisely this. Not primarily to administer, to fundraise, to chair meetings or to keep buildings standing, but to stand in the place of the Good Shepherd who knows his own and is known by them. If he has lost the confidence to do it — and many have, for reasons that are not their fault — then the Church must give it back to him: by telling him the truth about what he is, by forming him properly from the first day he enters the seminary rather than hoping he picks it up, and by putting the cure of souls back where it has always belonged, at the centre of his life and not at its margins.

Gregory the Great called the governance of souls the art of arts. He was not being decorative. He meant that it is the most difficult and the most consequential work a human being can undertake, and that a man who takes it on without preparation is a danger to those he serves. We have spent a century preparing priests with great care for everything except this. The rediscovery of spiritual direction is therefore not another initiative to be launched. It is a rebirth: the recovery of something the Church already has, already teaches, and has simply stopped handing on.

On Priestly Formation, see also here

On Integral Theology, see here

Bibliography

Magisterial and Ecclesial Sources

Council of Trent, Session XXIII (15 July 1563), Decree on Reform, canon 18.

Innocent X, Cum occasione (31 May 1653).

Clement XI, Unigenitus Dei Filius (8 September 1713).

Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (21 November 1964), esp. ch. V, nn. 39–42.

Second Vatican Council, Optatam Totius, Decree on Priestly Training (28 October 1965).

Second Vatican Council, Presbyterorum Ordinis, Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests (7 December 1965), nn. 12–14.

Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (7 December 1965), n. 16.

Code of Canon Law (1983), cann. 515, 519, 528–529.

John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation (25 March 1992).

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edn (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nn. 27–30, 1422–1498, 1776–1802.

John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte, Apostolic Letter (6 January 2001).

John Paul II, Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela, motu proprio (30 April 2001).

Congregation for Catholic Education, Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood (29 June 2008).

Benedict XVI, Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland (19 March 2010).

Congregation for the Clergy, The Priest, Minister of Divine Mercy: An Aid for Confessors and Spiritual Directors (9 March 2011).

Congregation for the Clergy, Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis: The Gift of the Priestly Vocation (8 December 2016).

Francis, Vos estis lux mundi, motu proprio (7 May 2019; rev. 25 March 2023).

Conférence des évêques de France, Enquête annuelle sur les catéchumènes (Paris, published annually in Lent; figures cited from the survey of 25 March 2026).

Patristic, Monastic and Classical Spiritual Sources

Augustine of Hippo, Confessiones, I, 1, 1.

Augustine of Hippo, De Trinitate, XIV, 8, 11.

Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 2 (Apologeticus de fuga sua).

John Chrysostom, De Sacerdotio.

John Cassian, Conlationes; De institutis coenobiorum.

Benedict of Nursia, Regula.

Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis, I, 1.

Bernard of Clairvaux, De diligendo Deo.

Bernard of Clairvaux, De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae.

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, esp. Sermons 80–83.

Ignatius of Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia, esp. the Rules for the Discernment of Spirits.

Teresa of Ávila, Libro de la Vida, ch. 13; Castillo interior.

John of the Cross, Llama de amor viva, stanza 3.

Francis de Sales, Introduction à la vie dévote, Part I, ch. 4.

Alphonsus Liguori, Theologia Moralis; Praxis Confessarii.

Thérèse of Lisieux, Histoire d’une âme.

John Henry Newman, A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk (London, 1875), sect. V.

Modern Studies and Other Works Cited

Jansen, Cornelius, Augustinus (Louvain, 1640).

Arnauld, Antoine, De la fréquente communion (Paris, 1643).

Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion (1927); Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).

Tanquerey, Adolphe, The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology (Tournai: Desclée, 1930).

Jung, C. G., Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933).

Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald, The Three Ages of the Interior Life (1938).

Frankl, Viktor E., Man’s Search for Meaning (1946); The Unconscious God (1948).

Rieff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007).

Bible Society, The Quiet Revival (Swindon, 2025) — withdrawn March 2026; see The Quiet Revival One Year On: What’s the Story? (2026).

Notes

[1]John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte, Apostolic Letter at the close of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 (6 January 2001), n. 30.

[2]Ibid., n. 31; cf. Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, ch. V, nn. 39–42, on the universal call to holiness.

[3]Novo Millennio Ineunte, nn. 32–33. The Pope asks that Christian communities become genuine schools of prayer, and reads the contemporary demand for spirituality as one of the signs of the times.

[4]John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation (25 March 1992), nn. 45–50. Spiritual formation is presented there as the element that unifies and animates the whole of a man’s being and acting as a priest.

[5]Second Vatican Council, Optatam Totius, Decree on Priestly Training (28 October 1965), n. 8; cf. n. 3 on the role of spiritual directors.

[6]Congregation for the Clergy, Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis: The Gift of the Priestly Vocation (8 December 2016), which presents formation as a single integrated process rather than four parallel tracks.

[7]Conférence des évêques de France, annual survey of catechumens, published 25 March 2026: 13,234 adults and 8,152 adolescents were baptised at the Easter Vigil of 4 April 2026, a rise of some twenty per cent on the previous year, which had itself been a record. Adult baptisms have more than tripled in a decade, from 4,124 in 2016. Some eighty-two per cent of the adults baptised were aged between eighteen and forty.

[8]The same survey of 1,450 catechumens across sixty dioceses found that roughly two in five began the journey towards baptism in the wake of a personal trial — illness, bereavement, or a comparable rupture — which had opened existential questions for them.

[9]Two cautions are in order for anyone citing figures in this area. First, in France women form the larger share of catechumens, at roughly three in five; the strong impression of young male enquirers reported by many priests in Britain and North America is pastoral observation rather than published statistics. Second, the Bible Society report The Quiet Revival (April 2025), widely cited in the English-speaking press as evidence of a surge in young male church attendance, was withdrawn in March 2026 after YouGov acknowledged that the 2024 sample was compromised by fraudulent respondents. The French catechumenate figures, being counts of actual baptisms rather than opinion polling, stand on much firmer ground and are relied on here.

[10]Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis, I, 1: the governance of souls is the art of arts. Cf. Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 2 (Apologeticus de fuga sua), where the guidance of the human person is called the art of arts and the science of sciences.

[11]John Chrysostom, De Sacerdotio, especially Books II–III.

[12]Council of Trent, Session XXIII (15 July 1563), Decree on Reform, canon 18 — the decree establishing diocesan seminaries.

[13]Code of Canon Law (1983), cann. 515 §1, 519, 528 §2 and 529 §1. The last of these obliges the parish priest to know his people, to visit families, and to share their burdens.

[14]John Paul II, Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela (30 April 2001); Benedict XVI, Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland (19 March 2010); Francis, Vos estis lux mundi (7 May 2019, revised 25 March 2023).

[15]On the necessary separation of the internal and external forum in formation, see Congregation for the Clergy, Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis (2016); and Congregation for Catholic Education, Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood (29 June 2008).

[16]Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

[17]Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). For a very different account from within the discipline, see C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), and Viktor E. Frankl, The Unconscious God (1948).

[18]Cornelius Jansen, Augustinus (Louvain, 1640); Antoine Arnauld, De la fréquente communion (Paris, 1643), which did much to make the deferral of Holy Communion a mark of seriousness.

[19]Innocent X, Cum occasione (31 May 1653); Clement XI, Unigenitus Dei Filius (8 September 1713).

[20]St Alphonsus Liguori, Theologia Moralis and Praxis Confessarii, the decisive pastoral counterweight to rigorism in the confessional.

[21]2 Corinthians 7:10.

[22]Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, n. 16; Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 1776–1802.

[23]John Henry Newman, A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk (1875), sect. V, where conscience is called the original vicar of Christ in the soul.

[24]Augustine, De Trinitate, XIV, 8, 11: the mind is the image of God precisely in this, that it is capable of him and can share in him.

[25]Augustine, Confessiones, I, 1, 1. The Latin has fecisti nos ad te — you made us towards yourself — a directional preposition, not merely a purposive one.

[26]Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 27–30.

[27]Bernard of Clairvaux, De diligendo Deo, II, 6, and the treatment of the degrees of love in chs. VIII–X.

[28]Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, especially Sermons 80–83 on the soul’s greatness, uprightness, and its likeness to God.

[29]Pastores Dabo Vobis, n. 43, where human formation is described as the necessary foundation of all priestly formation.

[30]Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 1422–1424, 1468.

[31]St John of the Cross, Llama de amor viva, stanza 3, contains the tradition’s most severe warning against incompetent spiritual directors, whom he compares to blacksmiths who know only how to hammer.

[32]Congregation for the Clergy, The Priest, Minister of Divine Mercy: An Aid for Confessors and Spiritual Directors (9 March 2011).