In a provincial diocese, where the bells still mark the rhythm of simple lives and the corridors of the Curia carry the scent of old wax and guarded silence, there are bishops who exercise their ministry not with the wisdom of shepherds, but with the repression and sentimentality of those who, once, were cast out of the Roman palaces.
The Wounded Power
These prelates have learned to mask their bitterness behind slow smiles and measured words, to govern with emotion rather than reason, to inspire fear instead of accompanying and understanding their brothers. Their defeat in the corridors of power has made them cautious and suspicious: today they surround themselves with followers ready to interpret every gesture as a command, men and women ever alert, knowing that the bishop’s mood is a broken compass. They live by his oscillations, between caress and reprimand, in that unstable balance that only the schizophrenic souls of power can create.
The New Religion of “Psychology”
In these rooms, where the Gospel hangs like a faded painting, and clinical reports have replaced the words of Christ, psychology has become the new instrument of control. Not the genuine kind — the one that listens, accompanies, and frees — but the one bent to the manipulator’s will. No longer the confessional, but the clinical session; no longer excommunication, but a therapeutic relationship used as an act of obedience. Thus what was born to heal becomes a means to dominate, and care turns into surveillance of the soul.
The Weary Priest
One morning, a young yet worn-out priest appeared at the bishop’s residence. In his eyes shone the lucid despair of one who seeks no privilege, only a little peace. It’s a state familiar to many priests today: men exhausted by a pastoral system reduced to deadlines, reports, and fear, forced to appear strong while inwardly crying out only to be heard and seen as men, not as superheroes in cassocks. They wish only to live their ministry as bridges between God and His people, not as managers of a corporation bearing the name of a new “pastoral unit.”
The Smile of Power
The bishop, known for his ambition and a past few in Rome remember all too well, greets him with a calculated smile — the same he once reserved for donors, politicians, and cardinals when he still sat on the chairs of power in the Urbe. “Do you need some rest?” he asks, slowly turning his coffee cup as if it were a worldly rosary. The priest nods. Calmly, he explains that even his psychologist has suggested a break to recover balance and peace. Today, burnout among priests is no longer an unlikely risk — it is a daily reality, lived in the silence of parish houses. Parishes are merged into new structures, but the churches to manage remain the same; Masses increase while priests decrease, crushed beneath a burden no one can bear forever. They live torn between obedience and exhaustion, between duty and breakdown, and often end up mistaking the Cross for fatigue. The bishop leans forward, lowering his voice, the strategist behind the paternal tone: “Forget that one. I’ll send you to someone better — someone I trust.”
When Care Turns to Control
The priest is unsure whether he’s joking. Then he looks into his eyes — and realizes, with a chill, that he isn’t. It’s the start of that subtle game, as old as ecclesiastical power itself, which some pretend to despise only because they’ve renounced gold and lace. But power does not reside in vestments: it is a mindset, a way of breathing, of dominating under the guise of piety. Those same vestments, once meant to remind one of his calling as father and shepherd, now give way to tailored jackets with a pectoral cross in the pocket — an ecclesial badge of rank. More CEOs than pastors, they raise their voice or manipulate when the “pastoral revenue” doesn’t meet the expected figures. The therapist is appointed not to heal, but to influence; not to free, but to convince. In certain Catholic circles, psychology has ceased to be a science of support and has become a technique of docility — a refined way to secure obedience when faith no longer suffices.
The Silence of Italian Authorities
That man of the Church, once dismissed for his intrigues in Rome, has learned that true control no longer passes through decrees or censures, but through clinical files. A few sessions, a neatly written report, and the priest who resists becomes suddenly “fragile,” “unstable,” “in need of accompaniment.” This is how consciences are killed: not with condemnation, but with diagnosis. Silere non possum has long denounced this: the use of psychology as a tool of clerical manipulation. And these are not isolated cases. In Italy, where psychological orders protect their “Catholic” colleagues more than the ethics of their profession, no one truly investigates. Elsewhere, police and parliaments have launched inquiries into so-called “conversion therapies,” where faith becomes a pretext to cure what is not a disease. Here, everything remains “in the family”: a bishop recommends, a psychologist accepts and labels, a seminarian or priest submits. And yet, as psychiatrist Viktor Frankl reminds us, “Man must never be a means, not even for the sake of good.” But in today’s Church, care has become the most elegant form of control.
The Selection of the “Pure”
Even in seminaries, psychology serves not to help but to screen. It’s not accompaniment — it’s selection. Those who show too much sensitivity, who are deemed “not masculine enough,” “too rigid,” “too traditional,” or “too friendly,” those who look others in the eye instead of lowering their gaze, who unmask the ideology of their formators, or refuse to play in certain power games — all end up on the watchlist. Then comes the ritual phrase, soft as silk but sharp as a blade: “We’re sending you back for further discernment.” It’s the Church’s gentle way of saying you’re not one of us. Only a few wise voices still see the disaster unfolding before their eyes. We speak of a “vocation crisis,” of a “lack of priests,” of “difficult times,” but few dare to speak the truth: formation has failed — completely. You see it every day, in parishes and Curia corridors; in those smug smiles, that hollow self-assurance masking unresolved wounds. At the first difficulty, they collapse. What else could we expect? We have favored weak and narcissistic men, priests convinced that the world revolves around their reflection. We have taught them to please, not to serve; to judge, not to love; to appear perfect, even when they are falling apart inside. They are the sons of a Church that preferred blind obedience to uncomfortable truth, flattery to interior freedom. In seminaries, we promoted those who bowed, not those who questioned. Those who nodded in public and stabbed in private. Those useful to the system. The others — the honest ones — were sent away, exiled to “discernment” or to teaching religion in schools. And now we feign surprise. We lament unstable priests, divided parishes, collaborators who slander one another like village gossips. We gasp at scandals and crises of faith. But we know the truth: this is the fruit of the formation we chose — and the fault is entirely ours.
The Silence of the Soul
Beneath the stone cross and the episcopal coat of arms crowning the palace, a quiet tragedy unfolds — small only in appearance. The priest returns home with a folded slip of paper in his pocket: the name of a “bishop-approved psychologist.” In his room, he takes it out, studies it briefly, then folds it again and places it gently in his bedside drawer. He has understood: once again, the bishop will not help him. That task belongs to the lay therapist who has long accompanied him outside the Church’s fences — the one who, with patience, helps him rediscover within himself the strength to live his vocation as a man and as a priest. The bishop, instead, wants to steer, persuade, correct — not for his good, but for a more merciless reason: the need to fill a parish vacancy. The young priest kneels beside his bed, before the crucifix that has followed him since seminary — the same he carried to each of the parishes he’s already been forced to leave. He gazes at it in silence. And in that silence, more eloquent than a thousand words, he asks only: Who, after all, is truly sick?
p.A.S.
Silere non possum