The Spanish bishops publish a very balanced doctrinal note on the pros and cons of emotions in the development of Christian life.
The main aspects that are usually discussed in this area are as follows and then we offer the main excerpts from the document.
1. They point out the risk of reducing faith to emotions, while recognizing that these are something human and positive.
2. They denounce the risk that some behaviors involve an “emotional bombardment” that can lead to a form of “spiritual abuse”.
3. They invite us to learn to discern our feelings in the spiritual life by following the great masters of spirituality. They cite St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Teresa of Jesus, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Lisieux and St. Teresa of Calcutta.
4. They stress that what is central to the Christian life is the trinity, not subjective experience.
5. They invite to bet with determination for an integral and continuous formation.
6. They point out that faith is lived in the Church, without absolutizing the charism of one's own group, but placing it at the service of the unity of the Church.
7. The bishops are ultimately responsible for discerning the future of the various charisms.
8. The fruits of the new methods of evangelization can be measured by their capacity to integrate into a community and to awaken the question of one's own vocation.
9. Encourage the fostering of Eucharistic adoration as a natural continuation of the Eucharistic celebration.
10. They encourage to follow the Ritual for adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and not to focus on adorations with a gimmicky decoration that deviates from the norms. However, they do not specify to what extent it is inappropriate to expose the Blessed Sacrament outside the altar of a church or how the altar should be decorated according to liturgical norms (and not with its own decoration, candles of all kinds, posters with messages, etc.).
Textual quotation of the main ideas of the document:
In recent years, there have been signs that indicate a revival of the Christian faith, especially among young Spaniards of the so-called “generation Z”.”, those digital natives born between the mid-1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. The Church appreciates the creativity of the various initiatives of first proclamation that the Holy Spirit has awakened in many ecclesial movements and associations to facilitate for so many people the encounter with Christ or the revitalization of their faith.
1. Feelings are good
Jesus himself, when asked about the principal commandment of the Law, says: «You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind» (Mt 22:37). Faith involves the whole of human existence, since it is the surrender of the “whole” man to God as an obedient and free response to revelation (Rom 1:5, 26).. Along with the fiducial aspects (trust in God), faith includes cognitive elements (adherence to God, confession of faith) as well as emotions and feelings (spiritual joy, love or peace, among others).
In all these methods, to a greater or lesser degree, emotions and feelings play an important role, provoking a first “impact” on the person and leading to conversion and adhesion to Christ. However, there are not a few, even among the promoters of these experiences, who have warned against the risk of an “emotivist” reductionism of faith, which leads many people to become consumers of impact experiences. and insatiable seekers of the pleasure of spiritual sentiment. The proclamation of Christ does not seek directly to provoke feelings, but to bear witness to an event that has transformed history and is capable of transforming the existence of every human being by occupying the center of his or her life.
In our days, on the other hand, the experience of faith is centered in the emotional universe This could be interpreted as one of the “signs of the times” or a call to recover the importance of feelings and to integrate them, without undermining reason, into the Christian life. At the same time, we note the need to regulate and discern emotions because they can be an obstacle to spiritual growth.
Feelings play an important role in human and spiritual life, and are fundamental to the inner life of every human person.. Christian faith, rooted in the incarnation, can neither leave them aside nor ignore them. God also reaches us in our feelings, in our subjectivity, in our intimacy, in our emotionality. The affective constitutes a fundamental field in the spiritual life, in the relationship with God and with others, in the believing maturation of the person. However, feelings cannot determine all or almost all of the Christian life, because, at times, the very absence of feelings is part of the spiritual journey.
The challenge will always be to facilitate the encounter with God without abusing emotions., This would be contrary to the Word of God itself, which takes into account the affective dimension of the relationship between God and the human being. This would contradict the Word of God itself, which takes into account the affective dimension of the relationship between God and man.
2. Where the problem arises
Experts and analysts of our time have been warning that in the last few years the so-called postmodern culture has produced an absolutization of affectivity, reducing it to feelings and emotions., It has even been argued that it is irrational, which has been called “emotivism”, that is, the reduction of affectivity to emotion. Postmodern man rejects rationalist objectivism to become an emotive subject, who becomes an emotive subject, who becomes an emotive subject, who becomes an emotive subject. from “I think therefore I am” to “I feel therefore I am”.”, from “logos” to “emotion”. But feelings and emotions, although they are part of the affective world, are not capable of embracing it in its totality.
The “emotivist” man perceives himself as disoriented, because is swept away by emotions at every moment without any horizon and identifies with them; and lives in immediacy and fickleness absolutizing the instant (as long as the emotion endures). Applied to the spiritual life, the “religious emotivist” makes faith depend on the intensity of the emotion, reducing it to the measure of the feeling and how pleasurable it may be, which is reinforced when it comes to shared experiences.. It is important to not to confuse these experiences with mystical rapture. or the experience of spiritual joy that accompanies private revelation in the saints.
It is important to keep in mind that emotions and feelings play an important role in human and spiritual life. The human body and emotions are integral parts of the psychic and spiritual life of the human being. Emotions cannot be ignored or trivialized because they are intrinsic to our existence. However, they are intrinsic to our existence, it is decisive to find a balance in the spiritual life between the intellectual, volitional and sentimental aspects of life. Feelings cannot be separated from either truth or goodness.
On the other hand, the “emotivist” is more easily manipulated.. Many current social and political discourses frequently appeal to emotions (fear, hope, indignation) in order to generate certain behaviors and adhesions. Also in the spiritual life there is a danger of trying to elicit certain behaviors through “emotional bombardment”, which could be considered a form of “spiritual abuse”.”. Such abuse can manifest itself in the form of “emotional peer pressure,” whereby individuals are forced to “feel” the same as others in order not to self-marginalize themselves from the experience. And even through the use of false supernatural or mystical experiences (“false mysticism”), which distort an authentic vision of God, as a means of exercising dominion over consciences by annulling the autonomy of individuals or to commit other types of abuses, which must be considered of special moral gravity.
Positive vision of the heart
Ya Pius XII in the encyclical Haurietis aquas (1956), on devotion to the Heart of Christ, warned of the danger of naturalism and sentimentalism, and presented the Heart of the Incarnate Word as a sign and symbol of the threefold love with which Christ loves: divine love (as God), human spiritual love (the charity of his human will) and sensible love (affections and emotions).. In this way, the faithful were invited to reach the harmony of love in Christ.
Authentic love always leads to truth. As Pope Benedict XVI affirmed: Without truth, charity falls into mere sentimentality.
Believe with the heart is the best antidote against the two great enemies of the spiritual life pointed out by Pope Francis: neo-Gnosticism and neo-Pelagianism. The former conceives salvation as something purely interior, closing the subject in the immanence of his own reason or feelings. Pelagianism, on the other hand, emphasizes the radically autonomous character of the individual, The Church, which pretends to reach salvation by its own strength. This is translated, among other things, in a self-complacency for the fruits achieved, in the obsession for the law and in the ostentation in the care of the liturgy, of the doctrine and of the prestige of the Church.
4. Theological-pastoral criteria for discernment
a) The essence of Christianity is the Trinity.
It is important that Christian prayer does not lose its Trinitarian identity, and that the first proclamation, as well as the processes of discipleship, present Jesus Christ, whom we know through the action of the Spirit, who reveals to us the face of the Father.
b) Personal dimension
We invite you to learn to discern feelings in the spiritual life from the great masters of spirituality. St. Ignatius of Loyola himself encouraged us to discern between states of consolation and desolation of the soul, or to place ourselves in holy indifference before a choice of life, with the desire to serve God as the first and principal end to which everything is subordinated.[28]. Others, like St. Teresa of Jesus or St. John of the Cross, will live the purification of the senses in the “nights of the spirit” or will have to face, like St. Therese of Lisieux or St. Teresa of Calcutta, long periods of spiritual darkness.
It follows that one must be wary of feelings and emotions that simply provide comfort to the subject. Christ, on the contrary, calls to carry the cross and to follow him. A faith based only on pleasant and positive sentiments is repulsed by the cross. The Christian life cannot be understood without sharing the cross and completing in our flesh the sufferings of Christ (cf. Col 1:24).
c) Objective dimension of faith
The encounter with Christ entails the acceptance of the truth of his person and his message. There is no encounter with Christ without profession of faith, if only the subjective aspect is taken into account, but the content of faith and doctrine is not deepened. Formation is the primary means of integrating truth in love.. If the act of faith as personal adherence to Christ loses its profound unity with the saving truth that he has brought us, it becomes an empty and blind act.
The emotional experience of the faith must be based on the objective truth of the kerygma, whose content is found in the Word of God as transmitted and interpreted by the Church. All this invites us to to be determinedly committed to comprehensive and continuous education and training, The program includes all the dimensions of the person (intellectual, affective, relational and spiritual).
d) Ecclesial dimension
By the same logic of the incarnation, the encounter with God is always mediated. Jesus Christ, the mediator of salvation, continues to go out to meet human beings through the proclamation of the Word, the celebration of the sacraments and the service of our brothers and sisters in the Church.. A direct and individualistic experience and knowledge of God is not possible. No one became a Christian by himself, nor is he a believer on his own. We believe because someone spoke to us about the Lord and transmitted to us the faith of the Church in the family, in a parish, in a group or in an ecclesial movement. The profession of faith itself is a simultaneous personal and ecclesial act, so that when the Christian says “I believe”, at the same time, he says “we believe”.”, The symbol of Nicea in its Greek version testifies to this, thus highlighting the ecclesial dimension of the act of faith.
This “we believe” does not mean uniformity. The Pauline image of the body of Christ is very eloquent in expressing unity in the necessary diversity. All of us, though different, are members of the one body, whose head is Christ (cf. 1 Cor 12:12; Eph 1:18); so that diversity is not contrary to the unity of the body, but enriches it: «there are diversities of charisms, but the same Spirit; there are diversities of ministries, but the same Lord» (1 Cor 12:4-5). An authentic ecclesial living of the faith does not absolutize the charism of one's own group, but places it at the service of the unity of the Church; it does not exclude other charisms, but appreciates the richness it brings to the whole.. The same can be said of evangelization methods: none should be considered absolute, and it must be admitted that what is useful for some is not necessarily valid or useful for others..
It is important to appreciate the capacity of these new evangelizing initiatives to be integrated into community life. As the Second Vatican Council affirms, «these charisms, whether extraordinary, ordinary or common, are to be received with gratitude and joy, for they are very useful and appropriate to the needs of the Church». However, «the judgment of its authenticity and the regulation of its exercise belongs to those who direct the Church. It is up to them above all not to extinguish the Spirit, but to examine everything and to retain the good ones. (cf. 1 Thess 5:12,19-21)»[30]. It will be, therefore, a sign of ecclesiality that these new methods are subject to the discernment of the bishops' authority and the competent diocesan bodies.
The fruits of the new methods of evangelization, therefore, can be measured by their capacity to integrate into the community and to awaken the question of one's own vocation. and mission in the Church and in the world (“for whom am I?”).
e) Ethical and charitable dimension
Faith cannot remain a merely emotional experience, but is translated into charity towards the poorest of the poor.
f) Celebrative dimension
Evangelization initiatives must be careful not to encourage disembodied “spiritualistic” prayer or intimate and gimmicky liturgical celebrations.. There is a danger of reducing the liturgy to a mere “devotionalism” that enhances sentimental subjectivism as opposed to the communitarian, objective and sacramental. In some environments, there is an excessive recourse to emotional elements, including practices of worship of the Eucharist outside the Mass that distort and decontextualize the proper meaning of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Eucharistic adoration, whether private or public, prolongs and intensifies what takes place in the liturgical celebration, for we adore the One we have received. This intrinsic relationship invites us to take care of the communitarian dimension of Eucharistic adoration, since the personal relationship with the sacramentalized Jesus puts the faithful in communion with the whole Church, making them aware of their belonging to the Body of Christ. The purely ecclesial sense of Eucharistic adoration implies respect for and fidelity to the liturgical norms, which will avoid subjectivism and arbitrariness in the forms of Eucharistic worship, as well as the use of elements foreign to the provisions of the Eucharist. Ritual.
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