**THE MENTALLY ILL **
- A FAITHFUL IMAGE OF GOD
tinyurl.com/yr722a
This article is from Aust. Catholic News and very briefly summarizes the article below. This comment is of interest to me:
Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan told his World Day of the Sick audience in Adelaide yesterday that while the mentally ill patient “escapes classification as a normal person”, he or she remains “an image of God” deserves every normal respect.
“Normal” within society is actually over the span of ‘civilized’ society, actually an ever shifting imaginary line which defines “the most common” as the “normal”. However, simply because a certain thinking, idea or concept is the most common does not necessarily by definition make it “normal”, right or truthful. Even psychiatry and psychology agree they have no idea at all what is in truth “normal” for a human being; however, Jesus is said to be the most perfect human being that ever lived, so I take my concept of what is normal as being Jesus, since theologically speaking we are all called to perfection hence that is the normal for a human being “be ye perfect as Your Heavenly Father is Perfect” “He who sees Me, sees The Father” I and The Father are one".
Was Jesus a wishy washy goody two shoes? Absolutely not. He was not at all fearful of standing in direct opposition to authority and being critical, pointing out how He thought things should be, how things should run. That was His character and personality as a strictly human being, Fully Man. He happened to be right in it all because as well as Fully Man, He was at once also Fully God. This is an absolutely staggering and mind boggling awesome matter to ponder.
tinyurl.com/2zhf8l
The Mentally Ill – A Faithful Image of God - Speech of Cardinal Barragan.
I was very wrong in a previous Post, it was not the Pope that made this speech it was a Cardinal. His Eminence made his speech in my home town of Adelaide, South Australia. I did not go, however, the seats were too expensive. Sometimes I think The Church presupposes that Catholics all have a car, money and the internet. For one the greater majority of people suffering so called “mental illness” here in Sth.Aust. are on disability pensions and as very poor as the very poorest Church mouse. We can barely feed ourselves and pay our bills – more often in fact, sufferers on the DSP (disability pension) cannot. There was not even any cheap seats made available for the sufferers of mental illness. No one wanted to have to contact Diocesan Offices and plead poor-reasons kept to myself. Memory serving, the seats were over $150.
I warn - the whole speech is very lengthy and to completely understand one needs to read it all and with care to get things into the context. For myself, some things I would take to task with His Eminenance, other things I completely agree with.
If you read the whole speech, you will see that mental illness has its origin in the brain and in physical problems and misfunctions, disfunctions, in that brain.
Hence “mentally ill” is a complete misnomer. Rather, misfunctioning mentally is a symptom of an underlying physical cause and hence so called “mental Illness” is in reality a “Physical Illness”. If you sit down with sufferers of so called “mental Illness” in the main you will discover that they are quite intelligent ‘normally’ functioning human beings in every way and that any so called ‘mental’ problems are episodic. Outside of these episodes, you would also discover that these sufferers of so called, misnamed, mental illness many of them, have rich spiritual lives and prayer lives. It is also a fact that most sufferers of MI (so called) are religious people of Faith.
There is more I’d like to say, but if I decide to say it, I will start a thread.
The Cardinal:
Therefore, once the mental illness has caused such a disorder as to take away from the mentally ill patient any responsibility for his actions, qualifying them as separation from the divine will -as a sin- the mental patient cannot separate from God. In other words, the image of God in him cannot be distorted. In this case his knowledge or his volitive option are no longer sufficient to motivate any human action that separates him from God. His bodily and psychic conditions do not allow him to commit a grave sin, given that in his state of disequilibrium he does not have that full knowledge and ability of assent required
