Joy Behar Suggests Saints Were Mentally Ill

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QUOTE=Ghoti;3364610]I was watching this show the other day called “The Communion”, where a group of saints sit around a table and discuss current topics of interest, hosted by St. Barbara.

St. Paul apparently opined that Joy Behar was mentally ill, and called her musings “a distraction”. He discounts the psycho-tropic drug theory, since “they don’t seem to be calming her down.”

👍 Now THIS sounds like an interesting show!
 
She isn’t Jewish! her husband is not Jewish!
She is quite frankly a very sad, angry ex Catholic who needs many many prayers!
 
Jennifer_G said:
I’m pretty sure a lot of us animal lovers have done the same at one point. 😊 :whistle:

Just one reason he’s one of my patron saints. 👍
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If talking to animals was a sign of insanity every dog or cat owner (pretty much every pet owner) would be in a mental institution.
 
A good friend of mine will sometimes watch this show and tell
me about the anti-catholic remarks which she doesn’t like.
I asked her to please not tell me anything else about the show
because it just gets me angry. It is a disgrace that they get
away with the things they say. They need lots of prayers for
sure!😦
 
To an avowed secularist, obviously a religious perspective is evidence of mental illness.

But to a religious person, diehard secularism is probably evidence of someone who is suffering from …merely a lack of faithl …

It kind of reminds me of the differences of perspective by political persons: Conservatives think Liberals are misled and misinformed; whereas Liberals think Conservatives are evil.
 
ChristIsTheWay said:
newsbusters.org/blogs/justin-mccarthy/2008/01/09/joy-behar-suggests-saints-were-mentally-ill

"According to “View” co-host Joy Behar, those sainted by the Catholic Church are no more than mentally ill individuals who heard voices. On the January 9 edition of “The View” Behar, who considers prayer a “distraction,” suggested that there are no longer any saints due to modern medicine.

‘I have a theory that you can’t find any saints any more because of psycho-tropic medication. I think that the old days the saints were hearing voices and they didn’t have any thorazine to calm them down. [laughter] Now that we have all of this medication available to us, you can’t find a saint any more.’

Elisabeth Hasselbeck noted the late Mother Teresa, who does not yet been given sainthood, as a modern example. Behar responded by citing Mother Teresa’s doubts and that the Church’s standard has changed due to medical advances"

I am not the least bit shocked by this. I’ve come to expect this from The View. I wonder if she has the courage to say something similar about Islam and Mohammed. I doubt it.
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Some of the Saints may have been. Why must perfect mental health be required for heroic virtue ?​

To put it another way - can God work only in & through those who are not mentally ill ? “My grace is made perfect in weakness” - not in our strength 🙂 Maybe perfect mental health can make one less able to respond to God than if one were not fully compos mentis. (Which is not to idealise mental illness; but even so…)

Besides, heroic virtue consists not in visions & the like, but in conformity to the Will of Christ. So even if St. Joan of Arc was prone to having hallucinations, that doesn’t affect the heroic character of her Christian life - at most, it modifies the manner of it.

There’s another point that needs making:
  • Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.
    And:
  • …The medical materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin in a destructive instead of an accreditive way.
They are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long as supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but the argument from origin is under discussion. But the argument from origin has seldom been used alone, for it is too obviously insufficient. Dr. Maudsley is perhaps the cleverest of the rebutters of supernatural religion on grounds of origin. Yet he finds himself forced to write:-

"What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose.
  • or as we would say, God -
  • It is the work that is done, and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that is alone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint, if in other qualities of character he was singularly defective- if indeed he were hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic… Home we come again, then, to the old and last resort of certitude,- namely the common assent of mankind, or of the competent by instruction and training among mankind." [5 (http://www.csp.org/experience/james-varieties/james-varieties1.html#5)
In other words, not its origin, but the way in which it works on the whole, is Dr. Maudsley’s final test of a belief. This is our own empiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest insisters on supernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end. Among the visions and messages some have always been too patently silly, among the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for conduct and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still less as divine…
 
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"According to “View” co-host Joy Behar, those sainted by the Catholic Church are no more than mentally ill individuals who heard voices.**

This, of course, is a straw-man argument. Not every saint had these experiences, or anything close to them.
 
If a person “heard voices” or “saw visions”, it might indeed be a sign of schizophrenia.

On the other hand, if, as result of heeding the “messages”, the person actually intersected with some other person … for example, a priest was awakened in the middle of the night by a “voice” telling him to go to some specific address … and he went and found a dying man lying on the floor and was able to give the man the Sacrament of Extreme Unction just before he died … then, it would not be a sign of mental illness, would it!

Or, if by complete coincidence, years later the “voice” or “vision” was corroborated by a totally independent witness with no prior coordination, then it would not be a sign of mental illness, would it!

Also, a lot of people, especially nowadays in this age of secular scepticism, might be reluctant to say anything lest they be publicly ridiculed. So, they might just keep the experience to themselves.

Read Fr. Benedict Groeschel’s book, “A Still, Small Voice”.
 
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