Joseph Moscati and the Ministry of Confession

Felice D'Onofrio O.F.M. Cap.

Translated by Caterina Esempio

The need of bringing at people's attention the "heroes of the faith" is strictly linked with the message they can continue giving through the pattern of their life. This is the St. Joseph Moscati's case.

When the concept of transcendence is banned from people and society, the moral values, which underlie not only the human society, but even the balance of existence itself, start to fall apart inevitably. The human being cannot stake everything on materiality and horizontally on the society, in fact without a vertical vision he will never find a full accomplishment of himself.

If some examples were necessary, you should just consider the slow, continue growth of the religious feeling in eastern European countries following the fall of the Marxist atheist and materialist system, which 70 years long could only silence the spiritual longing of those populations without suppressing it. On the contrary, it has to be acknowledged that free western countries' indifferentism managed to alienate people increasingly from the eternal realities, which should be always the aim to long for.

Saint Joseph Moscati [picture by Leon Giuseppe Buono]

The human being is an indivisible "spirit-body" oneness and we always have to refer to this aspect. We know that there is a close relationship between body (soma) and psyche, for this reason each alteration of one entity reflects on the other one. Certainly, Sigmund Freud has to be credited with the success of having highlighted the conflicts among the instinct world, the external reality and the cultural needs at the base of people's psychosomatic sufferings.

Erich Fromm's conception is also interesting. He underlines that no human psychical or psychosomatic pain can be understood unless you take into account the social environment where people live.

However, it's Viktor Frankl who understands at best that the problem concerning people's psychosomatic pain is based on the lack of meaning of life or "existential emptiness". According to Frankl, doctors have to try to understand and help patients not only through pharmacological therapy, but also through psychic therapy.

Joseph Moscati's work follows this pattern, when he interests in the patient's spiritual conditions, trying to find the symptoms to make a diagnosis. Actually, Moscati had perfectly understood that every moral unbalance, as well as every physical one, determines negative effects inevitably.

The man who is unable to accept his own limits and, most of all, does not manage to bring his gaze over the boundaries of his materiality and selfishness, when he has to face the trials and tribulations of life or physical diseases, is often prone to pessimism and to neurosis. Every doctor can count cases of neurotic patients or other whose neurosis overcomes and highlights an organic illness, and these are much more frequent than it is thought.

When Joseph Moscati (1880-1927) performed his intense medical activity, an overall vision of the patient was predominant. This vision has then slowly declined because of the spreading of specializations, but now it has been revaluated, because it allows a better vision of the patient as a wholeness.

According to this way of thinking, while writing to a colleague, Moscati says: "Consider that first and foremost your patient have a soul and you have to be able to approach it and bring it close to God. Consider that you are obliged to love studying, since this is the only way to fulfil the great task of succouring people's miseries."

In my opinion, this short text, which can represent the believing doctor's "vade-mecum", is also useful for those people who do not practise a belief, but understand that the human being is not just matter, therefore his spirituality cannot be disregarded.

Moscati said to a patient: "I've never been worried about your physical health; despite some little and treatable troubles, I've always considered you as a strong man… but your spiritual health filled me with apprehension!"

Moscati loved saying openly his whole idea about the necessity of observing and curing body and soul at the same time. He urged a friend of his: "Come back to [faith] observance and I swear to you that this will nourish your flesh as well as your spirit: both your soul and your body will be recovered."

Even though Moscati did not mistake the organic pathology for the spiritual one, he felt strongly what Rahner declared later for the theological field, that is the existence of a relationship "between spirit and body. It exists no body without spirit and vice versa." However, Moscati's spiritual therapy does not only consist in advising the Sacraments, it also involves the lifestyle to lead.

During the canonical trial the Prof. Mario Mazzeo, a student of his, underlined this aspect, when referred that Moscati had told a relative of his: "You aren't ill at all… Work, defeat the aboulia and change your state either getting married or in another way".

I think it is interesting what Agostino Gemelli adfirmed just three years after Moscati's death, since it highlights his perfect balance in the double dimension of doctor and believer: "whoever is tempted to see a sort of anomalous religious fanaticism, this would forget who was Joseph Moscati: a character that for nature, cultivation, way of thinking is averse to any unbalance, exaggeration, and exhibitionism. He didn't have a trace of that pietistic mania, which is, more or less, a pathological degeneration of the religious feeling. Unless you want to identify with the religious mania every kind of proselytism, including the intelligent, moderate, careful, perfectly discreet one of a man such as Moscati, who was used to sounding the physiological as well as the moral and mental diseases, considering that the former very often depends on the letter."

The modernity of Moscati's pattern consists in his touching a particularly delicate subject of our times. By now, it is well known that many believer's regard for the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession) has fallen into decline. But it's an indisputable fact that the human being needs to compare with himself and he certainly feels the lack of equilibrium setting in him, when there is a deviation from the moral law, which, on the other hand, is always part of the physiological laws making him up.

The creation of the biological self, which marks out our single vitality, necessary for the relationship with the exterior world, comes true parallel with the psychological growth right from the birth for the "development of the boundaries of the new human being".

Because of this, self-consciousness does not have to be mistaken for soul, since, as Eccles says, "between soul and brain there is correspondence, but no identity." These two entities, the spiritual and the anatomic-functional one, relate to each other, but they are not the same thing.

Ministry of Reconciliation in Gesù Nuovo Church

It is clear that either sin or guilt cannot and do not have to be identified with the disease and that the sinner is neither a neurotic nor a sick person. However, any moral guilt or sin is always a particular kind of voluntary repudiation of God's action and, as such, it produces an unbalance causing a negative reflex in man himself.

On the other side, only by means of the concreteness of past experiences it is possible to understand the psycho-physical suffering, since its interrelationship with the personality of the individual has to be kept into consideration. Furthermore, the social environment where he lives cannot be ignored.

Any guilt hardly affects his existence only. It involves and causes unbalance even in the surrounding environment and where he acts. In this way, it has social consequences, too. This is the concept of "circularity of guilt".

Guilt consciousness, just like pain, has a reparation function: it is an expression of reactivity, an efficacious attempt of restoration, as it can redeem us from the evil. All that God created has its own order and every thing is well done according to a law that is necessary and unmodifiable at the same time.

According to Christian morality, sin, as well as pain, does not border on the nothingness, but it claims a hope, which can be valid only if you have the strength of not looking just horizontally, toward ourselves and the earth, but also vertically. Standing in the immanence, it is necessary to stare at the transcendence.

In the modern world, as a consequence of the weakening of the theological and metaphysical thought, the ontological identity of the human being has been deeply changed. In these sense, most part of neurotic pathology of our times identifies its own substratum or origin in a widely understood moral gap, that is meant both as a real sin and as a way of living no more concordant with the biological order we have to be in harmony with, if we want to be in balance.

Although Moscati lived in a time in which the "religion of science" reigned, he, as doctor, but most of all as biologist, who had grasped this problem perfectly, did not feared to highlight this relationship in his patients.

In this case, it seems extremely logical his insisting on advising, when it was necessary, the cure of the spirit, and in some particular cases he considered it even as foremost. On the other side, in our technologically advanced time we are living an even slow return to spiritual values, after the idle and unfortunately frequently harmful good health search in the long list of psychotropic drugs or in psychoanalysis, which does not often take into account the eternal values of the spirit, but pretends to treat every matter as a material one.

From the Christian point of view, Reconciliation becomes to Moscati the way to allow him to look inside himself. But it was most of all the way to try to discern deep inside every person the Creator's indelible sign, who remains our main benchmark.

From this point of view, when no mental pathology can deprive the individual of his own critical abilities, Reconciliation becomes an efficacious way to achieve an easier solution of psychophysical problems, which can be anyway alleviated or actually recovered, only trying to find in oneself the moral values that can quench the eagerness for the lost balance.

Prof.Felice D'Onofrio, author of the article

It is indubitable that the role of the priest does not have to be mistaken for the one of the doctor, since their fields of action are different. However, both the doctor and the priest will be able to meet themselves in that area, where the boundary between their two fields is indistinct. At this level it is required an open cooperation, without personalisms.

Considering the problem as a doctor, I think that believers sometimes consider the priest as the person who can better act in this boundary area, better if in cooperation with the doctor. In this way, it will be possible to avoid or even reduce the pharmacological therapy, which always causes the cells of the whole body and, particularly, the brain-cells to react in a different and artificial way.

Reconciliation requires the priest to have delicacy, patience and faith. It is the most efficacious means for the Word of God to be personalized and to make it bear its fruit more surely. Drug, alcohol, sex, unconcern, boredom… these represent an existential emptiness, that is typical of the man that has closed his soul to the light of God.

In order to open the shutter again and receive an even little ray of light, it is necessary to feel listened, to be able to talk about one's problems, so that the spirit is favoured. The human being has to free himself from his own meanness, in order to do a radical change, turning his gaze towards eternity. In this way, his limits and finiteness won't be bounded by a brink, but by the certain hope of an unending life, and for which even the physical and psychical pain, just like the awareness of his guilt, can became valid supports to go on with his walk.

Moscati, doctor and hero of the faith, had learnt up the basic idea of the supremacy of the spirit over the body just by the precise and careful examination of patients. Through his patients' "suffering flesh" he was able to discern the pain of the spirit and realized the necessity of curing it as well – if not prominently – to give the body an effective benefit.

Nowadays, an increasing number of epidemiological and experimental data seems to confirm the following theory: emotional states can determine a reduced immunologic defence, and so contribute to infectious diseases and tumours.

On the other side, some of the pathologies bound up with emotional stress, such as peptic ulcer, arterial hypertension, ulcerous colitis, bronchial asthma, etc., are well known since a long time. From this point of view, I think that Reconciliation, even though it cannot and doesn't have to be considered as a therapy, represents an important benchmark for believers.

Doctor and priest: two functions with an indistinct borderland. Joseph Moscati had felt that this zone was his field of action, as doctor and believer. Thanks to his distinguishing humility, after having highlighted it, he was able to step aside to allow the priest to perform his role.

This lesson by Joseph Moscati can end with the following sentence: "The doctor finds himself in a privileged position, because he is very often in the presence of souls, who are obsessed with pain and, notwithstanding their past mistakes […], they are anxious to find a comfort. May be blessed that doctor who is able to understand the mystery of these hearts and inflame them again" (Letter of 8^th March 1925).

For this reason, he made the medical job a ministry to cure patients and, at the same time, draw them near to Christ, mostly with the help of the priestly ministry that takes a particular position in the field of Reconciliation, since it can reach the human being as a whole. As Eccles says, the human being has "a single identity that claims the necessity of a divine creation. Problems […] that are often ignored by contemporary philosophy. This is probably determined by the widespread materialism, which is blind to basic problems having roots in spiritual experience."

Reconciliation requires attention to be paid to individual's experience. It cannot have a valid substitute in forms that don't take into account this fact and prefer, for example, a collective experience, or even make it a private talk with God. It was actually God himself who wanted men to pardon in His name through the establishment of – as Moscati states – "the high and divine priestly ministry".

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