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Some of those rely on faith to help them through their grief. Others look to psychiatrists, who offer therapy or prescribe antidepressants to help ease their patients’ pain.

On Saturday (May 18), in a move that could add to the tension between religion and science, the American Psychiatric Association changed a controversial diagnosis regarding how grief relates to mental health.

The change “will affect every single person in the country, because at some point we’re all going to be bereaved,” said Joanne Cacciatore, founder of the Center for Loss and Trauma in Phoenix and a professor of social work at Arizona State University.

At issue are questions as fundamental as how long we grieve, what clinical label we assign to sadness, and when grief transforms into mental illness.

The modification also rekindles long-standing debates about whether spirituality or medicine offers the best pathway out of bereavement.

The debate comes down to a small edit to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a guidebook that is considered psychiatry’s diagnostic bible.

After 14 years of work, the fifth edition of book — called DSM-5 — was unveiled in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the 36,000-member American Psychiatric Association.

Changes in each revision are important because most insurance companies require a DSM diagnosis before they reimburse doctors. The manual is also seen as the definitive psychiatric reference by other professions such as law, government and journalism.

Psychiatry historically has refrained from calling normal grief a mental disorder. Since the last DSM was published in 1994, the guideline has been that when symptoms — sadness, distress, insomnia, trouble concentrating, lack of appetite — begin within two months of a loved one’s death, but do not persist beyond those two months, psychiatrists should not diagnose “major depressive disorder.” In earlier decades, psychiatrists waited a year before such a diagnosis.

The revision narrows that window to two weeks. So a person who has five of nine symptoms that define depression — regardless of the reason behind those symptoms — could be diagnosed as mentally ill.

That change could give psychiatrists earlier access to grieving patients, critics say, heightening a perception that medical responses to grief are encroaching on turf traditionally held by faith.

“It’s in the realm of the spiritual that we learn to accept the unanswerable questions,” Cacciatore said. “People can get help without being labeled mentally ill. That’s what churches are for, that’s what community is for, that’s what spiritual leaders are for.”

The shrinking window for grief has stoked what psychotherapist Gary Greenberg describes as an insurgency against the DSM, fueled, in part, by accusations that the changes would help funnel money to manufacturers of psychotropic drugs.

But supporters of the revision to the DSM say the change has been misunderstood. Narrowing the grief window, they say, is about improving psychiatry’s response to major depression. And the change does not interfere with the role of faith-based supports.

“There is nothing in the recognition of major depression that precludes the patient’s receiving love and comfort from friends, family and clergy,” Ronald Pies, a professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University, said in an email.

‘Medicalizing grief’

Normal bereavement and major depression share many of the same symptoms. And because of those similarities, psychiatrists have historically carved out what is known as a “bereavement exclusion.” Its purpose was to reduce the likelihood that normal grief would be diagnosed as clinical depression.

But critics of that thinking say the greater danger is missing the signs of mental illness simply because a person is experiencing grief. Such grief, they say, may even trigger a major depressive disorder bringing more symptoms — a preoccupation with worthlessness, or thoughts of suicide.

Removing the exclusion, Pies and others argue, will allow psychiatrists to cast a wider net by more quickly diagnosing mental illness and offering treatment.

But critics have charged the APA with “medicalizing grief” by bypassing traditional methods of healing that come from friends, family or theology.

Greenberg, author of “Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry,” said psychiatry “never figured out how to distinguish mental illness from normal suffering.”

“We want to identify disorders and then eradicate them as if they were smallpox,” he said. “The idea is that the nature of suffering is to be eliminated, rather than valued, used and incorporated into a person’s life.”

‘A boon to the pharmaceutical industry’

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine last May, Richard Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, said the change would “erroneously label healthy people with a psychiatric diagnosis.” And Cacciatore said such labels have lasting effects.

“Once you say someone has a mental illness and bill their insurance company, that’s on their record,” she said. “They could be denied a job, lose custody of children or be denied insurance.”

Last May, in a concession to such arguments, the APA panel that worked on the issue said that a footnote would be added in the new DSM, a reminder that sadness and other mild depressive symptoms are not necessarily indicators of major depression.

But that hasn’t silenced broader concerns over labels and medication.

In December, Allen Frances, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University and a high-profile critic of DSM-5, wrote in Psychology Today that the APA will be “substituting pills and superficial medical rituals for the deep consolations of family, friends, religion and the resiliency that comes with time and the acceptance of the limitations of life.”

That concern was shared by Friedman, who wrote that the change would “no doubt be a boon to the pharmaceutical industry, because it will encourage unnecessary treatment with antidepressants and antipsychotics.”

The APA asked those revising the DSM to provide financial disclosures of any grant money, consultation fees and stock ownership that could be perceived as a conflict of interest.

In an analysis of the disclosures, Lisa Cosgrove, a professor of counseling and school psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, found that of those who served on the DSM-5 panel that eliminated the bereavement exclusion, 67 percent had ties to pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs used to treat mood disorders.

The APA did not respond to a request for an interview.

Cacciatore said those suffering from traumatic grief heal more quickly through human contact, often with a nod to the divine. Psychiatrists, she said, “can’t do someone’s grieving for them.”

“Nothing can comfort someone about the great mysteries of life like a relationship with another human being — sitting with someone, crying with someone,” she said. “We have to let people go through the dark night of the soul.”

(Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

KRE/AMB END TOWNSEND

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The Rev. Lawrence Biondi, president of St. Louis University, attends the announcement of JIm Crews as the new head basketball coach on Friday, April 12, 2013, at Chaifetz Arena. Biondi announced Saturday that he will step down as president. Photo by Christian Gooden/St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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Soon, it may be led by neither.

Biondi recently announced that he intends to retire, and university officials are saying little about the specifics surrounding his departure. But one thing its board of 50-plus trustees will have to consider is whether to replace Biondi with another Jesuit priest.

That is, if they can find one to take the job.

The “biggest challenge” for a Jesuit institution selecting a new president is that the pool of Jesuits with the right resume is rapidly shrinking, said the Rev. Thomas Gaunt, executive director of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Jesuit-run Georgetown University.

“You’re looking at a pretty tiny group of guys,” he said. “And the right one might not be available.”

SLU does not make its bylaws public. But the most recent version — obtained and published online by the university’s faculty senate — makes it clear that the next president can come from outside the order that founded the school.

The bylaws were amended either in 2006 or 2010 to eliminate the first sentence in Article III, Section 3: “The President shall be a member of the Society of Jesus.”

Striking that requirement likely has a lot to do with simple math. The 1960s saw the peak of Jesuit membership in the U.S., with about 7,000 priests. By 1982, that number had diminished to 5,500. Today there are about 2,500 American Jesuits.

In 2001, trustees at Georgetown — the country’s oldest Roman Catholic university — selected John DeGioia, an alumnus, as its first lay president. He became the first lay person to lead any of the country’s 28 Jesuit colleges and universities.

As of July 1, seven of the 28 schools in the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities will have lay presidents.

Among the 194 U.S. Catholic colleges that belong to the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, 63 percent are led by lay people. That number is up from about 50 percent in 2001, and 30 percent in 1991.

A month after DeGioia’s selection at Georgetown, Marymount University in nearby Arlington, Va., hired a lay president, James Bundschuh, who previously served as dean of SLU’s College of Arts and Sciences. The four presidents preceding Bundschuh had been nuns.

Despite those daunting statistics, Jesuit universities are finding men of their own order to run them. Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia has had a lay president in recent years but will revert back to a Jesuit leader in July. The school did not conduct a search but promoted a member from its own board.

Regis University in Denver installed a new president last year — a Jesuit its board recruited from Marquette University, another Jesuit school.

Tom Reynolds, Regis’ vice president for mission and ministry, said the board’s process was split into two parts. Its initial phase focused on trying to find a Jesuit leader. “If we couldn’t find a Jesuit, then we’d open up the search to anyone,” Reynolds said.

As SLU now launches its first presidential search in a quarter century, many at the university are hoping for a recruitment process that includes input from faculty, students and administrative staff.

Aside from saying the search process would begin “in the fall,” officials have revealed no details publicly about what that search might look like, instead saying in a statement that specifics about the search process “will be communicated to the University community in the weeks ahead.”

In the meantime, some faculty aren’t waiting to seek to insert themselves in the process.

Bonnie Wilson, an associate professor of economics, said the SLU faculty would immediately begin meeting to discuss what they’d like in Biondi’s successor.

“The community is not sitting back to wait for an invitation from the board,” she said. “We presume we’ll be invited, and we need to get to work and help ourselves and the board transition for new leadership.”

(Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

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They gathered here to learn how to spread the faith, a concept that is both fundamental to Christianity and nearly foreign to modern Roman Catholics.

Marty Scrima, (left) and Jim Wedick, members of the Holy Infant Catholic Church evangelization team, work the New Ballwin Estates subdivision in Ellisville on Saturday, April 20, 2013, going door to door, re-welcoming registered members to restart an active membership at the church and taking suggestions on how to make worship better. Photo by Christian Gooden / St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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For the first hour of the conference, Kenneth Livengood, a parishioner at Holy Trinity Parish in St. Ann, Mo., detailed one way — door-to-door evangelization, a missionary strategy more familiar to Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“We’ve been tricked into thinking faith is a private matter,” Livengood told the audience. “That’s a lie. Faith is meant to be public, and there are many ways to share it.”

He taught them how to form a door-to-door ministry, explained how to divide a boundary map of their parish into geographical sections, suggested useful handouts, gave safety tips, and showed videos that detailed the best way to respond to various reactions from those on the other side of the door.

“Divide up into teams of two,” Livengood said. “One of you can do the talking and the other should be a silent prayer warrior. At the next house, flip your roles.”

Evangelization is central to the Christian mission, but for the average adherent, the physical act of approaching a neighbor, work colleague or family member can be daunting.

A pamphlet produced by the Archdiocese of St. Louis called “Witnessing Christ Door-to-Door” offered a list of suggestions “since this may be a novel, perhaps, intimidating path.”

The suggestions include:

• “Ask each person you meet if they are in need of prayer.”
• “Early Saturday mornings may not make for the most receptive ears.”
• “Trying to provide too many facts about the Church may cause misunderstandings.”
• “Doing a little role-playing before going out for visits may be helpful.”
• “Sometimes a person answering the door thinks getting back to regular Mass attendance would make their grandmothers very happy, which might present a welcoming start for conversation.”

Going door to door “is not really a Catholic practice that we’ve done often in the past,” said the Rev. Stephen Bevans, professor of mission and culture at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. “There have been so many of us we haven’t had to do it.”

In the final scene of the Gospel of Matthew, the resurrected Christ appears to his disciples and tells them — in what has come to be called the “Great Commission” — to make new disciples by “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

Catholics are no less engaged by the Great Commission than evangelicals, but over the last century, the church has relied on evangelizing through the example of its social justice work, relieving those in the pews from having to knock on a neighbor’s door.

Some newer denominations are more accustomed to evangelization. The Rev. Cecil Robeck, an Assemblies of God minister, sees a contrast.

“In some older churches, people are not used to talking about faith in personal terms,” said Robeck, a professor of church history at Fuller Theological Seminary.

“Over the last 25 years, the Catholic Church has said, ‘Our strong social agenda is all well and good, but we need to be vocal about our faith as well,’ ” said Robeck.

In the late 1980s, Bevans said, Pope John Paul II began referring to “the new evangelization” as a strategy of bringing lapsed Catholics in Europe back into the church.

In his book “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” the pope wrote that evangelization “has never been absent” in the church. He quoted the Apostle Paul from the book of 1 Corinthians: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!”

Pope Benedict XVI made his predecessor’s “new evangelism” a central theme of his papacy, even convening a monthlong meeting of bishops from around the world last fall to discuss it.

During a speech to his fellow cardinals in Rome last year, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan called evangelization “the sacred duty,” saying in the words of St. Augustine that it is “ever ancient, ever new.”

“The how of it, the when of it, the where of it, may change,” Dolan said, “but the charge remains constant.”

Many observers have cited Pope Francis’ humble behavior as its own kind of evangelization. Or, to use a phrase attributed to his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi: “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.”

Bevans said images of Francis stopping to bless a disabled man during his papal inauguration, or washing the feet of women during Holy Week, were especially powerful.

“There you see the face of Jesus,” Bevans said. “That’s what evangelization is about.”

Julie Bostick, executive director of the St. Louis archdiocese’s office of laity and family life, said the archdiocese would hold another “how to” conference in June, focusing on evangelizing in the family. Another in the fall will tackle evangelizing in the workplace.

“Sometimes people get a little nervous talking about their faith, but spreading the message of Jesus Christ has always been the mission of the church,” she said. “We’re just trying to refocus.”

(Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

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But eventually the council members got around to Item 8E — the reason City Hall was filled with pastors on a Thursday night.

On its face, Item 8E — an amendment to an ordinance requiring safety inspections for businesses — seems like standard City Council fare.

In reality, it touches on one of the most fundamental and contentious aspects of American democracy: the separation of church and state. And it has pitted the pastors in one of the most church-packed cities in the country against a municipal government whose council members sit in their pews on Sundays.

At issue was a new $100 “annual registration fee” that the city imposed on churches and nonprofits. Most of the fee will go toward building safety and fire inspections, and $25 toward administration costs.

But East St. Louis pastors say Mayor Alvin Parks is playing a game of semantics, using the word “fee” where “tax” is more accurate.

They say they only learned about the new fee when they began receiving letters from the city, warning that the churches would be turned over to a collection agency if they didn’t pay. Nonpayment, the letter said, “may reflect negatively on your credit record, lien on property and other remedies that the State of Illinois allows.”

Those building new churches pay fees for licenses and permits, just like anyone else putting up a new structure. But churches and nonprofits don’t pay taxes.

The traditional argument for that position has been that the organizations provide the community with services — propelled by their religious obligations and beliefs — and save a municipality tax money that would have gone toward those services.

The Rev. Jerome Rogers of Shining Light Missionary Baptist Church pointed out at the City Council meeting that the churches of East St. Louis do a lot of good in the community — from teaching computer classes and resume writing classes to cleaning up dilapidated properties.

Church-state separation advocates say by demanding payment of churches for city services, and levying fines for nonpayment (and potentially putting a church in jeopardy of shutting its doors), a municipality would be entangling itself in church affairs.

In the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that freeing houses of worship from paying taxes “restricts the fiscal relationship between church and state, and tends to complement and reinforce the desired separation insulating each from the other.”

In 2010, the town of Mission, Kan., attempted to levy a “transportation utility fee” — also called a “driveway tax” — on churches to fund road work. A Baptist church and a Catholic church sued, arguing the town was breaking the law by disguising a tax as a fee.

Sarah Barringer Gordon, a constitutional law professor and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, said the idea of tax exemptions for religious institutions has evolved over the last two centuries “into something more and more generous.”

Today, she said, it’s tempting for municipalities to try and revert back to older taxing philosophies in a bad economy.

“Smaller jurisdictions with budget problems, in times of crisis, naturally look to nonprofits and the vast majority of those are going to be churches,” Gordon said.

In East St. Louis, the mayor said churches and nonprofits had never previously been charged a fee for fire safety inspections “because typically churches don’t pay taxes.”

“We didn’t want to tax the churches; we’re still not,” he said. “It’s a fee to recoup our costs for providing safety and services to the churches.”

At the meeting, the mayor allowed pastors to vent their frustrations.

“Why you want to tax God’s house?” one pastor boomed at Parks. “Churches are struggling. This is a low blow.”

“I see the condition of the city and it hurts my heart,” said yet another. “But to come after the church — that’s not right.”

Then Parks unveiled what he called “a solution”: The ordinance would be revised to allow churches and nonprofits to self-inspect their buildings.

Pastors could elect not to pay the city fee, but would still have to hire their own certified inspector and provide annual documentation to the city that their buildings were safe. Their first inspection, he told them, would have to be completed no later than June 30.

“If you don’t want to pay, don’t pay,” Parks told the pastors. “But one thing we can’t get away from is that churches and all buildings need to be inspected annually.”

A pastor asked how much it would cost to train a member of his congregation to get the proper building inspection certification. Somewhere between $500 and $1,000, he was told. But even such inspections would not satisfy safety standards, Fire Chief Jason Blackmon told the pastor.

“I didn’t want to say this earlier,” Parks told the pastors. “But it’s so much easier to just have the city do it.”

The council members seemed wounded by some of the barbs thrown their way.

“I’m getting the feeling that people don’t think we pray,” said Councilwoman Emeka Jackson-Hicks. “I pray. And I take it personal when we’re assassinated like this. We are the flock and we desire care, too.”

The mayor insisted the fee is not a money grab. He said the best-case scenario is that all 140 churches pay $100 for a total of $14,000.

“That doesn’t even pay one person’s salary,” he said. “It’s not about the money. It’s about the safety.”

The council adopted the mayor’s compromise and moved the pastors’ first deadline to Sept. 30.

(Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

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In a joint statement issued in response to queries from the Post-Dispatch, attorneys for the archdiocese and St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church said they had resolved their legal struggle.

“The Archdiocese will dismiss its appeal, and the judgment of the trial court is now final,” according to the statement issued Wednesday (Feb. 13).

Patricia Darek lets out a small cheer as she talks with the Rev. Marek Bozek following a celebratory Mass at St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in St. Louis, after a judge ruled in the church’s favor in a decade-long dispute between the historic Polish church and the Archdiocese of St. Louis. RNS photo by Erik M. Lunsford / The Post-Dispatch.

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As part of the agreement, St. Stanislaus agreed to abstain from representing itself as affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. Neither side made any payments to the other as part of the resolution, according to the statement. Attorneys said all other terms of the agreement were confidential.

“By bringing this legal dispute to an end, we pray that this will help to initiate a process of healing,” the statement said.

The Rev. Marek Bozek, the former Catholic priest who has led St. Stanislaus since parishioners hired him in 2005 in violation of canon law, said in an interview that he was “glad it’s over and done.”

“This won’t change anything besides making us breathe easier,” he said. “This statement only affirms the status quo of everything we’ve been since December ’05.”

Last March, St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Bryan Hettenbach ruled against the archdiocese in a sweeping decision affirming St. Stanislaus’ ownership of its property. Afterward, Archbishop Robert Carlson vowed to appeal the decision “all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.”

Carlson declined to be interviewed.

Kathleen Pesha, the archdiocese’s executive director of communications and planning, said in an email that “the lawyers retained by the Archdiocese of St. Louis are handling this matter completely.”

The modern battle between the church and the archdiocese went on for a decade, and the wider tumult is more than a half century old.

The legal battle for St. Stanislaus revolved around a 19th-century agreement with then-Archbishop Peter Kenrick that allowed the parish to govern its own finances. Its bylaws stated that a lay board would control the church’s property and assets while the archbishop would appoint the board and pastor.

Much of Hettenbach’s opinion centered on changes to the church’s bylaws in 2001 and 2004 that eventually allowed the board to eliminate the authority of the archbishop over those church decisions.

The archdiocese sued the St. Stanislaus Parish Corp. in 2008 to regain control of the church’s assets and property from the church’s lay board.

Hettenbach found that none of the language in the changed bylaws conflicted with the board’s purpose in the original articles of agreement.

“The Archbishop may own the souls of wayward St. Stanislaus parishioners, but the St. Stanislaus Parish Corporation owns its own property,” the judge wrote in his decision.

At the time, Carlson said the court had ignored the right of the Catholic Church to determine its own internal legal principles “and has substituted his own analysis of Church law.”

Despite the turn of events, Bozek said the congregation would not be celebrating, in deference to Ash Wednesday, “but the happy news has made our fasting a very rewarding experience.”

(Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

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The Rev. Matthew Harrison was elected July 13, 2010 as the president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. RNS photo courtesy LCMS.

ST. LOUIS (RNS) A decision by the leader of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod to censure a pastor for participating in a prayer service for victims of the Sandy Hook school massacre has reopened old wounds for an often politically divided denomination.

The Rev. Matthew Harrison asked the Rev. Rob Morris, pastor of Christ the King Lutheran Church in Newtown, Conn., to apologize for participating in a public interfaith vigil with President Obama two days after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at the town’s elementary school.

Morris apologized and Harrison accepted, but the exchange sparked a media firestorm with charges that the 2.4 million-member denomination was intolerant, insensitive or both. On Sunday (Feb. 10), Harrison said he made a bad situation even worse.

“As president of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, I take responsibility for this debacle,” he said. “I handled it poorly, multiplying the challenges. I increased the pain of a hurting community.”

Now Harrison’s handling of the Newtown service is almost certain to be a factor as he seeks re-election in July when delegates gather in St. Louis for their triennial convention.

The Missouri Synod’s constitution prohibits members from taking part in worship services that blend the beliefs and practices of Lutherans with those of other faiths and Christian denominations.

In 2001, a similar moment threatened the administration of Harrison’s predecessor, the Rev. Gerald Kieschnick, after he allowed a pastor, the Rev. David Benke, to take part in an interfaith prayer vigil at Yankee Stadium in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

Conservative elements in the church called for Kieschnick’s removal, and Benke was eventually suspended in June 2002. Benke was later reinstated, but the episode dogged Kieschnick’s presidency. He lost re-election in 2010.

In a recent email newsletter, Kieschnick said “the overwhelming majority of people both in and beyond the LCMS who hear the request for apology and/or removal shake their heads in disgust and dismay.”

In 2004, the synod — under Kieschnick — issued guidelines for participating in public events, including the acknowledgment of “once-in-a-lifetime” situations which “can be evaluated only on a case-by-case basis.”

The LCMS constitution states that members must denounce “unionism” — mingling of Lutheran and other Christian theology or practice — and “syncretism,” the mingling of Christian and non-Christian theology or practice.

“I did not believe my participation to be an act of joint worship, but one of mercy and care to a community shocked and grieving an unspeakably horrific event,” Morris explained in his apology. “However, I recognize others in our church consider it to constitute joint worship and I understand why. I apologize where I have caused offense by pushing Christian freedom too far.”

The controversy over the Newtown vigil had flared on the Internet even before the Dec. 16 service as conservative voices within the synod began criticizing him online for planning to participate.

Perhaps the harshest critics were those affiliated with the Brothers of John the Steadfast, a group who identify themselves as confessional Lutherans who stress strict adherence to the Book of Concord, the 16th-century work that defined the central doctrines of Lutheranism.

Confessional Lutherans were also critical of Kieschnick for allowing Lutheran participation in the 9/11 event, and the Brothers of John the Steadfast are credited with helping Harrison oust Kieschnick three years ago.

Morris defended himself on the Steadfast Lutherans website, citing the disclaimer “that no clergy member present was endorsing the religions of others, or recanting any portion of their own beliefs, but only offering their love, care, and prayer for their families and communities.”

But the Rev. Timothy Rossow, a pastor from Naperville, Ill., and Steadfast Lutherans’ leader, compared the disclaimer to a man whose wife had caught him with a prostitute and who offered her an excuse that “it was OK because before we had sex we each claimed that this had no bearing on any other physical relation that we have, right or wrong, with any other person.”

Another pastor said that by participating in the service Morris had sinned. “There is no other way to say it,” he wrote.

One commenter said Morris’ participation in the service “does more harm to the souls of the survivors than any gunman could ever do.”

“Does anyone else agree that Pastor Morris’ action is more abominable than those committed by the gunman?” the commenter asked.

“Yes I do,” Rossow answered in a post that followed. “The gunman killed the body which lasts for 70 or 80 years. … False teaching and practice kills the soul which lives for eternity in heaven or hell.”

Rossow calls Harrison’s heavy hand in the Newtown situation a “come to Jesus moment” for the president, and many conservatives believe Harrison took a stand for Lutheran orthodoxy.

“In Matthew Harrison God has richly blessed our Church with a truly confessional theologian,” wrote one pastor on the Steadfast Lutherans site.

But some pastors and academics — most of whom did not want to speak publicly — reacted angrily to Harrison’s moves against the Connecticut pastor.

“I would hope that this latest action by Harrison would be sufficient to lead LCMS electors to remove him from the office of president and to replace him with someone who is wiser and more evangelical,” said the Rev. Matthew Becker, interim pastor at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Michigan City, Ind.

The Rev. Scott Seidler, pastor of Concordia Lutheran Church in Kirkwood, Mo., sent a message to his congregation saying that “with thousands of other pastors and church leaders from across our denomination, I find President Harrison’s actions to be both outside the bounds of his denominational authority and inconsistent with the example of Jesus Christ himself.”

Seidler said that Lutherans “will not soon forget the heavy-handed reproof of a young pastor who interceded for the little children. It is quite possible Matt Harrison is a one-term president.”

(Tim Townsend writes for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

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(RNS) After all three Masses on the weekend of Jan. 19-20, parishioners of St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Springfield, Ill., were handed a statement written by Bishop Thomas Paprocki.

The bishop explained that St. Aloysius’ pastor, the Rev. Thomas Donovan, “is suffering from a psychological condition that manifests itself in self-bondage as a response to stress.”

The Rev. Thomas Donovan, “is suffering from a psychological condition that manifests itself in self-bondage as a response to stress.” RNS photo courtesy Shutterstock.com. *Note: This image is not available to download.

The statement was a response to a 911 call in November by Donovan from the parish rectory. In it, the priest tells dispatchers he had placed himself in handcuffs and asks police to help free him.

After the recording of Donovan’s 911 call rocketed across the Internet, Paprocki was in a unique situation. His priest had not done anything illegal, and yet he’d been found doing something most people would consider bizarre.

In Paprocki’s 1,038-word response to parishioners, he took the unusual step of delving deep into Donovan’s psychological problem. With the priest’s consent, the statement includes a description of what Donovan’s own clinical therapist had diagnosed as “non-sexual self-bondage.”

For the last decade, in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis that rocked the Catholic church, bishops have been hammered by critics for breaking repeated promises for transparency in documentation of past abuses and investigations of present-day accusations of sexually abusive priests.

But there are signs that a younger generation of church leaders have learned lessons from the last decade and are attempting to be as open as possible when a crisis comes to their diocese.

Yet in the case of St. Aloysius, that desire for transparency may have produced a response that caused more harm than good.

Springfield police responding to Donovan’s 911 call on Nov. 28 said that as far as they could tell, there was no one else in the rectory when they arrived at 4:45 a.m.

Donovan’s hands were cuffed behind his back with the keyhole facing up, so he couldn’t unlock himself, according to the police report. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and “a leather bondage-type mask with a bar in his mouth.”

The officers uncuffed Donovan, and asked if he needed medical attention. The priest said he was fine, he was alone, and that he “does this from time to time.”

What, exactly, “this” was must have been the topic of conversation when Donovan was summoned to Paprocki’s office 11 days later.

During that meeting, the bishop learned that Donovan was “mortified” by what happened, but insisted he’d been alone “the whole time of this incident,” and “denied that there was any sexual component to this,” according to Paprocki’s statement.

The following weekend, the diocese’s vicar general celebrated Mass at St. Aloysius and told the parishioners that Paprocki, 60, had granted Donovan a leave of absence. He read a message from the priest in which he said he had been “responding to the stresses of priestly ministry in a way that has come to compromise my own personal safety and welfare.”

Donovan, 41, grew up in Decatur, Ill. and went to Catholic schools there, according to diocesan records. He was ordained in 2005 in the Springfield diocese, and has served as pastor of parishes in Carlinville and Springfield.

Donovan is also a chaplain in the Illinois Air National Guard, serving with the 182nd Airlift Wing in Peoria. He lost 80 pounds in order to enlist in 2008, according to Maj. Brad Leighton, public affairs director for the Illinois National Guard. Since then Donovan has deployed twice — in 2010 and again last year — to Landstuhl, Germany, where he ministered to wounded personnel.

When the audio of Donovan’s 911 call to the Springfield police and the police report became public in December, they sailed around the Web, and online headline writers had a blast — revealing, for instance, that a “kinky priest” had been “tied up at the moment.”

Earlier this week, Paprocki told St. Aloysius parishioners in his own statement that “some of those stories are untrue and even defamatory.” He wrote that with Donovan’s consent, he would disclose to them the priest’s “private patient information.”

And it’s here that Paprocki’s unusually intimate act of transparency may have raised more questions than answers.

The bishop said that after a review of Donovan’s “work and lifestyle patterns,” the diocese had found he “severely-compromised patterns of self-care with respect to diet, exercise, sleep, work hours, and unreasonable expectations of himself as a pastor.”

Such patterns, the bishop continued, can lead a person to self-medicate. Sometimes that comes in the form of alcohol, drugs, gambling or pornography. In Donovan’s case, according to an unnamed therapist the bishop cited, stress reduction came in the form of self-bondage.

The therapist assured Paprocki, and Paprocki assured Donovan’s flock, that “that this self-bondage is to be understood as non-sexual in nature.”

The statement included a lengthy footnote, written by the therapist, defining “non-sexual self-bondage,” which concluded with the admission that “non-sexual self-bondage is not a recognized mental health diagnosis at this time.” Indeed, “non-sexual self-bondage” is not listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,” or DSM.

Kenneth Rosenberg, a psychiatrist in private practice who is affiliated with Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and specializes in sexual disorders, said that although “non-sexual self-bondage” doesn’t exist in the DSM, Donovan’s actual problem can probably be found there.

“It’s called a sexual disorder not otherwise specified,” Rosenberg said. “Bondage is often associated with sexual behavior, and I’m of the belief that that ought not to be such a stigmatizing issue.”

Rosenberg said religious communities often stigmatized sexual disorders and that “it shouldn’t be so important.”

“But religious figures have other agendas,” he said.

(Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

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