Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 18)
As I said, I have had quite a number of these Catholics—six.
I was quite proud to have so many, and I said to them, “Now, you see, what you tell me here, this is really serious.
You go now to your father-confessor and you confess, whether he understands or does not understand.
That is of no concern.
It must be told before God; and if you don’t do it, you are out of the Church, and then analysis begins, and then things will get hot, so you are much better off in the lap of the Church.”
So, you see, I brought these people back into the Church, with the result that the Pope himself gave me a Private Blessing for having taught certain important Catholics the right way of confessing.
For instance, there was a lady who played a very great role in the war.
She was very Catholic, and always in the summer she used to come to Switzerland to pass her summer holiday.
There is a famous monastery there with many monks, and she used to go to it for confession and spiritual advice.
Now, being an interesting person, she got a bit too interested in her father-confessor, and he got a bit too interested in her, and there was some conflict.
He was then removed to the Clausura, and she naturally collapsed, and she was advised to go to me.
So she came to me in full resistance against the authorities who had interfered, and I made her go back to her spiritual authorities and confess the whole situation.
And when she went back to Rome, where she lived, and where she had a confessor, he asked her, “Well, I know you from many years ago: how is it that you now confess so freely?”
And she said she had learnt it from a doctor.
That is the story of how I got the Pope’s private blessing.
My attitude to these matters is that, as long as a patient is really a member of a church, he ought to be serious.
He ought to be really and sincerely a member of that church, and he should not go to a doctor to get his conflicts settled when he believes that he should do it with God. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 618-620
