Faced with this dehumanizing worldview, that Eastern mother—enlightened by what in our moral and dogmatic theology we call right reason and the sensus fidei or sense of faith—rebells with all the force of her ontological being against clinical reductionism. She understands through incorruptible empirical intuition that psychotherapeutic intervention is never and can never be axiologically neutral. For this reason, it subordinates the doctor's technical competence to a higher order requirement: it deliberately seeks a health professional who has a human and moral profile compatible with the values of natural law and faith. This mother knows, perhaps without ever having read the pages of the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas, that the human soul, as a substantial form of a structured body, requires to be treated and accompanied by someone who does not amputate its spiritual dimension or its teleological order towards the Truth and the Supreme Good. It is through this palpable experience that the speaker responds with categorical force to the guiding premise of his dissertation: there is a very profound, unavoidable and indispensable relationship between empirical psychology and the Christian faith, since handing over the superior powers of the rational soul into the hands of any immanentist clinician constitutes a risk of moral perversion that corrupts the very root of the human personality.
Advancing our journalistic dissection of the conference, the speaker takes us non-stop from that familiar intuitive wisdom to the cold and hostile amphitheater of the secular university academy, going back to his hard years of training as a hospital psychiatry resident in Uruguay. It is in that clinical setting where the epistemological fracture that we denounce manifests itself with undeniable crudeness. Dr. Verdier relates the episode in which a veteran and hierarchical professor of the specialty, forged in the most recalcitrant positivist empiricism and declaredly hostile to the Catholic faith, approached him in front of his fellow residents and, giving him a light blow on the shoulder with an accent of subtle contempt, pointed him out exclaiming: here is the Catholic.
As a philologist and discourse analyst, I immediately decode the enormous symbolic load that this sentence contains; but it is from my condition as a Thomistic metaphysician that I notice the true magnitude of the ontological grievance. We are not faced with an inconsequential anecdote in a hospital corridor, but rather with the public confession of an irreconcilable rivalry for the dominance of the human subject. Modern science, intoxicated by the technical ability to quantify matter—which is rigorously legitimate only within the order of physical accidents—has sought to usurp the exclusive throne of anthropology. By identifying and separating the student, marking him by his faith, that veteran teacher reluctantly admitted that modern psychiatry and Christian doctrine inevitably collide because both claim magisterial authority over the same and unique material object of study: man in his entirety. That woman had the insight to sense that her materialist conception of the psyche would inevitably spark when confronted with the Catholic vision of a young student. In analytical chemistry we know with certainty that if we try to mix two substances of opposite electrical polarity without the mediation of an emulsifying agent, the immediate result is repulsion or violent fracture of the compound. In the same way, a psychiatric anthropology that conceives man as a pure conditioned nervous reflex will never be able to coexist peacefully with an anthropology that confesses that man as a substantial unity of matter and spirit, called to eternal transcendence.