...including:
- Withdrawal into oneself with poor communication
- Lack of giving to romantic love and the marital friendship
- Lack of responsibility for one’s spouse
- The treatment of one’s spouse as a sexual object
- Lack of respect toward one’s spouse
- Overly controlling behaviors
- Overreactions in anger
- Inability to ask for forgiveness
- Failure in treating one’s spouse as one’s best friend
- Failure to wish the best for one’s spouse
- Weakness in giving praise
- Excessive anger when everything doesn't go as expected
- Insistence on having one’s own way
- Strong desire to do what one’s feelings urge one to do
- Focus on one’s own well-being and not one one’s spouse’s welfare
- Tendency to avoid responsibility in some major area of life
- An exaggerated sense of self-importance
- Loss of kindness and thoughtfulness
- Immature and excessive comfort-seeking behaviors
- Obsession with working out, physical appearance and possessions
- Controlling behaviors
- Excessive self-indulgence
- Blind ambition for success
- A focus on the impression one produces rather than on one’s work
- Loss of faith
- Lack of motivation to resolve marital conflicts
- Lack of openness to God’s will regarding the number of children
- Lack of a sense of oneness and shared mission with one’s spouse
- The failure to correct children and one’s spouse
- Resentment of sacrificial giving
- Use of pornography
- The use of contraceptives
- The annulment entitlement mentality.
The profound writings of St. John Paul II on selfishness, marriage, family, youth, contraception, divorce, cohabitation, same sex unions and the Eucharist brought hope that a time of purification had come. However, the new growth in the support of narcissistic attitudes and situational ethics concerning those in irregular, cohabiting and same sex unions is a major psychological and spiritual threat to Catholic marriage and family life.
Growth in Selfishness and the Contraceptive Mentality
In addition to the harm done to marriages, the growth of selfishness has severely harmed the priesthood and religious life, innocent spouses and 1,000,000 children in US who are traumatized yearly by divorce.(i)
Selfishness played not a minor role in almost 100,000 priests and Religious who abandoned their vows/commitments beginning in the 1970s (Mullan, 2001).[ii] It strongly influenced the rebellion against the Church’s teaching in Humanae Vitae. Situational ethics with the primacy of the personal conscience replaced the teachings of Jesus Christ and his Church.
Simultaneously, clerical narcissism exploded in the liturgy[iii] with massive liturgical abuses and, more importantly, in the refusal to teach the Church’s truth about sexual morality. Instead support was given to situational ethics in Catholic seminaries, universities, and secondary schools, with the assertion of the primacy of the personal (and often uninformed and selfish) conscience over the Church’s teaching. Priests and Bishops who failed to teach the Church’s truth about sexual morality were failing to configure themselves to Christ and to live His truth.
The staggering and shameful result was the crisis in the Church, characterized by the massive homosexual predation of adolescent males by Roman Catholic priests and religious.[iv] No adult male would act against his own essential manly nature as a protector of youth unless he had given in to severe narcissism and the belief that he had the right to use others as sexual objects.
Narcissism, malignant selfishness and divorce
Contraceptive use severely harmed marital trust and love, with the direct result of increasing malignant selfishness in spouses which then led to the onset of the Catholic divorce plague. The relationship between the contraceptive use and the divorce plague is irrefutable.
The sad reality in our experience is that the intensely selfish spouse often initiates divorce and is often granted an annulment without this severe character conflict being identified and challenged.
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