Recently the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith announced that it is considering making spiritual abuse a crime in canon law. But what does “spiritual abuse” entail?

We could do worse than to revisit an old case for an answer. In 2020, several women alleged that Jean Vanier, founder of the disabilities ministry L’Arche, and his spiritual mentor Father Thomas Philippe, had abused them over the course of more than three decades. The summary report of the investigation into the affair listed seven representative examples of Vanier and Philippe’s predatory behavior. These included Vanier leading one woman in “spiritual accompaniment” which soon transformed into sexual touching—leaving her unable to distinguish right from wrong. In another instance, he told a woman of the sexual contact: “This is not us, this is Mary and Jesus. You are chosen, you are special, this is secret” and, later when a woman questioned him: “Jesus and myself, this is not two, but we are one . . . It is Jesus who loves you through me.” Another woman reported of Philippe that he was “more brutal, no intercourse, same words to say that I am special and that all this is about Jesus and Mary.”

Vanier and Philippe’s predatory behavior gives us, I suggest, some insight into what a canonical definition of spiritual abuse might look like, and the kind of actions that might fall within its scope. To understand why, it is worth examining the term in a little more detail—and more specifically, the first word. What does it mean to say abuse can be spiritual?

The word “spiritual” has become devalued in recent years. It is often used to mean something vague, ill-defined, and unworkably subjective. A self-proclaimed “spiritual” person is one who does not want to be held to any particular standard in their religious practices, or lack of them; a “spiritual” belief is one entirely beyond reasonable discussion or argument. In the Catholic tradition, however, we have a more robust understanding of what “spiritual” means. The spirit, the Catechism tells us, “signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God.” In short, we are spiritual because we have an inherent capacity for God. And as Catholics, we understand that this capacity is realized not through some private infusion of mystical union which God injects into each person separately, but through the ministry of His Church: the community of the baptized in which sacraments are administered, obedience is given, and witness to faith is received—all of it in and through relationships with our fellow human beings.

God has chosen human relationships within the Body of Christ to be the normative means by which our spiritual potential is realized. In a hierarchically ordered Church, constituted on earth with what Lumen gentium calls a “visible structure” or “visible delineation,” such relationships are no more vague or ill-defined than the spiritual itself. They are the relationship of a pastor to his flock, an ordinary to his particular church, a superior to her community; in the case of Vanier and Philippe, they are the relationship of a community leader to his community and of a spiritual director to his directees.

Vanier and Philippe are horrifying yet very clear examples of how such relationships can be leveraged for disordered personal gain, in ways that cause immense harm to a person’s perception of themselves, their perception of the moral law, and ultimately their perception of God. Both men used their spiritual authority to invade the conscience of another, deliberately and explicitly misusing sacred realities, including the very name of Jesus, to construct a smoke-and-mirrors moral universe in which their abuse was permissible and even good. Their violation of consciences was—not uniquely, as anyone with a passing interest in Church safeguarding will tell you—a context and precursor of sexual abuse. But even if it had not led to such abuse, it would still have been immoral in itself.

The British academic Lisa Oakley has described spiritual abuse as “a systematic pattern of controlling and coercive behaviour in a religious context.” This is not a magisterial definition, of course, but it gives us something usefully concrete to work with. Catholics can recognize that the “religious context” that Oakley describes is, for us, a sacramental and hierarchical context. To others, it might be tempting to see the significance of the “religious context” as merely epistemic: of course you’d find it difficult to believe in God if you’d had a bad experience in a God-bothering sort of place; the two have become connected in your mind because that’s how minds work. But within the Catholic Church, the “controlling and coercive behaviour” which Oakley describes does not merely muddy the epistemic waters. It attempts to thwart the very means by which God acts to communicate Himself to us and make us saints.

What we see in the case of Vanier and Philippe is the deliberate misuse of a relationship specifically and explicitly intended to help bring a person to holiness. To conduct oneself appropriately in such relationships certainly requires many safeguards. It requires a proper understanding of mediation, obedience and authority in the Church, and an awareness of the great power and responsibility which such relationships carry. It requires an absolute commitment to refrain from harm towards the other person, and to bar oneself from ever breaching the sanctuary of their conscience. And for those who cannot be trusted to live up to this standard, it will also require the oversight of the law of the Church.

At the time of writing, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has done nothing further than convoke a study group to consider the question of a spiritual abuse law. It remains to be seen what that study group will suggest or conclude. Some might argue that this is the most we can expect, given the likely disagreements over how to frame such a law and how to enforce it. But even if the hypothetical delict of spiritual abuse never makes it into the Code, the time discussing and reflecting on it will not have been wasted. It will have served, God willing, to remind us all of the immense gravity of our relationships within the Body of Christ—for they have been given to us by God Himself, not for the satisfaction of disordered desires, but for the making of saints.