IIC 175: IFS, Parts Work, Vatican II, and Your Conscience

“Man is divided within himself.”  So says the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes.  Sins – original sin, the sins of others, and your own personal sins lead to your inner fragmentation and the obscuring of your conscience.  What is your conscience?  Where is your conscience within you?  What does Vatican II say about IFS concepts?  How did St. Maximilian Kolbe live sacrificial love in Auschwitz with interior integration, inner unity?  And what does Vatican II say about psychology and the social sciences?  Dr. Gerry Crete joins me for a wide-ranging discussion of these questions and so much more.

[00:00:00] Dr. Peter: Vatican II. We are getting into it, my dear viewers, my dear audience. Vatican II. We’re getting into the actual text, the actual quotes today and not the polemics that have swirled around the council for the last 70 years or so. What did Pope Benedict XVI say about Vatican II? He said, “The second Vatican council documents to which we must return are our compass in our time that permits the barque of the church to put out into the deep in the midst of storms or on calm and peaceful waves to sail safely and to reach her destination.” Pope Benedict XVI, we must return to these documents. We must read them. We must study them. And we’re doing that today.

[00:00:55] Dr. Peter: And what did the venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen say about the second Vatican Council? He said, ” What the council did was establish equilibrium or balance between these extremes: between evangelization and human progress, between soul winning and society saving, between divine salvation and human liberation. It made both inseparable. The council decided that we must beget children of God through evangelization, but not without giving witness to fraternal love and a sensitivity to humanity’s desire for freedom and justice.” Equilibrium, balance, human liberation, fraternal love with freedom and justice.

[00:01:41] Dr. Peter: These are themes around human formation. And today we are getting into Vatican II and how the documents of Vatican II — we are focusing on Gaudium et Spes — how this document in particular can help us understand and love God, our neighbor, and ourselves better. And also in paragraph 16 of Gaudium et Spes, we get into the topic of conscience. I wanna share with you just some quotes on conscience just to prime the pump, just to get us started. Martin Luther King, he said, “Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”

[00:02:47] Dr. Peter: The artist Vincent Van Gogh, he said that “Conscience is man’s compass.” And then this quote from Mother Angelica, “Man can and does rationalize his sins. He finds reasons for all his weakness, invents excuses that first calm and then deaden his conscience. He blames God, society, education, and environment for his wrongdoing.” The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. He said, “Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience is a still small voice that says to us something is out of tune.” And then author Carlo Collodi in his book Pinocchio in 1881, which he wrote when Carl Jung was six years old, wrote, “A conscience is that still small voice people won’t listen to.”

[00:03:52] Dr. Peter: So you have that still small voice, you know, from Jung and Carlo Collodi, being a little cynical here about how we don’t listen to our consciences. And then Mother Angelica, and when we don’t listen to our consciences, we deaden them. American playwright George Bernard Shaw said, “A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner. Inside of me, there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. And when asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, ‘The one I feed the most.'”

[00:04:36] Dr. Peter: We’re working on nourishing a good conscience in today’s episode and what goes into that from a parts and systems perspective. And then the Greek historian, Polybius, from the second century BC said, “There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible, as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.” “There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser, so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.” Who is this witness? Who is this accuser that dwells in the heart of every man? It sounds like an inner critic that’s taken over the conscience. Well, let’s get into this in greater depth. Let’s do this.

[00:05:40] Dr. Peter: I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, also known as Dr. Peter. I am your host and guide in this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, and I’m so glad to be with you. I’m a clinical psychologist, a trauma therapist, a podcaster, a writer, the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts. But most of all, and you hear me say this a lot, most of all, I’m a beloved little son of God. I’m a passionate Catholic who wants to help you to taste and see the height and depth and the warmth and the light of the love of God, especially God, your father, God your father, you as a beloved little son or daughter. And a beloved little son or daughter of not only God, but also of Mother Mary. These are your parents, your spiritual parents, your primary parents. I’m here to help you embrace your identity as a beloved little child of God, as a beloved little child of Mother Mary.

[00:06:33] Dr. Peter: And all this year, in 2025, we are doing a deep dive into Internal Family Systems, IFS. We’re doing this dive into parts work and Catholicism, and we’re bringing in the insights from Internal Family Systems developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. We’re bringing in other parts and systems models, and we are harmonizing them to be consistent with the truths of the Catholic faith. Why? To help you live out the three great loves and the two great commandments: to love your God, your neighbor, and yourself. That’s what it’s all about.

[00:07:04] Dr. Peter: This is episode 175 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, which releases on October 6th, 2025, and it’s titled IFS, Parts Work, Vatican II, and Your Conscience. We’re getting into the documents of Vatican II, as I said, especially Gaudium et Spes. The literal translation of that Latin is “joy and hope.” Joy and hope. But the official English title of the document is the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. It was issued in 1965. It was the final document of the 16 documents of Vatican II. It’s the longest document in Vatican II. It’s got this keen focus on human nature and the gift of self. And Archbishop Fulton Sheen in his autobiography, he called Gaudium et Spes a brilliant document. So we’re gonna explore that brilliance.

[00:08:01] Dr. Peter: And I am so excited to have back for this episode of Interior Integration for Catholics, my colleague, my dear friend, Dr. Gerry Crete. And many of you know Dr. Gerry. He’s a licensed marriage and family therapist in Atlanta, Georgia. He’s the founder and owner of Transfiguration Counseling. He and I co-founded Souls and Hearts in 2019, and he’s the author of the book, Litanies of the Heart. He’s a leading Catholic thinker and what’s amazing about Dr. Gerry is that he synthesizes so much information, so many conceptualizations from so many sources, just this beautiful synthesis of Catholic parts work. Alright, so it is so good to have you with us, Dr. Gerry. This is just wonderful. It’s been a while, Dr. Gerry, since you have been back on the podcast and it is a delight to have you back to be discussing these documents of Vatican II. And you know, it’s been a while since you and I have connected. You’ve been on the road. I’ve been on the road. And so it is just good to see you again and to spend some time together.

[00:09:12] Dr. Gerry: Thank you. Yeah, it’s been great to be back. It doesn’t feel that long ago, although I guess it’s been maybe over a month or two. And I’ve done a Pints with Aquinas and I’m doing a bunch of speaking engagements, so it’s been a whirlwind. Yeah. But it’s always good to connect with you and connecting with our parts and connect something in our faith with parts is always fun.

[00:09:33] Dr. Peter: Absolutely. Well, I think sometimes our audience believes that since we’re in Souls and Hearts together, that we’re like on the phone every day, you know, and that we’re constantly in meetings together. And we do generally meet, you know, ordinarily about once a week, but it’s been a little less consistent. And so I just, I don’t know. I just wanted, my parts just wanted to say how much I enjoy being with you and how much I enjoy just sharing what we have together in this format of a podcast.

[00:09:59] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I feel the same way. So it’s great for us to connect. 

[00:10:05] Dr. Peter: Well, I think we should just go ahead and dive in. And I know that you’ve been taking a look at the documents of Vatican II. I’ve been taking a look at the documents of Vatican II, just about what might be in there that informs us about this parts and systems thinking, informs us about IFS, informs us about other parts and systems approaches and anything in there that you thought that was just particularly relevant to the work that we do in Souls and Hearts and the work that we do in this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast.

[00:10:38] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, well, I mean, there’s one passage in particular that really leaped out at me, and I don’t know if you wanna get into that.

[00:10:43] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Let’s just go to the meat of it and then let us know what document it was in and what the paragraph number was.

[00:10:48] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. So in Gaudium et Spes, which I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly. My Latin is nowhere near as good as yours, Peter. My Ukrainian is no better, but in, I think it’s, you know, section, I think 13, and I actually have in front of me what you sent, which is a slightly different translation than I found online. And it’s that line, “Therefore man is split within himself.” And then the other is “Man therefore is divided in himself.” So it could be translated either way. But it says, “As a result, all of human life, whether individual or collective, shows itself to be a dramatic struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness.” I mean, that probably leaped out at me more than anything else in the whole document.

[00:11:33] Dr. Peter: Well, we did this research separately, individually, and that was exactly the same paragraph that leaped out at me, was like number 13, Gaudium et Spes. My translation, I’m using the study edition, which was translated by Austin Flannery, the Dominican, which I just really like, better than some of the other translations. But yeah, this idea of our hearts being divided, our hearts being split. And then these elements, right, that this paragraph brings up the struggle, a dramatic struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness. And let’s just run with that.

[00:12:07] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause it resonates with me, you know, with St. Augustine talking about my divided heart or my heart was fractured or whatnot. And so I’m really curious what the Vatican II fathers were thinking about when they kind of put that in there. I mean, so if you back up just a little bit to look at the context. It says, “Although he was made by God in a state of holiness from the very onset of history, man abused his liberty at the urging of the evil one.” So the context of this is the creation of man. And so there’s a sense in which, it says here, “Examining his heart, man finds that he has inclinations toward evil too.” So that whole concupiscence which Augustine and others of course talk about. “And is engulfed by manifold ills, which cannot come from his good creator.”

[00:12:57] Dr. Gerry: So this splitting is connected to the fall. And so, you know, it’s an interesting question for, you know, for us in our work with looking at IFS or parts work approaches, you know, is the fact that we have many parts, is that a result of the fall? Is it simply a result of sin? Or is it that we naturally have parts that are more fractured or more split or more affected or more burdened, what have you, because of the fall. So I don’t know that we’re gonna get an answer from the documents themselves, ’cause of course they’re not asking that question right straight out. But I think that’s one we can try to sort out.

[00:13:40] Dr. Peter: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m noticing at least in the study edition, this Chapter 13 is under the heading of sin, right? So it’s directly connecting this back to sin, original sin, like you talked about, but also like our own personal sins and how that brings in the darkness and how that leads us to be more fragmented inside, more disconnected.

[00:14:01] Dr. Gerry: Well, ’cause it goes on to say, to describe chains. It says, “As a result, all of human life, whether individual or collective, shows itself to be a dramatic struggle between good and evil.” I mentioned that already. “Between light and darkness. Indeed man finds that by himself, he is incapable of battling the assault of evil successfully.” Right? So we can’t do this on our own. “So that everyone feels as though he is bound by chains.” I think that’s kind of profound and we can’t handle it on our own. I mean, I feel like that all the time. And what does it mean that we are bound by chains? I feel like that’s a very descriptive image, but I feel like it speaks to burdens. ‘Cause when we have parts with burdens, it’s like those parts are bound in chains. I mean, what a powerful image. And that it’s through Christ, right, and through our repentance and our turning to Christ, that grace is allowed to break those chains. And so I think that even though this is very spiritual language, of course, and spiritual imagery, I think it speaks to the freeing, the liberation, if you will, of our parts, to be able to be fully who they’re meant to be, or we’re meant to be.

[00:15:16] Dr. Peter: Well, I’m thinking about like this idea that we are to love ourselves. You know, this is the second great commandment. Love your neighbor as yourself, which implies that relationality within, you know, and we’ve talked about this in previous episodes. And so this division, or let me put it this way. I think parts of us being distinct, when they become divided, that’s where the problem comes in. I don’t think it’s a problem of having distinctions within oneself, you know, like distinctions among parts and between parts of the innermost self or even distinctions among faculties like the intellect and the will. We make distinctions all the time about what goes on within the human person, but it’s when they become divided. And I think that word is just really powerful or split in the translation you’ve got, that that’s where the problem comes in. It’s not a problem of having parts per se. It’s a problem of the lack of relationship among those parts, or the disconnection or the fragmentation within. And that’s what I think this is getting to in this whole chapter on sin in Gaudium et Spes, paragraph 13.

[00:16:21] Dr. Gerry: Well, I definitely agree with you. I think you can’t have a mind, a human mind, without having some kind of inner dialogues going on. Like I think that, I mean, some people say they don’t have an inner dialogue. I’ve heard that. I don’t understand it. I’ll be honest. I find that really difficult. But, so for me, it’s just natural to think that within my mind would be a process that involves multiple dynamics. And however you want to define it, as parts, or whatnot. I think parts make sense to me, of course. But that is just part of having a mind. But I don’t think that’s in conflict with the sense that our soul or who we are is meant to have a unity. So I think that’s might be what you’re getting at. Like there might be distinction. I like that, distinctions, and there might be dialogue within, but it doesn’t imply that we have to have a lack of unity. In fact, we should be striving toward unity.

[00:17:31] Dr. Peter: Well, I just think about our bodies, right? And going back to some passage of St. Paul where he talks about different parts of the body. There is a distinctiveness, as we were talking about in episode 174 with Dr. Tony Flood between our hand and the rest of us. You know, hand is distinct, but you don’t think of like a person’s hand as apart from the body. Or there’s a distinction inside between our internal organs or distinction between the heart and the lungs. But that doesn’t take away from the unity of the body, that we have these distinctions. Otherwise, we would have to be sort of like homogenous. even in amoeba, you find distinctions, in tiny one-celled organisms. There’s distinctions inside. And I think that actually leads to some of that richness. Otherwise, we would have to be like a homogenous substance, you know, and that’s a lot harder for me to grip onto or to believe than the fact that we do have this multiplicity inside.

[00:18:23] Dr. Gerry: So it makes me curious about inner conflicts, right? Because if we have an inner conflict, it’s something that kind of needs to get resolved in some way, right? So there’s some conflict. And so it makes me wonder, you know, whether we were meant, whether Adam and Eve before the fall had inner conflicts? Did they not have inner conflicts? When we are, you know, transfigured, when we are transformed, we come into the beatific vision. Are we gonna have any inner conflicts? And I’m gonna suggest that we won’t, that our parts will be just, we will still have distinctions. I like that word. But it will be glorious. It will be like the unity among all of our parts will be just sublime and harmonious. There won’t be an inner conflict. So it’s not that inner conflicts are just simply bad. I mean, we have to work through them, but they do kind of represent our fallen state perhaps.

[00:19:27] Dr. Peter: I agree with you entirely. And I think there will also be different ways that different parts of us contribute. And this is where I really like that jazz band analogy, where the jazz band is one, it’s one jazz band, but it has these different musicians in it, which are corresponding to the parts. It has a jazz band leader, which corresponds to the innermost self. You know, by analogy, you know, as we’re talking about the system of a jazz band, and what I like about the jazz band is that I think, and I could be totally wrong in this, this is really speculative Malinoski eschatology, and at this point we should also like put out the call again, we are speculating, we’re theorizing here. 

[00:20:07] Dr. Gerry: I’m open to being corrected at any point on anything.

[00:20:09] Dr. Peter: Yeah, I totally am too. You know, reach out to us, let us know if we’re saying something that seems like it’s at odds with something that the church has taught definitively. But I like this idea that our parts of us can actually, in some ways, if they’re in right relationship with the innermost self, lead, like in improvisational jazz, a band member can go off on a riff, as long as it’s consistent, following the parameters laid out by the band leader, like the key that you’re playing in and the beat, you know, and so forth. Like, it can be beautiful.

[00:20:43] Dr. Gerry: I’m gonna challenge you. You’ve used this example before. I’m going to challenge you, just for fun. I really, I like it.

[00:20:50] Dr. Peter: No, no, really, go.

[00:20:52] Dr. Gerry: I think in heaven it will be all Gregorian chant.

[00:20:57] Dr. Peter: Okay. Okay.

[00:21:00] Dr. Gerry: Maybe Byzantine chant. I don’t know. I mean, I’m a little kidding, right, of course. I do kind of love harmonies though as well, so I love the fact that these harmonies would all just be so beautifully together. As opposed to jazz band where people are taking turns almost. I mean, there might be background things also going on, but there’s an emphasis on one, in a given moment. But when there’s harmonies, it’s like you’re just, you are completely enveloped by all the sound and no one sound is dominating, I don’t believe. So maybe there’s just variety. Right.

[00:21:39] Dr. Peter: Yeah, I think that’s a good word because I think it would be lessened if there was only a melody, you know, if it was just plain chant, with the one melody. You know, all of the homogenous, you know, in theory, right? This homogenous person was just singing the one melody, and that’s all that there was. I think we’d lose something, you know, so I think there’s something sort of wondrous about the multiplicity. But it’s also prone to this fragmentation in a way that, you know, a homogenous rock wouldn’t be. You know, like the rock is not gonna split into parts as a function of sin coming into the world. It’s got a homogenous substance. So it’s not prone to that. But we do have this in a little bit later in par in paragraph 14. It says, “Man, though made of body and soul is a unity. And through his very bodily condition, he sums up in himself the elements of the material world.” And I just again, I thought that was so interesting. To me, that goes back to Maximus. Like they don’t cite Maximus there, but you know, this idea of microcosm, macrocosm, like summing up the elements of the material world in the body. And then I’m thinking about like, you know, by analogy, summing up other elements in the heart or the psyche.

[00:22:59] Dr. Gerry: I’ll tell you what’s coming up for me just a little bit, and this is again speculative, and it’s just me kind of riffing here, but I’m nobody’s idea of a biologist. Like I’m not a true scientist. I’m not, but I do enjoy reading things as I can. And my understanding of the universe, right, and matter is that we’re made up of some core elements. And so to me, there’s something amazing about that statement. The condition sums up in himself the elements of the material world. I get the Maximus thing, and of course I love that. But I also hear in that like, you know, the core elements of the entire universe. I mean, scientists have been trying to understand that and figure that out.

[00:23:43] Dr. Gerry: I am, you know, well behind. But I mean, there’s something about the fact that all of nature can be, you know, even humanity, like our physical bodies can be taken from these core elements. And yet, how is it that we have the heart or the mind or the conscience or the innermost self or the idea of love, like how these things, like the fact that we have in common with us, like even inanimate objects, we are in common with whatever it is, hydrogen and whatever the different elements, I can’t speak to it. But we have all that in common and yet we have something so unique, you know, that is, whatever you wanna say. I dunno if it’s evolved or what, but God made us so unique even though he’s taking from the stuff of the earth.

[00:24:39] Dr. Peter: Of the earth. Well, I mean, we see it in Genesis, right? Clay, like taking clay and Adam, I mean, even the name Adam means red earth or red clay. Like he could have brought us into being out of nothing, but he chose to use the elements of the Earth. And what’s really interesting is you bring that up to me, is that like in a teaspoon full of soil, there are hundreds of millions of living organisms. You know, like there are all kinds of, you know, microbes. And so when God made Adam out of that red clay, like it wasn’t just these, you know, tiny little particles of, you know, a mineral, there’s a whole lot going on in that soil.

[00:25:22] Dr. Gerry: Well, and again, I’m no scientist. I’m no astrophysicist either, but I am interested in the cosmos and I am fascinated by the search for life, right? And every time I see an article that comes up on my feed about, oh, we found life on Mars, or we found life. And I’m like, okay, they found life on Mars. Well, okay, let’s read that. And of course, it’s like some tiny speck of a living creature maybe that they found. Right.

[00:25:48] Dr. Peter: Or a precursor or something. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:51] Dr. Gerry: And yet earth is teeming with what you’re describing. Like you just said, a teaspoon of soil has all these organisms. And I’m like, wow, we’re teaming with life and we’re looking around in space for that. And we’re barely finding it. I mean, some people believe their aliens are gonna show up, but we still haven’t seen them. And yet our world is so full of life and that it’s good, right? And that’s over and over said, right, in Genesis that it’s good, but it’s also the saints and the church teaches that our body is good. And so of course in Vatican II documents, we get that loud and clear, you know, that we’re a unity of body and soul. And it’s so interesting to me because I’ve been so steeped in reading so many of the mystics, right, of the church, and they draw from neo-Platonism quite a bit. But they transform it, they use it, they take the wisdom from it.

[00:26:47] Dr. Gerry: But the true saints of the church never become true neo-Platonists because Platonism has this concept that the soul is superior. I mean, Christians might say that to some extent, but they would separate the body and soul. They wouldn’t see it as, you know, hylomorphic kind of unity in this way. And that is what makes us unique. And I think even if you talk to regular people, even Christians, they would still separate the body and the soul in a way that the church doesn’t in these documents, nor do the saints.

[00:27:18] Dr. Peter: Well, I wanna take us back 34 years, Gerry. 34 years. Yeah, so this is the way back machine to 1991. And so I was 22 years old and I was going through some real spiritual trauma at the time. And I ran across this paragraph 16, and that was really important to me in 1991 as I was trying to really recover, rehabilitate from some trauma. And it reads like this in the translation I have. And I was thinking of you as I was rereading this and all your work on like the anthropology essentially of the heart, you know, and the diagram on page 300 of your book. It’s also on page 359, and it reads like this.

[00:28:04] Dr. Peter: “Deep within his conscience, man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself, but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and avoid evil, tells him inwardly at the right moment, do this, shun that, for man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. His dignity lies in observing this law and by it he will be judged. His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths.”

[00:28:38] Dr. Gerry: Yeah.

[00:28:39] Dr. Peter: So I really see you as the go-to guy, for understanding, you know, like the leading edge, tip of the spear of trying to incorporate, like, how do we understand this? Also in a way that helps us to flourish and to thrive, right? Because you hear those echoes of flourishing and thriving in this paragraph 16 of Gaudium et Spes. But yeah, just if you could just share with us, like what this brings up for you and how you see it connecting back to some of the work you’ve already done, in Litanies of the Heart, your book, and so forth.

[00:29:10] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. No, wonderful. I love that passage. Thank you for sharing that. And I love the use of the word sanctuary, in terms of speaking about our inward self, our innermost self, you know, it’s so interesting. In Litanies of the Heart, I do not focus on conscience. Really, I did a search. I don’t know that I would find the word comes up, you know, a whole lot. And I think probably the focus of the book is healing. The focus of the book is understanding, the inmost self as created in His image and as being an avenue or an access point really for grace. And that the inmost self is so connected to Christ, that it kind of can share graces, it can share the virtues of faith, hope, and love to the whole system. And so I see it that way and I kind of wanted to emphasize that. But more and more as I explore what the saints say, the inmost self is the place of conscience. The heart is the place of conscience. Now, the problem with using the word heart is that it gets used in different ways, right? And can mean different things. So when I think about the heart, I tend to think about the inmost self and our parts. 

[00:30:28] Dr. Peter: Well, and that’s, in that model that you gave, yeah. That’s one of the things that really struck me the very first moment I saw it, when I saw your hand drawn model. Do you remember when you shared that?

[00:30:37] Dr. Gerry: Yes, yes. 

[00:30:40] Dr. Peter: You know, like it struck me then as like, okay, the heart contains not just the innermost self, but also the parts.

[00:30:47] Dr. Gerry: Yes, I think that’s an important distinction. And I landed there even though like it might argue with this or that, in different people’s interpretations. I landed there because I think it is biblical, mostly biblical and mostly aligns with what mystics and saints in the church have taught. So the idea being like even the idea that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. What could be meant there? Like, ’cause I don’t believe that the innermost self is truly hardened. I don’t believe that can almost ever happen. I think it can be that the parts are so blended and so burdened and so overcoming of the system that, that there’s almost no access to the inmost self.

[00:31:25] Dr. Gerry: Right. And I suppose hell is absolute no access. Right. But, nevertheless, so the heart, to me, the way I see it, has to include parts, but the conscience is going to be found in the innermost self, because the innermost self is motivated by conscience. And we talk about parts having agendas, and we sometimes have to qualify the innermost self as not having an agenda. I mean, the inmost self has the agenda of love. It has the agenda of healing and harmony.

[00:31:57] Dr. Peter: I call those telos. I call those, I think of those as telos.

[00:31:59] Dr. Gerry: Telos. Ooh, I like that.

[00:32:01] Dr. Peter: As opposed to an agenda.

[00:32:02] Dr. Gerry: Right. Yeah. Agenda is a negative connotation. Right. But a motive, it’s motivated by love, it’s motivated toward healing. It’s motivated toward harmony. And conscience is part of that motivation because it is seeking the good, right? Like I don’t know why, I have a sometimes have a negative view of conscience, like as if it’s like telling me what to do, right? It’s this sort of, yeah, moralizer or something. And when I think of the inmost self and conscience, it’s not about moralizing. It’s about truly loving. It’s about truly wanting the good, which is what loving is. And so the conscience is about, Hey, I want the good for every single part.

[00:32:47] Dr. Gerry: And when any part of me is actively seeking something that is harmful to myself or to others or offensive to God in some way, then the inmost self can’t help but grieve, can’t help but want to like, have an influence, right. Now, if the heart is hardened right, and inaccessible, then it’s almost like the conscience is completely blocked out. I don’t know that ever a hundred percent. I don’t know about that, but it can be very hard to hear. And of course people talk about a malformed conscience, but I honestly think that’s more about the parts not being influenced by the conscience, ’cause I don’t think the conscience itself is malformed. I don’t think it’s something, I think it’s innate. But parts can have a malformed conscience in the sense that they’re not influenced, they haven’t been influenced by conscience, and so they’re actively seeking vice in some way. Does that make sense? I mean, I’m open to being corrected on some of the points.

[00:33:48] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, this is one of the points and I think it’s really interesting because we have different viewpoints. Say we disagree, I’m not sure. But I was imagining kind of just going with what you were saying, that somebody in hell then, you know, if we take somebody in hell, and you would say that the innermost self is still good. Well, this is what I’m wondering. Would you say that the innermost self is still good in that individual, but just permanently and completely severed from the parts? And so the fragmentation is intractable?

[00:34:22] Dr. Gerry: I don’t know. I don’t know. I’d have to think about that. So I’m a little nervous to say anything definitive, like, not that anything I say is completely definitive. But I’m more likely to look at it differently. I’m more likely to see it as the inmost self separated from God is Hell. And I don’t know what that really means. You know, it’s hard for me to picture it, but, you know, not that the parts are separated from the inmost self, but the whole heart is separated from God. So somehow the inmost self has rejected God. Whoa. I mean, that’s what the Angels did, false angels, the devils did. And I can’t understand it. It’s horrifying to think about it, but I suppose obviously it’s possible. And so, for the inmost self to be deeply pulled out of its roots so that it is disconnected and rejects God fully, so the whole system rejects God fully. Whoa.

[00:35:20] Dr. Peter: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t know. I mean, there’s so much to be worked out, I guess, is what we’re saying. And sometimes maybe it does come across like we know all this stuff, and we really are just struggling with that and bringing it out here, you know, and trying to talk about it. But what this reminded me of was a quote from Dietrich von Hildebrand in his book Transformation in Christ, and this is on page 226, ’cause he gets into like, how can this happen? How can we have a malformed conscience or how can parts have these impulses and desires and how does that work with the will, you know, and the intellect. And this passage was helpful to me ’cause he says, “By an act of our free personal center, we can either sanction or disavow our emotional attitude, which involves a far reaching modification of the inmost nature of our attitudes. A mood of malicious satisfaction, for example, which we expressly disavow in our mind is decapitated, as it were. It is revoked and declared invalid and thereby deprived not only of its outward efficacy, but to a large degree even of its intrinsic virulence.” And so what he’s saying here is that even if you were caught up in, for example, malicious satisfaction, and you realized that you were caught up in malicious satisfaction.

[00:36:38] Dr. Peter: You know, like, I’ll give you an example. Like if you were on the football field and it’s a really close contest, and one of the opposing players is injured and you’re like, oh, that’s gonna increase our chances of winning. Right? You know, there’s a sort of satisfaction in it that’s like oriented toward the harm of another person, right? Like you could disavow that even though you might still be carried by it, you know, parts might still be carrying that, parts that are hyper competitive or something like that. So I was thinking about like this sanctioning and disavowing, and I was thinking about this even in terms of compulsions, right? Where it feels like you just can’t stop doing something in a given moment because of where you happen to be, but you could disavow it. That this is connecting to conscience, in some way.

[00:37:19] Dr. Gerry: So to me, and help me make sure I understand and relate it to what Hildebrand is saying there. It’s helpful for me to visualize it. Sometimes hearing it, I don’t immediately catch all of it. So conscience is going to say, you need to stop and help that guy on the field, not profit from his injury, right? That’s what the inmost self would say.

[00:37:39] Dr. Peter: Well, I think it would be more like, yeah, I think it would say, pray for him. Let’s try to be with him. Let’s not just look at him and reduce him to a competitor, you know, that’s in the way of me having my agenda to win be thwarted. You know, like, I think it would be that kind of thing. Not necessarily even that you have to like somehow provide a material aid. ‘Cause hopefully there are trainers, you know, medics that could help ’em with that. But more like to move away from a position of antipathy or celebrating his misfortune because it furthers the agenda of a part. Does that make sense?

[00:38:18] Dr. Gerry: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So conscience is always gonna be on the side of, from the inmost self, like is gonna be on the side of the good. And we’ll see an injustice, we’ll naturally, like with the eight Cs, have a sense of compassion. Even if a part is like going, oh, great, he’s fallen. I’m gonna take advantage. We’re gonna score, whatever. 

[00:38:41] Dr. Peter: We’re gonna exploit that weakness in the secondary now, or whatever, right?

[00:38:44] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. So I think that dynamic is always there. Now, if we get to a point where we are not listening to our conscience, so to speak, then we’re not listening to our heart, our deepest center of our heart, our inmost self, at all. Like we are disconnected from it. And maybe the inner conflict has nothing to do with our conscience, right? It might be just different evils we’re seeking, right? And that’s what’s at play. But for most people, you have to slow down and be, as they put it, called to conscience. What does it mean for somebody to say something that says, like, you know, if you think about two middle schoolers that are fighting and the teacher pauses and says something to them, like, you guys were friends all year. What are you doing fighting? And all of a sudden something happens and they go, you’re right. We were being petty, or, you know, he hurt my feelings, or whatever it is. Right? You’re being called to conscience.

[00:39:40] Dr. Gerry: And so I think we are often called to conscience by others. We can be called to conscience within ourselves. We can call ourselves to conscience. Like we can pause, recollect, and go, okay, what’s wrong here? And listen to our heart of hearts. That knows, I mean, I think the Saints say that over and over, like, we kind of know. We don’t come down to hear it sometimes, but we know what’s right deep down. And it’s in that sanctuary. I mean, what’s so beautiful about this passage is that conscience is man’s most secret core in his sanctuary. They’re alone with God, whose voice echoes. So we hear God’s voice within us. So we have the answers there.

[00:40:26] Dr. Peter: Well, we’re back to IFS being a constraint release model then, aren’t we? ‘Cause I’m almost imagining this like an eclipse of the sun, you know, where the sun is shining, you know, our innermost self does shine. But that it can be totally eclipsed.

[00:40:41] Dr. Gerry: I have a quote.

[00:40:42] Dr. Peter: Okay. You have a quote. Alright.

[00:40:44] Dr. Gerry: Is that okay?

[00:40:47] Dr. Peter: It’s okay. Absolutely. It’s not from Vatican II! No, that’s okay.

[00:40:51] Dr. Gerry: I just this amazing quote. Okay. So it’s from Denis the Carthusian. Have you heard of him?

[00:40:58] Dr. Peter: Well, mostly from you, what? Seventh century? No, no, no. This is a little later, isn’t it? It’s not seventh century. 

[00:41:04] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, this like 15th century, and yeah, he’s a Carthusian.

[00:41:09] Dr. Peter: Oh yeah. It has to be later.

[00:41:10] Dr. Gerry: You know, they’re like hermits who live in community kind of thing. But this Denis the Carthusian, I’ve just discovered him not that long ago, like the fullness of his writings. And most of his writings are not translated into English. And I think it was 2005, there was some translations made of some part of the body of his work. And I had to hunt and find it. The only reason I was able to not pay 70 bucks on Amazon for a Kindle version of it, which seemed wrong to me. It just seems, to buy a book for 70 bucks, it better be like, you know, an anthology. Anyway, I was able to get it off my library at St. Vincent Seminary ’cause I’m technically faculty there. And I was able to pull up.

[00:41:54] Dr. Gerry: But somebody alerted me to this particular quote, actually, Susan, a member of Souls and Hearts. But I’m gonna read this amazing quote ’cause something you said just sparked, in terms of light and so on. This is what he says. Oh, before I say the quote. Yeah, know everybody’s in tension and dying to hear. This guy grabbed, he summarized writings from the church fathers, writings from a lot of the medieval saints and mystics, like he was summarizing and bringing it all. So he is a synthesizer. So he is one of my new buddies, basically. Brilliant.

[00:42:30] Dr. Peter: Because you love that. You love that model. That’s like what you’re called to, right? 

[00:42:34] Dr. Gerry: He brings it all together and he shows what’s common and what’s true within the tradition. And he’s very balanced. And even when he comes across different saints that seem to contradict each other, he kind of brings a balance to that in an understanding. Anyway, I think the guy’s great. Anyway, this is the quote. Get ready. This is so good. But once the inner light of wisdom sparkles.” Isn’t that amazing? “Once the inner light of wisdom sparkles, shines, and diffuses itself throughout the soul’s inmost parts, the clouds of sin dissolve, the storms of passion are calmed, the blackness of ignorance is wiped away, and the whole soul becomes radiant.” Isn’t that beautiful? I mean, it kind of speaks a little bit to what even what we were talking about here? 

[00:43:45] Dr. Peter: My goodness. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and again, go back to paragraph 16, right? We’re talking about the light and the darkness. We’re talking about the struggle, you know, dramatic struggle. That was going back to that first quote.

[00:43:59] Dr. Gerry: 13. Yeah. Between light and darkness. Yeah.

[00:44:03] Dr. Peter: And this light and darkness, and then the struggle and good and evil, right? And what’s fascinating about that, it takes us back to Augustine, like Augustine’s tremendous insight that evil is the absence of good where good should be. It’s sort of like darkness is the absence of light where light should be, right? So it’s like, what I love about that is the approach then isn’t just about trying to negate the darkness. It’s not trying to like, you know, make an absence of an absence, right? To make sin go away. We’re gonna like somehow expunge evil and make sure that there is like this absence of an absence of good. But we’re gonna pursue the good directly. See what I’m saying? Like, it’s let’s not worry about, you know, he’s not saying this exactly, but sort of like, let’s focus on fostering the good and really bringing the good up, you know, and not just get caught up in trying to remove all of the elements of evil. Like, it’s a different focus. 

[00:45:08] Dr. Gerry: Well, yeah, because like in this quote, it’s about the inner light of wisdom sparkles or shines, so it’s diffused throughout the soul. So it’s the role of the inmost self, to bring light to all the parts. And when that happens, sin dissolves.

[00:45:25] Dr. Peter: Sin dissolves. That was what I was getting at. Yes. Sin dissolves. And it’s not like it has to be like, it’s not like it has to be, like battled in kind of way.

[00:45:36] Dr. Gerry: It evaporates, it loses its power, yeah. And the passions are calmed. They just relax. Like those two kids, when the conscience calls to them and they go, oh yeah, we’re friends. We shouldn’t be fighting. Whoa. The passions just calm. Like they just kind of go, whoa, okay.

[00:45:57] Dr. Peter: Well, and that implies to me like a regulation across the system of the parts, right. Parts are becoming regulated and the body is becoming regulated too. Like it’s, you know, like we’re coming back to like a more stable homeostasis. We’re not in the fight or flight, hyper arousal. We’re not dropping into that hypo arousal of the freeze response. But, you know, we’re getting that, you know, again, reflected here in the documents of Vatican II, which I think were in some ways trying to emphasize the positivity of this, not just avoid sin, don’t sin, you know, but actually like trying to appreciate and embrace the good, which would, if we did that fully, make fighting sin like a moot point. You don’t have to be battling against sin if you are totally embracing love and goodness and beauty and truth.

[00:46:53] Dr. Peter: I’m not saying that we don’t have to resist temptations and stuff like that. I don’t want people to, you know, read me the wrong way and that there’s never a having to battle against sin. But I do sometimes get really worried when, you know, one’s spiritual life is all about spiritual warfare and like contesting the powers of evil and so forth. And I’m like, man, let’s have a little focus on what’s good. You know, and embracing the good, not just the goodness of God, but also the goodness within our own hearts and appreciating that and being able to love that, like we were talking about with Anthony Flood in the last two episodes about how it’s ordered to love ourselves, because if we don’t, we’re denying the good that God has given us. And I think this passage is bringing that out, paragraph 16 of Gaudium et Spes.

[00:47:31] Dr. Gerry: Well, you know what’s coming up for me? I don’t know, I think I just recently sent it to you, so I don’t know when we’re gonna publish it, but I just did a review of, and I just watched the movie Triumph of the Heart, which is on St. Maximus Kolbe. It’s not actually on his life per se, but on the time he had in Auschwitz. And, Peter, that movie blew my mind. Well, it blew my heart. I cried pretty much through the whole movie. I was with my wife Casey. She can’t handle a lot of torture and stuff like that, so she had her eyes like covered through half of the movie ’cause it was so powerfully disturbing. But it does speak to what you’re saying because, and I’m not gonna give away things about the movie, but I will say things that are historical that are known, right?

[00:48:15] Dr. Gerry: So most people know that the Nazi camp leader that he was in, somebody escaped from the camp and he said, I’m taking 10 guys. I’m gonna put them into this bunker until this escapee is found. And so he picks out 10 people and the last guy said, no, don’t pick me. I’m a Catholic, I have a family and all this. And Maximilian comes forward and says, take me instead. And so they do take him. And so he lives out the rest of his life in this bunker, right, in this cell with these men. And I actually looked at pictures of the actual cell. It’s smaller than what’s in the movie or what appears to be in the movie, the actual cell, but it looks similar and it’s down below ground and there is this sort of window with bars, so where some light can get in, but just a little bit. And there’s something so powerful about the fact that St. Maximilian kept this faith and kept this positive sense of hope, even in like the worst, most unimaginably terrible situation anybody could imagine. Basically being starved to death.

[00:49:28] Dr. Peter: Starved to death. Yeah.

[00:49:29] Dr. Gerry: With a bunch of men who are all hopeless themselves, like they’re all struggling. And he is like the inmost self in this scenario, just bringing light and bringing hope even there because they can’t, like. Even when the physical world is horrible, even when we’re tempted or we give into temptation maybe, or when we’re persecuted, or whatever is going on that is sinful or struggling in our lives, then like to me, this movie gave this beautiful, powerful example of what it looks like to be just receptive. Like to have your heart be so receptive to God’s love and presence, even there, right? So that none of those things have any power whatsoever. And so he embodied to me this inner light of wisdom sparkling and shining within the soul to allow himself to be so Christ-like that then that transfers to the men he’s around even in the worst situation imaginable. Anyway, that was it.

[00:50:34] Dr. Peter: All right. I gotta, I gotta see it. 

[00:50:35] Dr. Gerry: You do. Everyone should see it. It’s so well done and it is, quality wise, it matches, if not exceeds any Hollywood movie. Like the acting is superb, the cinematography, everything. You know, like there are Christian movies that you kind of go, arghhh. You know, no, this movie is well done. And it doesn’t take any time to build up though, so it launches you pretty quickly into this situation. So get ready. It’s like you’re strapped into the rollercoaster.

[00:51:05] Dr. Peter: So it could evoke a lot of intensity from parts is what I’m hearing.

[00:51:09] Dr. Gerry: Yes. So you wanna be attentive to that, you know, before going in to see this movie. But at the same time, like the irony and the paradox, which is really the deep paradox of our faith, is that, despite how horrific this movie was and what it was showing, it is one of the most inspiring movies I’ve ever seen for like giving me hope and the sense of like the beauty, even though this was the ugliest place in the world there, there was this like deep sense of beauty in humanity and dignity of humanity, which Vatican II is all about, is trying to say it in words, but this movie just embodies it. it’s just so beautiful.

[00:51:52] Dr. Peter: Well, that review, I’m taking a quick look at the calendar here. That review will come out on October 6th, which is the same date that this podcast episode releases. So there’s a kind of coming together of that, and we will put a link to it in the YouTube description. But you can also go to soulsandhearts.com/parting-thoughts. Just go to soulsandhearts.com. You’ll find it as well. If you’re not on our email list, and if you want Dr. Gerry’s movie and film reviews every month, they come out on the first Monday, sign up for our mailing list and you’ll get ’em right to your inbox along with your Kingdom Within which comes out every third Monday. And then also the semi-monthly reflections that I do, which come out on the second and fourth Monday. So sign up for that.

[00:52:35] Dr. Peter: But I am a huge fan. I use that example a lot to say that, you know, what can separate us from the love of God, right? I mean, here we have an example of St. Maximilian Kolbe, like, and having a sense of peace. And it’s interesting ’cause he wrote a letter to his mother when he was in Auschwitz and he said, things are going really well, in this letter to his mother. And you know, ’cause I have a special devotion to St. Maximilian Kolbe, and I didn’t even know this film came out. Yeah, I do because my spiritual director is a Franciscan Friar. And really from that tradition.

[00:53:08] Dr. Gerry: The conventionals.

[00:53:10] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I’ve read quite a bit about him and yeah, he wrote to his mother and said that things are going well. And you could look at that and you could say, okay, he’s just trying to put lipstick on a pig. You know, he’s trying to make the situation sound better, but I actually believe that he believed that things were going well. Like relatively speaking, not endorsing the evil that was around him. You know, obviously within Auschwitz. But that he could be living out a deep sense of peace, a deep sense of vision and mission, you know, because he was ministering to these men. I mean, he gave them last rites and all kinds of things, if I remember the story.

[00:53:45] Dr. Gerry: Hears their confessions.

[00:53:47] Dr. Peter: They were dying. He hears their confessions.

[00:53:50] Dr. Gerry: And I’m not sure if that letter would’ve made, it would’ve been before. I’m imagining before.

[00:53:56] Dr. Peter: No, it would’ve been before. 

[00:53:57] Dr. Gerry: But, yeah, I know, I mean, I can’t put into words the way that the movie brought faith messages to life and ’cause so often, and I’m pretty critical when it comes to movies, when it comes to that, if you’re being heavy handed or sentimental, I just vomit. Right. 

[00:54:21] Dr. Peter: Watch out, ’cause a Parting Thoughts is gonna take you down, you know. Our movie and film critic is gonna get on that. 

[00:54:30] Dr. Gerry: I don’t love, I often cringe when I watch Christian movies because I get what they’re trying to do and it’s not like I disagree necessarily with that, but I’m just like, please, can you not have some nuance? But this movie, I just, honestly, it just moved my heart. Like I just felt like it embodied the truth and the truth of humanity’s fragility and beauty. And it reminded me, honestly, I don’t mention this in the article, I thought about it, but it didn’t flow right. But when I first read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

[00:55:09] Dr. Peter: Man’s Search for Meaning, yeah. 

[00:55:09] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. Like, whoa. So Viktor Frankl, right, was Jewish, and he was Austrian, I believe, and I think he was a psychiatrist who was working in a ward for women who attempted suicide. You know, and then of course the Nazis come in and he’s taken away, his wife’s taken, his parents are taken. His wife and parents are killed in the concentration camps. He’s there. And when I first read it, and I’m always taking notes in the margins and underlining things. And when I first read Man’s Search for Meaning, and there’s this whole bunch of sections there. I remember writing, this is the most Catholic description of suffering I have ever read, most beautifully. Like it described, he wasn’t even Catholic, but it described suffering from a Catholic perspective and the power of it.

[00:56:00] Dr. Gerry: And the thing that struck me the most, in reading that was that he said some men that biologically, based on being starved and mistreated and everything else, should have died, but didn’t. And some men died when they maybe could have lived. And he was in search of what made that difference? What made some men survive when they shouldn’t have? And you see that in this movie, Triumph of the Heart, because we know the historical, I’m just saying the historical record, some of them lived 14 days with no food or water and it shouldn’t have happened.

[00:56:33] Dr. Gerry: What is it? And it’s the heart, right? It’s the heart, it’s faith, it’s connecting with God. It’s seeing beauty and love at a deep level, even in the worst of situations. And that is what Viktor Frankl kind of gets at in his book. But wow, Maximilian Kolbe brings that to life. Well, this movie at least brings that message to life in a way that I think most people would get, without doing it in a way that’s heavy handed in my view, anyway.

[00:57:05] Dr. Peter: Well, that leads me to think of the next paragraph in Gaudium et Spes, which reads, “Man gains such dignity when, ridding himself of all slavery to the passions, he presses forward towards his goal by freely choosing what is good, and by his diligence and skill, effectively secures for himself the means suited to this end.” This idea of ridding himself of slavery to the passions. And this is starting to sound very Thomistic, right? Obviously, you know, the idea of being overwhelmed or being dominated by passions. But yeah, I was thinking about this, when Maximilian Kolbe is in that place, he’s not being dominated by his passions, you know? His innermost self is the master of his system. Even under the kinds of circumstances where almost everybody would lose it, the demands, the pressures are so high, right?

[00:57:58] Dr. Peter: But, you know, there’s still this capacity to, St. Thomas Aquinas would say, to govern himself. And that’s what I’m hearing kind of coming out of that, that he was not dominated by his passions. He was not caught up with hatred for the Nazis or for his persecutors. He was not overwhelmed with despair, not caught up in a frantic search for the means of survival at all of the costs. In fact, he actually, if I remember, going to the biographies, they got tired of waiting for him to die and they actually killed him.

[00:58:31] Dr. Gerry: Yes, there were four people, four people including him, who should not have lived.

[00:58:36] Dr. Peter: That long. Yeah. Under those conditions. Yeah.

[00:58:39] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, which is kind of miraculous, really. And the way they presented in the movie too is just also, it’s their bonding, is that they came together. And so when I think of our system, it’s our parts can come together and deal with anything. And when we’re separated and divided, like we’re talking about the split or the divide within the soul and the inner conflicts, it’s like, that’s when we get dysregulated. That’s when our passions go in different directions and overwhelm us. And instead literally they, and they visually showed in the movie, in beautiful, powerful ways, are these men with nothing. And they’ve got nothing, right? Barely clothes. And they come together in this sort of unity. I’ll just, I’ll give away a little bit, but it doesn’t really give away too much of the movie. But to say that music is a piece of it and the singing, and he’s singing these Marian hymns, or he’s singing the Polish anthem. And the songs like kind of represent the spirit. The Holy Spirit is alive in them, and that’s why they don’t die. It’s like so amazing and beautifully presented.

[00:59:49] Dr. Peter: So here you see nature and grace, right? Because we wanna be careful, I wanna be careful not to convey that this is all happening in the natural realm, right? That it’s just your innermost self. And you and I might have different takes on this as to, you know, is the innermost self in the natural realm or is it in the spiritual realm? Is it in both? But like, nevertheless, however you look at this, grace is perfecting nature. And so these parts, they’re part of our nature and grace is perfecting them, but it’s not like grace just comes in and fixes everything. Like there’s some work that has to be done in the natural realm is I guess what I’m saying.

[01:00:24] Dr. Gerry: Definitely. And you see that in the movie. Actually, I think it would support your point of view because you watch these men go through, it’s really watching all these men go through the process as they’re dying, right. They know they’re gonna die. And yeah, there’s all kinds of things are coming up. I love that. I think that’s beautiful. It mirrors our inner world in some ways. You know, and what comes up for me too, just a little bit as I’m reflecting on this, is ’cause I quoted Denis the Carthusian, Carthusians are particularly austere of course, I can’t even think of a more austere order.

[01:01:00] Dr. Peter: Yeah, I can’t think of one either.

[01:01:01] Dr. Gerry: Thomas Merton actually wanted to be a Carthusian, and because of the war, he couldn’t, so he had to settle on being a Cistercian, which back then, the Cistercians were very strict. I don’t know about now, but they were very, very strict then. So he wanted the strictest. But in any case, so they go into a cell and they talk about what it is to be in their cell. And they have to battle demons in a sense. So there’s a sense of battling, but there’s a sense of really being nothing but you in your humanity with God in the cell. And that is gonna involve wrestling and that’s gonna involve all kinds of things. And what’s amazing to me is that watching Triumph of the Heart is that Maximilian Kolbe and these men were thrown in there against their, well, he kind of chose sort of, but they were thrown against their will and had to have all the spiritual battles one would have in the cell.

[01:02:01] Dr. Gerry: And then you have these monks, Carthusians or whatnot. But any monk that lives in a cell to some extent, that is contemplative, has to do that. Right. And so it’s amazing. But they choose to. They choose to go. And now maybe they don’t last. Some people don’t last, right. I don’t know how long I would last in a Carthusian cell, but you know what I mean? But it nevertheless doesn’t matter if you’re forced because of Nazis and they’re torturing you or if you’re choosing it. Like we all have to come to face-to-face with ourselves, our humanity, in the presence of God. You know? And I think even if we’re lay people and we’re not monks or anything, we can have moments of going into a cell, so to speak. Maybe that’s a prayer room. Maybe it’s a prayer closet. Maybe it’s, you know, whatever. But it, you know, where we do come with our bare humanity before God. Yeah.

[01:02:58] Dr. Peter: Well I’m thinking again about, this idea of loving your enemies, and praying for your persecutor. And in this paragraph 28, of Gaudium et Spes, it says, and it’s talking about, you know, external enemies, I think, primarily here. It’s under of the paragraph, Respect and Love for Enemies. It says, “Those also have a claim in our respect and charity who think and act differently from us in social, political, or religious matters. In fact, the more deeply we come to understand their ways of thinking through kindness and love, the more easily we will be able to enter into dialogue with them.

[01:03:35] Dr. Peter: And so I was thinking about taking this inside right to our parts, very different perspectives, points of view, very different assumptions, you know, and so forth. And I was thinking about like those that are in hell are enemies of themselves. There’s not a love that exists anymore there. And so I was thinking about this respect and love for enemies and the call here in paragraph 28 to listen to understand their ways of thinking through kindness and love. I was thinking about charity starts at home, right? Charity begins at home. That means within ourselves, because as we’ve been talking about with Anthony Flood, you know, the way that we love ourselves is going to be, according to St. Thomas, the forma et radix, the form and the root of the way we love others. It’s a template. We were talking about that in episodes 173 and 174. So yeah, bringing it in here and here we’ve got some real clues, especially in our hypercharged political environment right now. We just had the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and so forth. Like there’s a way that we need to have, you know, like as St. Francis is said to have said, let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. You know, let it begin internally. And we see that call, I’m reading it into there probably, and in paragraph 28. But just the beautiful language there of loving.

[01:04:56] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, no, I think that’s interesting. I love that you bring that up and it’s interesting. Matthew 5 is being quoted there in Vatican II, love your enemies. And I think that we have a tendency to get very angry, like, and often understandably, right? Like we have parts that get angry. And not just Charlie Kirk perhaps, but the two children that were killed in Minnesota, and I was just in Minnesota like last week. And talking with a friend there who, with the Elijah Institute, and they were actually very engaged in bringing, the Elijah Institute was engaged in bringing counselors, getting Catholic counselors together and EMDR informed counselors to come in and help families and work with people and stuff. And then they ran into political problems with different other groups, with different agendas and blah, blah, blah and all that stuff.

[01:05:46] Dr. Gerry: But, you know, I love it that the community, there were community people that came together to support these families and their loss and their grief and their trauma. And yet I can get angry around, well, what’s behind this person who killed them? And I don’t know anything about this person, right? Other than some data points. But I don’t know the person, any more than I know the person who shot Charlie Kirk. Like, I don’t know. And I think we can have parts that are very riled up and wanna do something right. I totally get that and I get the anger around it. But if we choose, ’cause I’ve seen some people do, and I do understand it, but we can choose to end up demonizing half of humanity and they become enemies that we have to hate.

[01:06:36] Dr. Gerry: And then I think Satan smiles, like, I think Satan is happy when that happens because he wants us to hate others and not love them. And I really do believe that even though Jesus got angry at times, right. He did get justifiably angry in very specific times. He’s calling us to be radical examples of love. And I don’t know, and I think I’m a pretty mild mannered person in general, but, thank you. I would be challenged, I would still be challenged if I came face to face with one of these murderers.

[01:07:15] Dr. Peter: Well, what about, without giving anything away, what about Maximilian Kolbe and his relationship? So I’m just curious. Like, did you sense like rancor, like anger, like what was the position like? That’s the amazing thing to me about him. 

[01:07:28] Dr. Gerry: Good point. They don’t focus on the guards in this movie so much. I mean, you see them. But they focus on Carl, who’s a historical figure, who’s a Nazi commander who’s in charge of the camp. And they show him and his family and they show his life and his getting angrier and angrier because this is not going his way. ‘Cause the Nazis do not want Maximilian to be a martyr, ’cause he is well known. I didn’t realize how well known. I knew he was well known from his martyrdom, but I didn’t know that he was already so well known.

[01:07:59] Dr. Peter: He was very well known. Yeah. The Immaculata.

[01:08:02] Dr. Gerry: Radio, yeah, all this stuff. And I didn’t know that he had been, oh my gosh, like so much I learned about him. ‘Cause of course, after I saw the movie, I wanted to learn more. He’s such an amazing saint. But that he was, you know, saving Jews, I didn’t know how many, I didn’t realize how many monasteries this guy founded and that he was like hiding Jews in monasteries and stuff like that. And in the end, he got accused of antisemitism and it’s totally like ridiculous. But he literally saved the lives of many Jews. But they do contrast him and Carl, I can’t pronounce the guy’s last name, who was the Nazi commander. And really Carl ends up coming across as kind of a Satan figure and tempts because he says, you know, if you, I don’t know, this is a bit of a spoiler. I don’t know. Should I get into a spoiler? Maybe not.

[01:08:49] Dr. Peter: Oh, let’s not. The point was about the anger. Yeah.

[01:08:53] Dr. Gerry: And Maximilian sees himself as being there for God, because God wants him to be there. Yeah. It’s so beautiful.

[01:09:02] Dr. Peter: He’s able to see the providential end of God, even in the kinds of circumstances that would be unimaginably horrible or, at least the movie is, it sounds like, is opening our imaginations to.

[01:09:11] Dr. Gerry: Yes, yes.

[01:09:13] Dr. Peter: That’s like the scary part of what you’re talking about. That’s what gives me the heebie-jeebies about watching it. Which I will do.

[01:09:17] Dr. Gerry: I can’t wait to hear what you think after you watch it. We have to talk. It is so powerful.

[01:09:22] Dr. Peter: Okay. Okay.

[01:09:24] Dr. Gerry: Oh, and by the way, like the only reason I was able to see it, it was because a wonderful Catholic pediatrician in our area, Dr. Margaret Boudreau, was a host and got petitions and we got enough people to have it played at the local theater.

[01:09:39] Dr. Peter: Okay. So we will get links to this movie into the YouTube description. So if you wanna pursue it, you can. You don’t know if it’s carried by Netflix?

[01:09:48] Dr. Gerry: I don’t think it’s available yet on a streaming service. It just came out. Well, by October, when this airs in October. I don’t know. We’ll find out. We’ll let you know.

[01:09:56] Dr. Peter: Yeah, we’ll find out. Yeah. So I know we’ve gotta kind of bring this to a close, but I did wanna at least bring up this paragraph 53 of Gaudium et Spes where it says that, “Experts in other sciences, particularly biology, medicines, social science, and psychology, can be of service to the welfare of marriage and the family and peace of mind of people.” This idea that, yeah, like that we can actually be helpful.

[01:10:24] Dr. Gerry: This is Magisterial teaching. We’re not saying that all psychologists are amazing, we’re just saying that there is value within that can be helpful.

[01:10:36] Dr. Peter: Right. Yeah. And again, because, you know, grace perfects nature, and that’s what we’re focused on at Souls and Hearts. That’s what we’re focused on in the Resilient Catholics Community, Formation for Formators Community, here in this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics. This is all supposed to be working together for good, you know, like we are supposed to be, you know, providing folks. And what I like about Internal family Systems, parts and systems thinking is that it gives us a way to put into action what we’re reading in Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, or what we’re reading in the Summa Theologica, we’re reading or witnessing in the lives of the Saints. That this is like a practical way of actually doing your human formation work. And human formation is the basis of all formation according to the Saint John Paul II in Pastores Dabo Vobis, paragraph 44, 43. So let’s bring it all together. And that’s what I’m so excited. Maybe this sounds a little bit too much like me patting myself on the back and patting you on the back, but like that’s what we’re coming together for, Gerry. That’s what we founded Souls and Hearts to be all about. It’s really exciting.

[01:11:44] Dr. Gerry: I’m sitting here always in awe of you, Peter, that you can quote, I can’t even say the name, it’s an apostolic exoration, right? Pastores Dabo Vobis.

[01:11:54] Dr. Peter: Yes. Pastores Dabo Vobis, and I will give you shepherds. Yeah.

[01:11:57] Dr. Gerry: You can quote the page numbers in my own book better than I can. So there we are.

[01:12:04] Dr. Peter: Well, I’m amazed that you can bring up St. Denis the Carthusian and you know, I’m thinking he is in the seventh century and you’ve got him, you know, rightfully located and you can track down stuff. And it was interesting ’cause even earlier today in our depth group, we met earlier today. You know, you mentioned how different we are from each other and how, you know, sometimes we really kind of disagree about just different perspectives whenever. But I think it’s so fruitful for us to come together. And one of the things I really have appreciated and really cherish about our relationship is that, yeah, we can be different and we can appreciate each other’s differences. You know, Souls and Hearts isn’t meant to be something homogenous in terms of like, how it presents. We want those distinctions and those different perspectives. And I feel really comfortable just being able to work here with you and to share here with you and to be really different from you.

[01:12:57] Dr. Gerry: And we have different copies Vatican II, right.

[01:13:00] Dr. Peter: We have different copies of Vatican II. That’s right.

[01:13:05] Dr. Gerry: I have the original and you have some new thing. I don’t know what that is. Just kidding.

[01:13:08] Dr. Peter: Yeah, that’s actually the one that was handwritten in Latin at the action in Rome, you know, and I just have the copy.

[01:13:14] Dr. Gerry: It is from 1966, but yeah. 

[01:13:19] Dr. Peter: Well, we’re getting closer to the original documents, like your copy is earlier. Right. You know, that’s important, you know, to be able. Like the earliest manuscripts are really important. 

[01:13:28] Dr. Gerry: Yes, because they’ve been doctored and changed by monks through the last several centuries, right. 

[01:13:36] Dr. Peter: Right. So, any final like, takeaway that you would just wanna leave our audience with, Dr. Gerry, as we bring this to a close, as we land this episode?

[01:13:45] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. I mean, I think just that we were looking at a particular part of Vatican II that honestly is a little drier than some other parts. Like the parts about the church are just so beautiful, you know, and so powerful. But I think that people don’t know how amazing the writings themselves are and how much richness they are and how much it speaks to the dignity of the human person, how much it speaks to the unity of the church and of the human person and God himself, of course. And the beauty of that. And so I’ve enjoyed, ’cause I hadn’t looked at it in a while, I’ve enjoyed, you know, looking at these documents and their beauty and what they really say versus what sometimes people think they say.

[01:14:30] Dr. Peter: Right, right, because there can be a lot of polemics and a lot of fighting within the church about these documents and Vatican II in general and the implementation of Vatican II and all of that. But I think we need to be able to really take in what our Lord is offering us through these documents and make it our own, you know, and really embrace it. ‘Cause there are things that are stated with a clarity here that you don’t see said it in the exact same way. And it’s written in a more modern language, even though we’re, you know, 60 years or whatever since the council, there’s a sort of immediacy. You know, I’m thinking about these documents being written within 20 years at the end of the second World War. That was living memory, you know, so the stuff that Maximilian Kolbe went through, like this was like on the minds of the council fathers, in a way that is not present for us today, ’cause most of us don’t have any lived experience of it.

[01:15:20] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. It was really a revolutionary time for the church that I think people don’t realize the important things that shifted, that needed to shift. You know, I think some things got lost that shouldn’t have gotten lost, perhaps, like you said, in the implementation. But the beauty of what came out of the councils to me is profound. The documents themselves, you know.

[01:15:43] Dr. Peter: Right, right. So to be able to embrace that and to be able to, you know, consider our hearts, you know, and this language of the heart, and that was something that Dietrich von Hildebrand wrote in his book on the heart, he felt like was being lost. You know, and you really do see it coming back in Vatican II, the language of the heart. And I actually did a search through all the documents of Vatican II, and the heart comes up a lot and the divided heart comes up a lot. That’s a very common phrase that comes up not just in Gaudium et Spes but in many of the other documents as well.

[01:16:17] Dr. Peter: So, no time to get through all of that, but just to say that there are really good reasons to believe that this idea of multiplicity, this idea of systems thinking, the idea of parts like this is very consistent with our faith. And you know what? I was mentioning this to the RCC members, the members of the Resilient Catholics community in a Walking Together as One podcast, that’s a daily podcast I do just for RCC members. I was talking about how people, you don’t have to believe this, you don’t have to, I mean, you can live a wholly rich life and not be thinking in terms of parts and systems thinking. I think it’s just appealing to, you know, a certain subset of Catholics.

[01:16:57] Dr. Peter: But if you’re not thinking in terms of parts and systems thinking, I would challenge you to figure out what does it mean to love yourself? How do you understand that? To really flesh that out for yourself in whatever model, you know, makes sense for you and is consistent with what the Catholic Church teaches. I wanna be really careful about not saying that this is how you have to think, you know, because I don’t think it is. I think it’s helpful to you and me and to many people that, you know, have kind of come together in Souls and Hearts.

[01:17:22] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, can I just, I agree, but if I could just say that, I as a marriage and family therapist, like somebody that’s worked with couples, worked with families, I’m doing a lot of work even in the church with different ecclesial groups. I can’t think of a better way or strategy of helping people to get along with each other better than parts work

[01:17:51] Dr. Peter: I totally agree with you. I would also say though that, when I was practicing psychoanalytically, and I was looking at this in terms of like internal conflicts, like there was still good that could come from that. You know what I’m saying? Like, I don’t wanna ever come across, as, you know, Souls and Hearts is trying to invalidate the good work that other people are doing.

[01:18:09] Dr. Gerry: Right, oh, yeah.

[01:18:10] Dr. Peter: Especially within human formation.

[01:18:12] Dr. Gerry: Like I was just on Pints with Aquinas, and Matt kind of wanted to talk a lot about why the therapy culture and the idea of that, you know, are we all just being needy or something? And so I ended up in a place, I mean, it was a positive conversation, but I mean, defending therapy. And I’m really defending all therapies because, well, not all, but you know, like most therapies that are, you know, that have some research behind them. Because there’s some work that’s been done to show its effectiveness. It isn’t just, like even therapies I don’t typically use very much anymore, like CBT, I know are helpful. It’s just I am finding these strategies more helpful, at least in my work. And so, yeah.

[01:18:58] Dr. Peter: Well, and you remember Kristen McIntyre, that Catholic psychiatrist, reviewed Internal Family Systems, and I think it was five other therapeutic modalities and kind of looked at the degree to which they’re consistent with a Thomistic anthropology and how effective they were, you know, and so, you know, I thought that was a really fascinating presentation because you’re seeing that there’s a confluence between what works and its consistency with the nature of the human person.

[01:19:25] Dr. Gerry: Well, if you’re honest and you look at the early church, like Desert Fathers and all these people, and even you could see this in some of the Eastern Christian, like the Eastern Orthodox psychologists. There aren’t that many, but there are some, that have looked at, you know, spent a lot of time with patristics and they tend to land on CBT. Because there’s an element of, you know, of that struggle of working with your rational, your various thoughts that are like overwhelming you and so on. On a surface, at least as a beginning point, I think that is actually helpful. But I think there’s more is all.

[01:20:04] Dr. Peter: Well, we might think of that as working primarily with the managers that are in conscious awareness initially, which is really where we begin in IFS work anyway. You begin with the managers, manager parts. And if you’re interested in that and this is the first time that you’ve kind of come across this language, check out episodes 157, 158, 159, where we do an introduction to IFS and to the innermost self and to parts. Such a great episode we did on the innermost self in 158. We’ll also put up that link to Dr. McIntyre’s presentation on that in the description of this episode.

[01:20:36] Dr. Gerry: Well, and I argue with, where do I argue with that? Somewhere I wrote something about it.

[01:20:40] Dr. Peter: Yeah. There is a, we’ll also put up a link to Kingdom Within where you did a review of those episodes, a review of that work. And there was one point about the cogitative power where you and she differed. And again, we talk about some of this from a Thomistic anthropology in the previous two episodes, 173 and 174 with Dr. Anthony Flood. So it’s just great to see that there’s more and more interest kind of, and traction around seriously engaging the question. ‘Cause, you know, I do believe that there are some things that we say being so speculative and hypothetical that are probably inaccurate. And that we can revise in the future. But I think it’s far better to wrestle with this and to say some things, and some of those might be wrong than to stay silent, you know, and to not open that or engage in that conversation. So I’m really grateful that, you know, when we started out Souls and Hearts, we didn’t know it was gonna lead us to all of this.

[01:21:29] Dr. Gerry: No way of knowing.

[01:21:30] Dr. Peter: But it’s been so fun to, no way of knowing.

[01:21:34] Dr. Gerry: God has his own plans. Yes.

[01:21:38] Dr. Peter: Right. Well, and it’s just been great that we’ve been able just to be able to draw out each other’s gifts. I mean, that’s one of the things I really appreciate. I’ve learned so much from you, Gerry. And just how differently you and I think, but yet how there’s a harmony and a convergence about what’s true, even though we may come at it from different perspectives and so forth. 

[01:21:58] Dr. Peter: Okay, so this is the big news. It’s happened again. The Resilient Catholics Community is now open for new members all during the month of October. If you are a Catholic who sees how important structure is for your personal human formation, if you wanna shore up your natural human formation foundation, if you wanna create that solid base for your spiritual life, if you wanna deeply learn your human formation arithmetic so that you can do your spiritual algebra, if you wanna bring this parts and systems thinking into your life, consider the Resilient Catholics Community. The RCC offers you a structured program. It’s year long in a community of like-minded Catholics in relationship with these Catholics in small groups flourishing and thriving as we journey together toward loving God wholeheartedly with all your parts and loving your neighbor as yourself.

[01:22:55] Dr. Peter: Go to our landing page at soulsandhearts.com/rcc to find out lots more. Hundreds of Catholics have found the RCC to be helpful in their human formation. Part of the reason is that we don’t journey alone. That old African proverb says, “if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We want to go far, very far. And in the RCC, we use the best of both secular and spiritual resources to help you experience what love is at a bones level across your parts so that you can love with your whole heart, with all of your parts. It’s not just for your head. It’s for your heart, for all of your being. So again, check out all of our information at the RCC landing page at soulsandhearts.com/rcc. Consider doing our 19 minute experiential exercise to help you discern whether it’s a good idea to apply to the RCC. And even if you apply, there’s still a mutual discernment process that lasts some weeks. It includes the PartsFinder Pro, which is a set of 23 measures to help you come to understand 10 to 15 of your parts managers, firefighters, exiles, and how they relate to your innermost self and how your parts relate to each other.

[01:24:13] Dr. Peter: So you’ll get feedback in your PFP report. It’ll be six or seven pages long, and you’ll also get a 15 minute Zoom interview with the Souls at Heart staff member. All of that is included in the $499 application fee. And you can contact Pam at office@soulsandhearts.com if you have financial need for a scholarship. Are you ready to apply? I’m just inviting you. We take that discernment seriously. We spend hours with your application, the staff at Souls and Hearts do. We meet with you and we search to find what’s best for you. And if it’s not the RCC, we make other recommendations for what would help you in your human formation. Go to soulsandhearts.com/rcc for more information.

[01:25:01] Dr. Peter: All right, this podcast, the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast. Like this episode, subscribe to us on YouTube. Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts, and join the conversation at Interior Integration for Catholics. That’s the number four there. That’s at YouTube. We are reducing the frequency of IIC episodes down to once per month. So the next episode will release on November 3rd. It’ll always be on the first Monday of the month. And why are we doing this? Well, we’re doing so many other things that we need to free up some time. We have a new podcast, Scripture for your Inner Outcasts. It’s the first podcast to my knowledge to discuss scripture through an IFS lens. It’s the first podcast ever to speak directly to exiled parts. We have so much free content from Souls and Hearts. We have these IIC podcast episodes. We have my semi-monthly reflections, which come out on the second and fourth Mondays of the month. They’re all about parts and systems thinking and Catholicism. We’ve been discussing habits, virtues, goals and how our doing should flow from our being, grounded in our identity over the last few weeks. You can check all that out at soulsandhearts.com/blog, and you can also sign up to get those in your email box. Just go to soulsandhearts.com on the homepage there. Click the blue box, get your email address to us, and we will send those out every week.

[01:26:26] Dr. Peter: Dr. Gerry, he’s got this Parting Thoughts. It’s his take on movies and films that address parts and systems thinking from a Catholic viewpoint. So super excited to have him do that. And also his Kingdom Within. Those come out once a month. Parting Thoughts comes out on the first Monday of the month, Kingdom Within comes out on the third Monday of the month. We also have these free courses. A Catholic’s Guide to Choosing A Therapist, A Catholic’s Guide to Self-Help, a Catholic’s Guide to Helping a Loved One In Distress. Go to soulsandhearts.com/courses to check those out. It takes a lot of time to generate this material, but we also wanna organize it. We are developing a tagging system so that everything can be found more readily. In the meantime, you can go to our resource page at soulsandhearts.com/toc for Table of Contents and you can find a lot organized by subject heading there. Let’s draw this to a close by invoking our patroness and our patrons. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. Joseph, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.