Schools and parents have failed to instill moral values in our youth. Remember “self-esteem,” “risk-taking,” “self-awareness” and the other clichés ...

How the Sensitivity Movement 

Desensitized Catholics to Evil

By William Kilpatrick

Remember bell-bottoms, beads, and tie-dyed shirts? Remember encounter groups, Esalen, and trust falls? Remember “self-esteem,” “risk-taking,” “self-awareness” and the other clichés that were born with the human potential movement?

Both bell-bottoms and human potential psychology became popular in the mid-sixties. Bell-bottoms, however, eventually went out of style. Human potential psychology never did. If you don’t notice it anymore, that’s because it’s become a fixture of modern life. It’s no longer necessary to seek out a sensitivity group, because the culture itself is now one large sensitivity group. The assumptions, vocabulary, and techniques of the sensitivity circle have found their way into business, schools, churches, and popular entertainment.

For example, college orientations for incoming students usually include heavy doses of encounter-group exercises—typically followed by four years of learning to be sensitive to differences and non-offensive to a myriad of minorities. Not surprisingly, the punishment for insensitivity is more sensitivity. Most of us know of cases where students, school personnel, sports stars, or businessmen have been sent to sensitivity training for the purpose of thought adjustment. The sensitivity movement was meant to liberate human potential, but it now serves as little more than a tool for enforcing conformity to the codes of political correctness.

One of the first institutions to embrace humanistic psychology was the Catholic Church. During the 1970s, self-awareness psychology became an integral part of life at Catholic seminaries, colleges, and grade schools. Religious studies textbooks were rewritten to include a generous serving of the wisdom of pop psychology gurus such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. For example, in the Conscience and Concern series’ book on the sacraments, about four-fifths of the chapter on marriage consists of a lengthy excerpt from Carl Rogers’ book Becoming Partners: Marriage and Its Alternatives. What might those alternatives be? Well, basically, whatever makes you feel good about your self. According to Rogers, the governing priority in any relationship is not fidelity but self-growth.

The influence of psychology even extended to the textbook illustrations. Book Seven of the Benziger series used in those days contains 300 photos and illustrations, but only one depiction of Christ on the cross. Book Eight has no crucifixion scenes. Nor do the books for grade levels Six, Five, Four, and Three. Presumably the sight of Christ suffering and dying for our sins might remind us of our sinfulness—and that, from the humanistic viewpoint, might be an unhealthy blow to our self-esteem.

Whenever a Catholic doctrine, such as human sinfulness, collided with a psychological doctrine, such as human goodness, the tendency was to sweep the offending Catholic doctrine under the rug. Catholics were given the impression that salvation was bound up with self-awareness and self-acceptance. Self-acceptance, it was believed, would automatically follow self-awareness, because the more you learned about yourself the more you would discover about the wonders of your inner self.

One of the things that a great many Catholics discovered almost simultaneously was that they were—to use the lingo of the day—OK. Convinced of their own self-worth, many Catholics abandoned the sacrament of Penance. Almost overnight, the long lines at the confessional disappeared. Catholics had been so well-schooled in the gospel of self-acceptance that they couldn’t think of any sins they needed to confess.

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