I am writing this article during Holy Week. I hadn’t planned this, but I can’t think of a more suitable time to ponder the relationship between abuse and safeguarding. We are celebrating the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and this consideration cannot ignore the sufferings that He endured at the hands of the human beings that He created, as well as God’s response to that suffering.
Abuse of any kind — physical, psychological, verbal, spiritual — is normally perpetrated by one human being on another human being. Self-harm can be considered a form of abuse, and abuse of animals by human beings is another form of abuse. Animals can exhibit violent behavior among themselves, and this resembles the abuse inflicted by humans, but such behavior in animals is normally caused by survival, mating, or environmental stress rather than the malicious, premeditated “cruelty” defined in human moral, legal, or psychological terms.
We began this series of articles in Where Peter Is as a presentation of the January 10th conference on safeguarding given by Fr. Hans Zollner, SJ, at the Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality in Oxford, England. Our first article, “Safe From Abuse?”, presented the subject of safeguarding and introduced us to Fr. Zollner’s conference. In our second article, “Is Safety Enough?”, we studied Fr. Zollner’s definition of safeguarding. Since these articles are based on Fr. Zollner’s conference, we will leave aside both self-harm and abuse of animals. Instead, we will limit our considerations to human abuse inflicted on another human being, and even more specifically to the spiritual aspect of such abuse. As we quoted Fr. Zollner in an earlier article, “safeguarding as an integral part of the mission of the church is deeply connected to spirituality.” Fr. Zollner insists on this connection, going so far as to say, that if safeguarding is not connected with spirituality, “it will not work.”
Fr. Zollner gives various reasons for this connection between safeguarding and spirituality. The primary reason is that the Church is formed by the action of the Holy Spirit, and the Church’s mission is inseparable from the Spirit who unites the members into one body. The head of this body is Jesus Christ. Head and body together form one person.[i] Everything in the Church is spiritual because the Church is the continuation of the Incarnation of the Son of God made man in the womb of Mary. Any aspect, any action of the Church that does not flow from the Holy Spirit risks being cut off and thrown away to be burned.
Another reason why Fr. Zollner says that safeguarding is necessarily a spiritual matter, is that he has come to realize that “the root cause of basically all types of abuse” is “the spirituality of power”. From this spiritual foundation flow “the abuse of power, the connection to clericalism, the connection to clericalism in clergy and non-clergy, the positions of power.” He admits that the links between on the one hand spirituality and safeguarding, and on the other hand spirituality and abuse “are new, relatively new subjects, at least beyond a very limited circle of people who had been talking about that before.”[ii]
Recently, these questions have suddenly become widespread with the present wars being waged around the world, for Pope Leo XIV declared that “Idolatry makes people slaves of each other” and “the wars that stain [our present age] with blood are the fruit of the idolatry of power and money.”[iii] No one will disagree that idolatry is a spiritual action. To make power and money into idols is to subject one’s whole self, mind, soul, and body, to those realities. History and literature have furnished many examples of those who worshipped at these shrines.
The phrase “idolatry of power” has long been familiar to me, but I have never heard the expression “the spirituality of power”. The “idolatry of power” creates in my mind the image of someone bowing down to the demands of power, to what one must forfeit in order to obtain power. An example of this is Richard Rich, a lawyer under Henry VIII who rose to several high government positions. He is well known in our time from Robert Bolt’s play and film, A Man for All Seasons. According to historical records, Richard started out as a lawyer in search of a patron, a common situation in the 16th century. He had a remarkable gift for adjusting his political adherence to the prevailing winds. He is known as the primary witness in the trial of St. Thomas More, as the witness whose testimony decisively caused More’s condemnation. “His evidence against the prisoner included admissions made in friendly conversation, and in More’s case the words were given a misconstruction that could hardly be other than willful.”[iv] One historian called him a man “of whom nobody has ever spoken a good word.”[v]
It is possible to find many other examples of those who worshipped at the altars of money and power. But what constitutes the spirituality of such idolatry? I did an online search for “the spirituality of power”, and found much about “spiritual power”, but nothing about “the spirituality of power”. In order to understand what this spirituality is that lies at the root of abuse, we will need to examine its individual components.
A general definition of “spirituality” is “the quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.” A more developed definition is “a personal search for meaning, purpose, and connection to something bigger than oneself, such as the universe, nature, or a higher power. It focuses on inner peace, personal growth, and experiencing life beyond just material needs.” This gives us a basis for understanding the spirituality of power. When this definition of spirituality is considered in the context of power, power is seen as the “something bigger than oneself” that gives the person “meaning, purpose and connection.” Power, having power, being able to exercise power, gives meaning to my life and to my existence, for I now have a goal: that goal is power. It gives me a purpose, for power is something that can be, and is meant to be, exercised. Finally, power as a spiritual reality gives me connection with something much greater than myself. Seen in this light, the spirituality of power becomes a god whose allegiance can be vastly alluring.
Moreover, power is impersonal, unlike the worship of a personal god. Power is a force and a force does not have a personality. It is, in a sense, understandable, unlike a person who always remains to some degree a mystery. A force can be studied and therefore, it can — at least in theory — be mastered. To worship power is to worship an impersonal god, it is to worship a god that one can understand and therefore master.
This possible mastery of power is the hope that lies behind the worship of power. We instinctively know that a person is always greater than any impersonal being. The temptation of power, from the Garden of Eden, to the whispering of Mephistopheles, to the lure of the One Ring, all these are forms of the belief that in worshipping power one can ultimately master power and use it as one chooses.
Is this true? Or was Lord Acton correct when he claimed, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”? The question becomes clearer when we consider what power is. It is a force, not an object. An object can act, but a force must act. Its action is its existence. Remember, we are talking about the spirituality of power in which power has become one’s meaning in life. Power is not just an ability one possesses. It is — by the definition of spirituality — the purpose for which one exists. To worship power is to submit one’s life and existence to a force that exists to act. To possess power in this way and to this degree demands that one uses it and uses it continually. Otherwise, it would cease to be one’s god. When power is worshipped, when one submits to the spirituality of power, its own existence forces its possessor to action, and in this way, the possessor becomes possessed by his possession.
The action of power exists to be exercised upon something or someone. This object of the action of power is the victim of that power. The first victim is, of course, the worshipper, who is himself manipulated by the power to which he has submitted himself. But the effect of the idolatry of power rarely ends there. The worshipper of power, once he possesses power, can rarely fail to exercise it, and in order to exercise it, he needs an object upon which to exercise the power that is in him. The form that this exercise of power will take can be manifold, but when power — naked, unadulterated power — is exercised, it can only be harmful, for its possessor has relinquished his responsibility as a person to an impersonal god, and therefore his choice of action has ceased to be both personal and reasonable.
At this point, we can see the choice laid before those who seek to put safeguarding into practice. To what degree will they use power? Power is necessary. We are not inert rocks. We possess the ability to act, and that is in itself a power. But we are faced with the choice: to use power, or to let ourselves be used by it? If we choose merely to use power and not to worship it, we are weaker than those who do worship it and we are therefore vulnerable to them. How do we deal with this dilemma? We seek by safeguarding to protect those who are vulnerable, yet we dare not imitate those who worship power and we thus are by our own choice weaker than those who do worship it.
It is not accidental that I am writing this during Holy Week. We celebrate in these days the moment when the all-powerful God chose to submit Himself to total abuse in utter weakness. Yet “the weakness of God is more powerful than men.”[vi] We have studied here the weakness of safeguarding by studying the power of abuse. In our next article we will study “The Weakness of Abuse”, and we will discover there the strength that we possess in His weakness.
Notes
[i] Catechism of the Catholic Church #795
[ii] Unless otherwise noted, quoted passages are from Fr. Zollner’s conference.
[iii] Pope Leo XIV, Homily of March 28, 2026, Monaco https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/homilies/2026/documents/20260328-principato-dimonaco-messa.html
[iv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rich,_1st_Baron_Rich
[v] Ibid.
[vi] 1 Cor 1:25
Image: Empty Pews. License: CC0 Public Domain.
Sr. Gabriela of the Incarnation, O.C.D. (Sr. Gabriela Hicks) was born in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in the Gold Rush country of California, which she remembers as heaven on earth for a child! She lived a number of years in Europe, and then entered the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Flemington, New Jersey, where she has been a member for forty years. www.flemingtoncarmel.org.
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