In the midst of the climate of confusion that much of ecclesial life is going through, the Spanish Conference of Religious (CONFER) has decided to entrust the guidance of its next General Assembly of Major Superiors —which will be held in Madrid at the end of May— to a group with diffuse spiritual inspiration, with traits of New Age thinking.
The news published in El Debate leaves, at the very least, one stunned by the direction that those who hold the responsibility of guiding consecrated life in Spain are taking.
Psychologism instead of spiritual life
The chosen facilitator, Yago Abeledo, trained in areas such as transpersonal therapy or so-called Bioneuroemotion —currents widely questioned and pointed out by various experts as New Age-style pseudotherapies—, belongs to Faith and Praxis.
It is an association that proposes a spiritual language that has little to do with Catholic faith. Its so-called “credo” speaks of an “evolutionary cosmic dance of creation and destruction,” of “co-creating God’s dream,” or of vulnerability as a path to fullness.
Not simply unfortunate expressions. We are faced with a paradigm shift: from revealed faith to subjective spirituality; from received truth to constructed experience; from God as Creator to a kind of energy in process.
The contrast with the Christian Creed is evident. Where the Church confesses with precision the faith in the Trinitarian God, in the incarnation of the Word, and in redemption, here ambiguous, open, and malleable formulations are offered, closer to spiritual self-help currents than to Catholic doctrine.
An Assembly at a critical moment
Religious life in Spain is going through a marked vocational decline, aging, and loss of social presence. Instead of returning to the sources —prayer, sacramental life, fidelity to the founding charism—, paths are explored that promise renewal from categories alien to tradition, under the motto “All, all, all. Synodal Kairos”.
The problem is no longer merely methodological. It is fundamental. When spiritual life is replaced by group dynamics, emotional processes, and personal growth tools, the risk is clear: faith ceases to be adherence to revealed truth to become a malleable inner experience, prone to subjectivism.
Not everything goes in the name of synodality
The constant recourse to “inclusion,” “dialogue,” or “synodality” cannot serve as an excuse to introduce into the Church approaches incompatible with its doctrine. Openness is not confusion. Renewal is not rupture.
Saint Paul warned it clearly: “Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings” (Heb 13:9). The warning remains current.
When the language of faith is replaced by ambiguous formulas, when spirituality is diluted in psychologism, and when the formation of those responsible for religious life is entrusted to currents alien to the Christian tradition, the problem is no longer one of style or method: it is one of identity. And the identity of the Church is Jesus Christ: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6).