By David Torkington
Crisis Magazine
March 13, 2026
The answer to the question, "What is truth?" is clearly to be found in Divine Revelation. Firstly, the ultimate truth is that God is love. Secondly, the truth is that God wants to share His love, His Holy Spirit, with us. Thirdly, the truth is that it is only when God's love suffuses and surcharges human love with His own love that we can be open to receive that love with ever increasing intensity and effectiveness. Fourthly, the truth is that the more we receive God's love, the more we become our true selves from the moral mess that sin and selfishness has made of us.
Jesus Christ came not just to reveal this to us but to show us how to open ourselves to receive this love by what He taught and by how He lived. That is why, when a way of life was created for us by Christ to produce the best possible environment in which to receive God's love, the Holy Spirit, it came to be called the spiritual life. Then the study of how we are to live this spiritual life came to be called Spiritual Theology. There is, therefore, no more important study-because without it, access to the love of God is permanently inhibited.
When, in the late 1950s, I began to study theology after two years of philosophy, the major subjects were Systematic Theology, Moral Theology, Canon Law, Church History, Scripture, and Liturgy. There was simply no subject called Spiritual Theology; no teaching, therefore, on how to generate a prayer life that leads to the contemplation which St. Thomas Aquinas insisted can alone open us to receive the fruits of contemplation. These were the infused virtues, the gifts and the fruits of the Holy Spirit, with which the life of Christ Himself and the lives of the first Catholic family-based communities were redolent. They were so alive with God's love that they were radioactive with all the fruits of contemplation, enabling them to transform a Pagan Roman Empire into a Christian Empire in such a short time.
When, over a thousand years later, a new Christ-centered Catholic Spirituality was reborn, it was spread all over Europe by the new mendicant religious orders: the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, the Augustinians, and their respective lay followers. When they came under attack by the older, established orders, St. Thomas Aquinas defended them by stating what their very raison d'être was. Their work, he insisted, was firstly to contemplate and then to share the fruits of their contemplative prayer with others.
Without the fruit of what is traditionally called the first of the infused theological virtues, which is love, they cannot even begin. They cannot even start because without this love they cannot even return God's love in prayer-never mind receive the other theological virtues; the cardinal virtues of prudence, goodness, fortitude,and temperance; nor the more than 60 infused moral virtues. Further to this are all the gifts and the fruits of the Holy Spirit, without which true Catholic apostles simply cannot even exist, as St. Thomas would put it, never mind act.
And if they are all truly infused and therefore of God, then they are all given gradually, but simultaneously, as St. Francis of Assisi insisted, and to all, no matter how lowly a person may be. That is why they were all firstly to be found to perfection in a young girl who lived in Nazareth over two thousand years ago, as Julian of Norwich explained, and in countless other poor and humble Christians whom we have called saints in subsequent centuries.
When I found that the subject called Spiritual Theology, in which prayer and contemplation would be taught-and therefore how the fruits of contemplation were to be received-was not taught in my priestly training, I was horrified and thought it must be a unique oversight. However, I was sadly wrong. It was not a one-off. Through the 1970s, as the director of a conference and retreat center and as a lecturer on Mystical Theology in Rome, I found that my experience was all but universal.
This frightening realization was reiterated over and over again as I was invited to travel all over the world in the 1980s to preach, teach, and lecture on the strange new ideas that I was spreading about the contemplative prayer that I found nobody knew about, never mind practiced. I am not just talking about the leadership in the Church, who are in the firing line now from the Catholic intelligentsia, but the intelligentsia themselves, who still do not know what I am talking about, although they are all united in criticizing the leadership for falling into the moral morass that is the result of continually committing the sin against the Holy Spirit.
The intelligentsia continually commit the sin against the Holy Spirit through ignorance-that was not necessarily of their making-or through the arrogance that always leads the spiritually blind into the worst sin of all. This is the sin against the Holy Spirit. The consequences of remaining closed to the Holy Spirit are that a person is to be deprived of all the infused virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit without which the Catholic Church cannot function as the Mystical Body of Christ, with Christ the King ruling over her. How can He rule when the only way His rule can be received is by the love that they have no time to receive.
For generations now, the Catholic intelligentsia or Catholic humanists have, in fact, been far more influenced by "The Age of the Enlightenment" than "The Age of Saints and Martyrs" in the early Christian centuries. The solid rock of reason seems to them a far safer foundation for living our Faith then some airy-fairy form of mystical prayer called contemplation that was, in fact, the foundation on which our Faith was founded (Luke 5:16). Love is not irrational but suprarational and, therefore, the only power capable of satisfying all the ultimate needs and desires of human beings.
Reread the sublime spiritual theology of St. Paul. Then read how he spent about 10 years in contemplative prayer before He even started to become the Apostle to the Gentiles, never mind writing his Epistles (see Galatians 1:11-24). Reread his second letter to the Corinthians, when he speaks of the sublime mystical heights that he had long since experienced (2 Corinthians12:1-6).
These experiences can only be understood by reading St. Teresa of Avila's masterwork, The Interior Castle, and St. John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul (that everybody must pass through, as a necessary purification, before experiencing such mystical graces). St. Paul refers to this purification as a new inner circumcision that prepares a person to be united with Christ (see Colossians 2:8-11 and 13-23). How could St. Paul have persevered after so many awful sufferings like prison, torture, multiple beatings, and even several scourgings, like Christ, before his final martyrdom.
I am afraid that the philosophical solace and stoicism of the "age of reason" could not have either inspired or sustained him. And what happened to him happened to the other apostles; but, sadly, this has now all been forgotten. I recently heard one of the most highly respected of Catholic theologians giving a lecture titled "All you need to know about the conversion of St. Paul," in which St. Paul was likened to Aristotle. Sadly, however, there was no mention of the many years that he spent in the Arabian desert in prayer and then near his own hometown of Tarsus; nor was there any mention of the sublime prayer that he experienced.
Of course, the technical language used in Mystical Theology was then unknown and therefore never used, but the reality was there-and more intensively practiced than at any other time in the later history of the Church. I do not mean in religious orders or congregations that did not yet exist; I mean in Catholic families that were the living, breathing building blocks of the Church.
As students studying the liturgy, we were taught that, as priests, we would become the ministers of the sacraments through which Christ continually pours out His love on all who receive them. However, we were not taught how to teach them-how to receive, assimilate, and digest this love through profound and ongoing prayer-so our flock would have to stagnate and remain as barren as we were. This also meant that the liturgy itself could never be much more than the expression of our deepest hearts' desires, or of holy ideas in our heads, or of cultivated feelings in our cerebellums.
Although I was cancelled almost 40 years ago for revealing the terrible consequences of Catholicism without contemplation, I have been cancelled many more times since, not by Rome but by the Catholic intelligentsia. It is they who run Catholic publishing houses, newspapers, periodicals, and magazines, none of whom seem to agree with each other except in their criticism of the present establishment. Nor, therefore, do the vast majority of them know anything at all about Catholic Mystical Theology.
When, occasionally, I manage to get a book or an article like this through these censors, which is rarely, many ordinary believers infused with the sensus fidelium ask why this has not been said before ? The answer is that if the shepherds have not been taught true traditional prayer, contemplation, and the fruits of contemplation, then what of the sheep whose ignorance of the traditional Catholic spiritual life is, therefore, frankly abysmal, although all too many think that it is authentic and traditional.
I was brought up in the 1940s and '50s, so please believe me—as I have explained in detail elsewhere—that it was far from perfect and eons away from the true Catholic spirituality as introduced into the early Church by Jesus Christ. Nostalgia has a habit of distorting reality—especially when, as it usually is, it is for the faith of our forebears, who lived in the generation immediately before our birth.
I can still name more than 20 priests who taught me in the boarding school, where we all had to attend the Rector's Mass in the College Chapel. Every morning, these priests rushed through their daily Traditional Tridentine Masses on side altars without us ever seeing them prepare before Mass or make a thanksgiving after Mass. The fastest said his Mass in 17 minutes, the slowest in 25 minutes. How do I know ? Because one boy used to run a book on who would be the fastest on any given day!
Three of them were pedophiles. A picture of the rector himself appeared on the main BBC news as one of the greatest pedophiles never to have been convicted. While staying overnight in another Catholic school, one of the priests tried to abuse me. I could say so much more, but I have said this much just to make it clear that the grass was not that much greener on the other side of the Second Vatican Council, where many contemporary Catholics believe that true Catholic spirituality is to be found. Remember: Spiritual Theology was not abandoned after—but before—that Council.
I was well acquainted with the different factions before the Council Fathers met in Rome, thanks to their cheerleaders in the student body to which I belonged. They all seemed to have one thing in common: they were all virtually ignorant of the Spiritual Theology that was also denied to us. Without contemplation, and therefore the fruits of contemplation, how could the infused virtue of wisdom guide the participants?
The presence of infused wisdom cannot be verified simply because the wisdom of previous councils is repeated or not denied. It is seen to best advantage when the infused virtue of prudence is used to apply the God-given wisdom of the Church to the modern world, rather than the ambiguity that comes from the wisdom of man. Ambiguity was and still is the favored means of disseminating the divisions and the disinformation on which contemporary relativism thrives on its road to mass apostasy and perdition. Has any other previous Council been so devoid of the spirituality that so liberally disseminates the fruits of contemplation?
In 1943, Venerable Lucia of Fatima said that despite all the miracles, the message of Our Lady that called us all to return to the true Faith of Our Fathers had all but been forgotten, at least in practice. Then, after the "Me, Me, Me, World" of "Take, Make, and Fake," was inaugurated in the "Swinging '60s" the message of sacrifice and prayer became a permanent nonstarter.
The greatest Spiritual Theologian of the last century, the Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, was the last great prophet of contemplative prayer. This is the prayer without which we are spiritually dead, if not buried. He not only insisted that contemplation is for all but that without it the Church would not only gradually disintegrate but finally disappear from view, drowned in its own corruption. Since the time of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., true Catholic Spiritual Theologians have been gradually disappearing—so even if Spiritual Theology was reinstated, who would be able to teach it?
Modern Catholics, priests, and sisters, who are called Spiritual Theologians, usually only have a basic degree in theology and then simply take some obscure person, movement, or institution and write a doctoral thesis on them. So please beware of believing that someone with the title of "Spiritual Theologian" is one who is well-versed in the spiritual life in both theory and practice. This misapprehension is enhanced by them being referred to as Doctor. This title only means that they have specialized knowledge in the subject in which they have chosen to attain their Ph.D., not to their knowledge of the spiritual life in general.
The gap created by the demise of true Catholic Spirituality before the Second Vatican Council has been filled by an alien form of socio-psychological spirituality. What had been primarily done by the Holy Spirit before would now be primarily done by the human spirit with the help of the new findings in depth psychology. Many "Modern Spiritual Theologians" are, in fact, purveyors of the "New socio-psychological Spirituality" and know nothing about true Traditional Catholic Spirituality—so beware ! These people can not only lead you in the wrong direction but they can psychologically destroy you.
Without the True Traditional Spiritual Theology that was not reintroduced at the Second Vatican Council, the liturgy that was introduced and which is still seen as the last bastion of spirituality is, in fact, the outward expression of the inner life and contemplative loving that should animate the Church. No such spirituality was reintroduced at the Council, nor has it been recommended, never mind taught, since. Take the inner life and loving out, and the liturgy, even the most perfect liturgy imaginable, soon becomes no more than the sound of gongs booming and symbols clashing, as St. Paul predicted almost two thousand years ago.
The final truth is that we no longer know what truth is, or whom the Truth is, nor do we know how to receive the Truth. So why waste any further time on scandalizing ourselves with the continual shock horrors that are raging in Rome when there are more than enough raging within us. Remember the words of St. Catherine of Siena: "The trouble with the world is me."
By continually committing the "sin against the Holy Spirit" we, like everyone else, except for a small minority of the "Poor of Yahweh," will soon find ourselves on a steady downward slope. If something dramatic does not happen to arrest our descent, we will be led to final and permanent separation from the Ultimate Truth that is God. If you want to know what to do now and without delay, then know that you have a Mother who has been regularly appearing to tell you how to receive the truth using the three simple words continually used by her own beloved Son.
Save the time you give to making endless speculations about apocalyptic horrors to come and repent daily, pray daily, and make daily sacrifices for God. Make sacrifices of the most precious thing that you possess: your time—and most of all, of your time for the daily prayer that will, with her help and intercession, and your perseverance, always lead to the contemplative prayer and to what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the indispensable fruits of contemplation.