AVOID THINKING/UNDERSTANDING: Denial of impact throughout the GLOBAL SOUTH Anglican Communion and Roman Catholic Church

¨Denial of impact involves a person's avoiding thinking about or understanding the harms his or her behavior has caused to self or others. Doing this enables that person to avoid feeling a sense of guilt and it can prevent him or her from developing remorse or empathy for others. Denial of impact reduces or eliminates a sense of pain or harm from poor decisions.¨


¨Denial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.¨

The subject may use:

Archbishop Akinola/Nigeria

SIMPLE DENIAL - deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether

Archbishop Orombi/Uganda

MINIMISATION - admit the fact but deny its seriousness (a combination of denial and rationalisation)

Archbishop Williams/Canterbury

PROJECTION - admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility.

Archbishop Gomez, Jamaica/West Indies, ¨Anglican Covenant¨ chairperson

¨The concept of denial is particularly important to the study of addiction. The theory of denial was first researched seriously by Anna Freud. She classified denial as a mechanism of the immature mind, because it conflicts with the ability to learn from and cope with reality. Where denial occurs in mature minds, it is most often associated with death, dying and rape. More recent research has significantly expanded the scope and utility of the concept. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross used denial as the first of five stages in the psychology of a dying patient, and the idea has been extended to include the reactions of survivors to news of a death. Thus, when parents are informed of the death of a child, their first reaction is often of the form, "No! You must have the wrong house, you can't mean our child!"

Cardinal Sodano, former Vatican Secretary of State

¨Unlike some other defense mechanisms postulated by psychoanalytic theory (for instance, repression), the general existence of denial is fairly easy to verify, even for non-specialists. On the other hand, denial is one of the most controversial defense mechanisms, since it can be easily used to create unfalsifiable theories: anything the subject says or does that appears to disprove the interpreter's theory is explained, not as evidence that the interpreter's theory is wrong, but as the subject's being "in denial". However, researchers note that in some cases of corroborated child sexual abuse, the victims sometimes make a series of partial confessions and recantations as they struggle with their own denial and the denial of abusers or family members.¨

Cardinal Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State

¨In this form of denial, someone avoids a fact by lying. This lying can take the form of an outright falsehood (commission), leaving out certain details to tailor a story (omission), or by falsely agreeing to something (assent, also referred to as "yessing" behavior). Someone who is in denial of fact is typically using lies to avoid facts they think may be painful to themselves or others.¨ HERE

BLAMING - a direct statement shifting culpability and may overlap with denial of fact.

MINIMIZING - an attempt to make the effects or results of an action appear to be less harmful than they may actually be.

JUSTIFYING - when someone takes a choice and attempts to make that choice look okay due to their perception of what is "right" in a situation.

¨Someone using denial of responsibility is usually attempting to avoid potential harm or pain by shifting attention away from themselves¨

Pope Benedict XVI

UPDATE TUESDAY AFTERNOON TERRAMOTO: HARK! THE BLAME GAME IS RESHAPING, MINIMIZING,JUSTIFYING and most of all NARROWING!

THE CHURCH ¨SINNER¨ is SHIFTING BEFORE OUR VERY EYES and WHERE THE BLAME STOPS and REALITY/TRUTH and INSTITUTIONAL and PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY EMERGES, well, THE POPE OUGHT KNOW VERY SOON!

It's "sin" inside the Church, says Benedict, aboard a plane from Portugal. "Today we see in a truly terrifying way that the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside enemies, but is born of sin within the Church."


¨Somebody call Tom Hanks, maybe he can find out where in the Vatican it's hiding. Maybe The Sin is hanging out with the bed bugs; those things are impossible to kill.¨ HERE

· Thanks to Scott Gunn, Akinola hiding photo
· Thanks to Wikipedia
· Thanks to Flickr Photo Sharing
· Thanks to Queerty, sidebar