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Church: Drugs and Drug Addiction Pastoral Handbook, Liberia Editrice Vatican, Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care, 00120 Citta del Vaticano Tel. (06) 698.85003, 2002 ISBN 88-209-7341-3.

A Terrible Problem of Drug Abuse, called that by Pope John Paul II, in 1997, he entrusted the Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care with the task of following up with this global epidemic. A handbook entitled, Church, Drugs and Drug Addiction, is the result.

With persuasive arguments for teens to avoid drug use, this reader has never seen the likes of the support for pastoral workers, catechists, parents and educators in confronting this “grave offense,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church is quoted in the handbook. “The pastoral worker has to operate in the perspective of evangelical acceptance, never losing heart,” the book reminds leadership. Furthermore, in emphatic encouragement of pastors, the handbook says: “The priest and the pastoral worker have to make a greater effort in order to be present to the world of drug addicts who, with their rejection of reality or with their way of manipulating it, jeopardize a good number of values and constraints.”

Prevention, suppression and rehabilitation are central issues in the handbook. Symptomatic of a “lack of love,” the Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care suggests that the Church “would like to get him or her (the drug addict) to discover the love of Christ.” Her duty is evangelical, holding out hope. The handbook cites a lack of clear, convincing motivation for life as the reason one uses drugs. Drug dependency is sympton not a disease, the helpful book says, at odds with the social sciences that label alcoholism, for example, a disease with one having a genetic predisposition.

Prevention and pastoral care are dealt with in detail, while suppression of drug dependency rests with Governments, the Pontifical Council declares. “The Church wants to intervene in the situation of drug addicts in the name of her evangelical mission; with the aim of letting them listen to the word of the love of God, offering the means to spiritually reach all those who are hit by drugs.” John Paul is quoted extensively in the text, wisely guiding pastoral workers to help the addict discover his or her proper human dignity which the drug has buried, the pontiff perceptively observes.

In its treatment of global education and prevention, the book’s treatment plan is prophylactic (preventing the dangers, assessing the risks, avoiding baleful consequences and helping people take responsibility for the use), therapeutic (aimed at taking care of treating and curing the sick person), and social (getting the addict into a culture of support, a community, church, sponsor and group).

Specific and honorable measures are delineated: Personal growth; promoting self-esteem and self trust; strengthening interior ability to know that suffering is part of the paschal mystery; resisting pressure and influence from others; and avoiding leads and triggers to drug addiction, along with developing skills to cope and avoid and resolve conflict.

Step 11 of the popular 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Western world’s, and uniquely American contribution to a spirituality of arresting addiction, is implied in the book, when urgency for meditation and sacraments is mentioned. “Conscious contact” with God has Step 11 placing the addict in daily and contemplative settings in what the book could have developed in the traditional three conversions: purgative (uncovering), illuminative (discovery of God’s love), an unitive (recovery) ways that are workable spiritual interventions for all believers as the People of God on their pilgrim path. Thomas Keating and Richard Rohr, have done a world of good in application of this divine way of healing and psychotherapy. While counseling’s purpose is to get patients to maintain their lives with appropriate functioning each day, the larger and noblest task, however; is helping the addict (or, anyone for that matter) to satisfy their thirst for God (Psalm 42) and to foster daily practice of the spiritual path in keeping them at the feeding trough, if you will, grounded in God.

Little if anything is mentioned about nicotine abuse and dependency that kills 400,000 Americans each year, let alone worldwide.



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