CONTEMPORARY PASTORAL COUNSELING

Pastoral theology is the practical side of theology, embracing as it does the conclusions of the other branches of theological science and applying them on a personal basis. To this traditional view has been added now another dimension, the inclusion of the data of certain ""auxiliary sciences"" such as psychology and psychiatry. This book treats of various aspects of pastoral theology within the context of those sciences. The thirteen essays, by various contributors, concentrate on particularly thorny problems frequently encountered by confessors and counselors: masturbation, homosexuality, venereal disease, drug addiction. There is a good deal of attention given to the needs of particular groups: teenagers, nuns, the aged. In general, a certain liberalizing tendency may be observed. Gone are the laundry-list catalogues of mortal and venial sins, gone the practice of seeing all human acts as irredeemably black or white--a laudable effect of the introduction of the human sciences into the divine. This is a practical rather than a speculative book, meant to be applied on a confessor-to-penitent basis. It is clearly written, for the most part, and readily intelligible to the priest or counselor without formal training in the behavioral sciences--i.e., to the audience for which it was intended.