Criticism
There has been criticism of various aspects of the People of Praise. Some of this criticism asserts that the group has tended to focus its energy on the strength of its leaders and the weaknesses of its non-leaders. Dr. Adrian Reimers, currently a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame and a charter member who left the group in 1985, has criticized the group on a number of different levels. Dr. Reimers states that the People of Praise has set up a parallel structure to the Catholic Church by its claim that (among other things) its leaders ("Coordinators") exercised divine authority to which members should submit their spiritual and moral lives. Dr. Reimers also claims that in the People of Praise, "a heightened fear of the devil or evil spirits can be used to (a) put pressure on wavering members to stay in the group, (b) elevate the importance of the group and its leaders, and (c) enhance the leaders' control of the membership by reinforcing the notion that Satan can even work through good people and only the leaders can discern his designs, and (d) undermine members' confidence in their own judgement, especially about spiritual development." Dr. Reimers alleges that these characteristics have caused much psychological distress and has spiritually misled current and former members.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
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“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
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