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Mind-Forged Manacles: Cults and Spiritual
Bondage
Thomas Case
Fidelity Press, South Bend, IN, 1993, 289
pages.
Reviewed by
Rev. Walter Debold
This is a book I warmly recommend. The first chapter
captured me and the following chapters never ceased to hold me. I am not in love with the
title or with the cover illustration, I confess, but that is a matter of taste. You and
the publisher and the author may be more easily satisfied. What matters is that it keep
moving out of the bookstores.
Case writes very well, indeed. The first of the two parts
of the book is autobiographical. His recruitment to the
Moonies
and his susceptibility will prove completely understandable to those who have worked with
cult victims. He fell into the Moonies and out and in and out and in and out, until the
reader gets impatient with him. One would like to shake him and scream, "Wake
up!" But then, as if that were not enough he turned to dally with
The Way International,
then he describes a "dharma high" with the
Naropa Buddhists
in Colorado. After all these detours, he convinced himself that he could not avoid a
confrontation with the Catholic Church. That is where he finds himself today in spite of
the fact that he was not welcomed with a red carpet or love-bombing. If I were the
publisher, I would have been tempted to turn out Part One separately, for while it will
not replace Augustine’s Confessions or Merton’s Seven
Storey Mountain, it is a moving acknowledgment of one man’s gullibility
and his sinfulness.
Part Two, another hundred pages, is entitled "Catholic Cults." Non-Catholics
will surely find it very interesting, but for Catholics it should be required reading. It
describes how a half dozen of the worst sort of manipulative groups have sprung up under
the umbrella of Catholicism and how slow the administration of the church has been to
recognize their malice.
Toward the end of the book the author editorializes
self-confidently about the "post-conciliar" church, sentiments with which this
reviewer wanted to take frequent exception. But that is not a concern for the purposes of
this review. Here we must praise his professional competence, his "total
recall," his economy of expression, and, finally, his vision. If you know a member of
the clergy, of any denomination, make him a present of this paperback. But read it
yourself before you give it away.
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