Papal Notes - Enneagram & Francis

For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners: but as for thee, the LORD thy God hath not suffered thee so to do.

Deuteronomy 18:14

 

"Austen Ivereigh, a journalist for the Catholic news website Crux, has written a post celebrating Pope Francis’s 80th birthday in which he claims that the Holy Father is “not against” the Enneagram, though he does have reservations about its misuse:

“Pope Francis, incidentally, knows the Enneagram well and is not against it. But he is wary of the way it can be misused and lead to excessive introspection if not deployed within a solid spiritual framework.”

In his post Ivereigh also wrote approvingly of the Enneagram, tracing its origin back to the Desert Fathers, the founders of early Christian monasticism:

“On the Enneagram, that personality-type identifier first created by the desert fathers which received its modern form from the Jesuits, Francis is an Eight – as Father Richard Rohr OFM, the leading Catholic authority on the Enneagram, has confirmed to me in an email.
The Enneagram has long been used in retreat houses to help people identify their core compulsion, usually a driving need or desire inherited from childhood which in adulthood needs to be ‘redeemed’ if it is not to hamper our ability to function and relate to others. Eights are paradoxically both leaders and rebels, life’s “challengers.” BFP

What is the Enneagram?
"The Enneagram is a popular New Age tool which has found its way into Catholic practices, including parish classes and in retreat programs.
The Enneagram is a circular diagram on which personality types numbered one through nine are symbolically represented at nine equidistant points on the circumference. The numbers are then connected by arrows in significant patterns which point the way to health (“integration“) or to

neurosis (“disintegration“). Each human personality is said to fall into one of these nine types. This number is said to reveal the hidden motivation for everything a person does. Intelligence is given three centers: thought, emotion, and instinct, which are always imbalanced. The result of this imbalance is that a person’s “true self” is always hidden beneath a “false self“. The Enneagram is supposed to enable a person to gain knowledge of his true self, exposing the true motivations for actions and illusions developed regarding himself and regarding how to deal with the world.
First, the Enneagram is derived from a groups called the Sufis, who are a mystical offshoot of Muslims that follow various pagan spiritualities, as will be described. Two non-Catholic men, George Gurdjieff and Oscar Ichazo, were primarily responsible for bringing this system into Western culture in modern times.
Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J. says the following:

“The Enneagram, from the Greek ennea (nine) and gram (line  drawing), is a system of classifying personality types based on the figure of a circle with nine points on it, [each] connected by lines.  Each point stands for an ego-type that has its own distinctive vice and  virtue. Each can get worse by moving against the arrow.”
“I was taught the Enneagram in 1972 while a student in the Jesuit theologate. We used it

in our spiritual and social life. But we noticed we were typing people incorrectly, and interest faded. “In the ’80s, I saw an Enneagram industry develop, but the  versions being taught were contradictory. So I did research. The  Enneagram is supposed to be ancient Sufi wisdom, thousands of years old. But the Sufis, who are Muslim mystics, aren’t that old of a movement. The diagram itself can’t be older than the 14th or 15th century. It was discovered in the 1890s in Central Asia by a Greek-Armenian occultist named George Gurdjieff. He got it from a secret brotherhood of Sufis called the Naqshbandi, who were using it for numerological fortune-telling. Gurdjieff, a charlatan and a swindler who was into gnosticism, taught it to his disciples as a symbol of the cosmos. Gurdjieff died in 1949 but left followers. Oscar Ichazo, a Chilean who claimed to have had out-of-body experiences since childhood and studied all sorts of psychic practices, learned the Enneagram from such a group.”
“In the 1960s, Ichazo devised a personality system of nine types — each with its animal totem — matched to the Enneagram. Esalen Institute psychologist Claudio Naranjo, another admirer of Gurdjieff, collaborated with him. Naranjo spread the Enneagram through Esalen classes.“

 
 Christian proponents of the Enneagram encourage practitioners to deny their Christian standards to

deal with their problems. Promoting sin to obtain so-called “self-improvement”. BFP
"The Enneagram redefines sin, among other fundamental concepts, by simply associating faults with personality types, which is particularly tempting in a cultural climate of irresponsibility and narcissism. It encourages an unhealthy self-absorption about one’s own “type,” so that the type is at fault rather than the person. This gives rise to a deterministic mindset at odds with Christian freedom."
CatholicWorldReport
....and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
Revelation 13:2