Clarifying Caritas: A Refinement of the Argument for a Caritas Clause in the Ethics Code of the Catholic Psychotherapy Association

This article is the third in a series. The first article, Zepeda and Loredo's “A Call for Indiscriminate Caritas: Proposed Nondiscrimination Clause in the Ethics Code of the Catholic Psychotherapy Association,” is critiqued in the second article, Sodergren's “In Defense of the CPA Ethics Code: A Response to Zepeda and Loredo.” This third article is a response-to-the-response. This sed contra format of writing helped clarify the arguments that the authors made in the original article. The current article examines how Catholic clinicians can be consistent in their approach to discernment of working with people whose values they do not share. It also critiques two failed methods to resolve this value-difference conundrum (minimizing therapist values and matching client-clinician values). The third proposed path opens a consistently Catholic approach-dialogue, union through universal necessity of grace, and caritas.