Spirituality Fosters Caring, Study Says : Religion: Researchers find that while self-interest is a factor in why people help others, a strong personal relationship with a ‘benevolent authority’ plays a greater role.

The search for the next Mother Teresa or St. Francis of Assisi will more likely begin on the bare floor of a chapel than in the teeming streets of Calcutta, a new study has found.

In an effort to determine why some people are exceptionally caring, psychologists studying members of religious orders found that the quality separating members who find joy in caring for the poorest of the poor from those who respond out of duty is the depth of their personal relationship with God.

The findings by David McClelland, professor emeritus of psychology at Harvard University, and Carol Franz of Boston University go beyond traditional psychological theories that individuals essentially help others out of self-interest--either to fulfill a personal desire to aid others or to reduce the guilt felt for walking by someone in need.

“For helpful people there is a third force in the transaction, namely what might be most generally called a ‘benevolent authority.’ For these religious (people), the third force is more simply God,” the researchers said.

Their conclusions were included in a larger study on “The Future of Religious Orders in the United States,” funded by the Lilly Endowment.

Franz and McClelland, who is renowned for his work in motivational psychology, studied 54 members of religious orders. One group contained 30 people regarded in their communities as exceptionally caring. The second group included 24 members identified as “typical” by their communities, but who still would generally be considered as helpful and caring.

In general, those in the “caring religious” group were more joyful in their work, more likely to establish personal relationships with the people they helped and more likely to describe activities such as visiting the sick and helping the poor as being very valuable.

Asked to describe a healing experience, four times as many in the caring religious group mentioned God’s role in the experience. Members of the caring group also frequently described contemplative prayer as being very valuable.

Relying on God produced some practical benefits, the researchers found.

For starters, religious care givers do not as easily burn out since they do not consider themselves responsible for doing the healing. They are also less likely to be manipulative as care givers because they believe it is God, not them, that is the source of the healing.

“They don’t see it as coming from themselves. They see themselves as coming from and identified with something larger than themselves,” McClelland said.

Sharing their relationship with God is more important than fixing the immediate need of the individual.

“They don’t stress the suffering and need . . . nearly as much as those who have socialized power motives,” McClelland said.

Take Mother Teresa as an example, McClelland said. The reason she can describe the joy in picking worms off a homeless man who will die a few hours later is “because this is the way she identifies with Jesus and the way He would want it.”

In the act of seeing God in the people they serve, all of the filters of class, race and status that many people bring to relationships tend to disappear, said Father David Nygren, who coordinated the larger study on religious orders with Sister Miriam Ukeritis.

“They pass through a barrier most of us have based on our own human needs . . . or our fears,” Nygren said.

McClelland said the findings likely do not apply only to Christians. The identification with a larger power also can be found in Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism, he said.

Outside religion, the implications of the research may even extend to superb physicians and judges for whom the higher power outside oneself can be simply medicine or the law, McClelland said.