A brief sketch of the early spread of the enneagram

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"Years of Testing"?


Okay, is Richard Rohr telling a whopper or is there some other explanation? Back in 1992 folks hadn't yet started to pretend that the Enneagram had ancient Christians roots, which meant Rohr still had to try to show somehow that the Enneagram was theologically compatible with Christianity, and the following quote shows how he did it:
“A series of American Jesuits, above all Fr. Robert Ochs, ran into the model in Naranjo. After years of testing and theological scrutiny many Jesuits decided to take over the Enneagram as a means of spiritual direction...I first learned it in the early 1970s from a Jesuit spiritual director.”*
The "whopper" seems to lie in the claim that the Jesuits spent "years of testing and theological scrutiny," before adopting the Enneagram. The problem however is seen in the actual chronology:
End of 1970: Claudio Naranjo is in Chile with Oscar Ichazo, where he encounters Ichazo's modified Gurdjieffian Enneagram.
1971-1772: Claudio Naranjo, after returning from Chile and reinventing the Enneagram as the numbered personality test it is today, teaches a select group his new system. Among them is the Jesuit Fr. Robert Ochs, who was on Sabbatical from the Jesuit Seminary in Chicago.
1972: In May, Fr. Robert Ochs is back in Chicago offering a heavily attended eight-day intensive seminar on the Enneagram. Fr. Mitch Pacwa travels to Chicago to attend.
1973 Richard Rohr tells us that he learned it in this year from Jim O’Brien in Cincinnati, Ohio. Mitch Pacwa (mentioned above) says that he was the one who taught the Enneagram to Rohr. But Rohr never mentions Pacwa when telling his story, perhaps because Pacwa afterward repudiated the Enneagram on the grounds of its roots in the New Age movement.
So here's the deal. How do you fit "years of testing and theological scrutiny," into the above timeline. By the time Rohr learned it, the Enneagram of personality had only existed for two years. So to return to our initial question: Was Rohr telling a whopper or is there some other explanation?


*Richard Rohr & Andreas Ebert, Discovering the Enneagram: An Ancient Tool for a New Spiritual Journey (trans. Peter Heinegg; New York: Crossroad, 1992), 9

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