Spiritual Dryness as a Measure of a Specific Spiritual Crisis in Catholic Priests: Associations with Symptoms of Burnout and Distress

Table 3

Mean values and reliability analysis of the spiritual dryness scale.

Item phrasings	Mean ± SD [0–4]	Item difficulty index (=0.33)	Corrected item-scale correlation	α if item deleted (𝛼=.867)	Factor loading
Item 1: I have the feeling that God is distant from me, regardless of my efforts to draw close to him.	1.00 ± 0.94	0.25	.733	.831	.838
Item 2: I have the feeling that God has abandoned me completely.	0.69 ± 0.86	0.17	.681	.842	.793
Item 3: I experience times of “spiritual dryness.”	1.70 ± 0.83	0.43	.680	.842	.792
Item 4: I have the feeling that I am “spiritually empty.”	1.41 ± 0.99	0.35	.685	.841	.791
Item 5: I have the feeling that my prayers go unanswered.	1.39 ± 0.92	0.35	.659	.845	.768
Item 6: I know the feeling of not being able to give any more.	1.64 ± 0.94	0.41	.553	.864	.660
Marker items when these feelings were experienced
Item 7: These feelings inspire me all the more to help others.	1.82 ± 1.07	0.46	—	—	—
Item 8: I have found ways to deal with these feelings.	2.50 ± 1.03	0.63	—	—	—
Item 9: After these phases of “spiritual dryness” or “abandonment by God,” I experience a greater spiritual serenity and depth.	3.05 ± 1.02	0.76	—	—	—

Extraction of the main components (eigenvalue > 1). Varimax rotation with Kaiser’s normalization. One factor explains 60% of variance.