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Story of the day:
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VATICAN-NEWAGE Jun-16-2004 (770 words) xxxi
Vatican looks at ways Catholic faith can counter New Age movement
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- People craving deeper meaning or greater fulfillment in their lives should look to what the Catholic faith has to offer rather than turn to the spiritual promises of the New Age movement, a Vatican official said.
"We live in an age in which people go to the spiritual supermarket. We have to remember that within the Catholic Church there is such a variety of mystical traditions, such a variety of religious charisms," said Richard Rouse, an official of the Pontifical Council for Culture.
"You think of all the religious orders, each one is slightly different, but they're all pointing to the same thing, which is your life in communion with God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit," he told Catholic News Service June 16.
Rouse was part of a Vatican working group that organized an international gathering June 14-16 to offer practical tips and help promote a 2003 Vatican provisional report on the New Age movement, "Jesus: The Bearer of the Water of Life."
Bishops' conferences from around the world sent New Age experts to the three-day consultative sessions to respond to that report. They focused on some of the techniques the New Age movement uses to attract people and ways in which the church has stepped up to the challenge.
A Jesuit priest from the Philippines said people in his country are drawn to the New Age movement because it offers a sense of community, which is sometimes lacking in Manila's overcrowded congregations.
The New Age movement gets people to "come together and compare notes and compare one's experiences," providing a sense of warmth and community, Father Romeo Intengan told CNS.
"Sometimes people are reacting to a situation in the Catholic community where things are very impersonal because they go to Mass on Sunday and there are 2,000 people there. You are hardly able to make a connection to your vital interests, your existential concerns," so a smaller, more intimate New Age group tends to fill that void, he said.
The New Age label has been placed on everything from crystals and hugging trees to yoga and foot reflexology. But there is a difference between taking a yoga class or receiving a therapeutic massage and getting wrapped up in the spiritual or metaphysical promises that activity may promote, said Irish Dominican Father Louis Hughes.
"I've been massaged, re-birthed, I've been in the flotation tanks several times, I've had my feet done with reflexology. ... I see no reason why we shouldn't practice techniques like that with our eyes open," he said.
"I say with our eyes open because unfortunately if we don't we may come for the technique and find ourselves staying for the metaphysics and the New Age beliefs" that are "profoundly antithetical to Christian theology and spirituality," he told CNS.
But Father Hughes warned that the church must provide positive outlets to fulfill people's needs.
"We cannot simply say 'that is bad and this is bad.' People are hungry for holistic experiences, holistic spirituality and holistic therapy. If we cannot provide them a holistic experience within the Christian context then they are going to ignore all our prohibitions and warnings," he said.
Father Intengan said the church must do more in promoting itself as being the place to find direct contact with the spiritual.
"Sometimes people mistakenly think that in the Catholic Church God doesn't speak to you directly, that you have to go through Scripture and the clergy who interprets the Scripture. It's not true," he said.
He pointed to the church's mystical traditions as being ways to have intimate contact with the divine.
"If people see the church responds to their interest in the spiritual and talking to God directly then they will say, 'there is something in the church answering to this; I'll remain a Catholic,'" he said.
Rouse said the Vatican working group will publish a report on the consultative sessions by the end of the summer. The report will contain a "key section on discerning the techniques" the New Age movement uses as well as some "pragmatic ideas" in what the church can do, he said.
"Our Catholic faith in 2,000 years has come up against so many trials, so many heterodox activities, some of which it has adopted, adapted, some of which it has closed the door to and said 'this is not good,'" he said.
"We will set up a list of criteria that people can have and which people can adopt in order to make a judgment about whether a technique is useful, needed or dangerous," he said.
END
Copyright (c) 2004 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method, in whole or in part without the prior written authority of Catholic News Service.
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