An Age of Unreason
Catholics and the New Age
by Mitch Pacwa, S.J.
Servant Publications, Ann Arbor, 1992
paperback, 234 pages, $8.99
reviewed by Donna Steichen
The times are passing strange, all right. Science outshines nature with ever more dazzling technology, uninhibited by traditional morality, while tenured theologians excuse its most abhorrent ventures by denying that any act can be intrinsically immoral. Updated religious bureaucrats writhe in embarrassment when simple believers protest in vitro conception or the grisly harvest of transplant tissue from aborted babies. Renowned scholars presume to weed Christ’s own words out of Holy Scripture, citing scientific advances in literacy and historical criticism as justification. Surely this must be the scientific age?
Then how explain those presumably sane Americans—not the aging hippies and vegetarians, but the nuclear physicists, doctors of sacred theology, nuns with master’s degrees in religious education—who are flocking to psychic fairs, studying horoscopes and enneagrams, celebrating solstices, talking to crystals, describing past incarnations, seeking out “ancient wisdom” channeled by mediums? Has superstition triumphed after all?
These inconsistent persons are caught up in the New Age movement, where internal contradictions abound. New Age theory grew out of the radical 1960s youth culture. It is a medley of discrete beliefs filched from primitive superstition, old-fashioned occultism, Hindu mysticism and 19th-century theosophy, mixed with questionable speculations from 20th-century psychology, physics, and theology into a highly seasoned, morally individualistic, spiritual bouillabaisse. Its devotees have revived long discarded notions that confuse the universe with its Creator, successfully introducing into mainstream culture their unifying premise that “All is one,” or “God is everything and everything is God.” That monist pantheism, C. S. Lewis said, “may be the most primitive of all religions. . . . the attitude into which the human mind naturally falls” without the light of divine revelation. Under whatever name presented, it is intrinsically repudiation of the personal, transcendent, immutable triune God.
The New Age movement is not a form of Satanic worship but, like the feminist Wicca to which it is organically related, a form of amoral neo-pagan nature worship. It is properly called Gnostic because, like ancient Gnostic religions, it holds that believers are saved (“enlightened” or “transformed”) by esoteric knowledge. What knowledge? Since everything is God, I too am God, and my insights and impulses, however singular, are my own divine truth. Good and evil are whatever I say they are; what Christianity has called “sin” is simply further opportunity for experiential growth. The extraordinary success of this alien belief system in a culture rooted, however remotely, in Christianity, convinces New Agers that they are steering the “emerging American culture” to a universal New Age religion that will usher in a glorious new Aquarian Age.
Some Christians who hear that millennialist prediction conclude that it is a centrally directed conspiracy bent on world tyranny. People have indeed been misled by New Age evangelists, inexcusably including school children; the movement has inflicted great harm on individuals, families, and institutions. But it has not been done at gun point. Many adults embraced New Age mysticism lightly, just as they had previously embraced other intellectual fads; if an Aquarian future depends on their constancy, Christianity has little to fear. The movement may in fact have passed its peak among ordinary folk already. One publisher has discontinued production of a separate line of New Age books, and New Age bookstores here and there have closed their doors. In the American Catholic Church, however, New Age fever is still climbing.
When the Princeton Religious Resource Center polled American Christians earlier this year to see how their faith had been affected by New Age ideas, nearly a quarter of the Protestants surveyed (23 percent) said they saw no conflict between Christian doctrine and New Age beliefs. That troubling news paled beside the responses from Catholics, almost 60 percent of whom said New Age beliefs and Catholicism are entirely compatible. It would be false comfort to read those results as evidence that Catholics don’t know what New Agers believe. More probably, they don’t know what Catholicism teaches. A 1992 Gallup poll asked adult Catholics about the church’s doctrine of the Eucharist. Even when the Catholic definition of Christ’s Real Presence was read to them, only 30 percent recognized it; among younger adults, only 21 percent.
What have Catholic institutions been teaching instead of church doctrine? An appalling number have been teaching New Age theories and practices, and the phenomenon is growing. Catholicism in North America is torn by a civil war over liturgy, authority, doctrine, and spirituality. Over the past 30 years, vowed Catholic religious have experienced an astonishing decline in numbers, in order and in faith. Never before in the church’s history has such a collapse proceeded from within the church. Contrary to common assumption, it was not always those who ceased to believe who abandoned religious life. Some believers left their vocations sadly, unable to endure life in communities controlled by ecclesiastical revolutionaries. And because many who stayed behind had lost their faith, they became agents of revolution, bent on subversion and expropriation.
Yet human beings must believe in something. As G. K. Chesterton observed, when they cease to believe in God they don’t believe in nothing but in anything. For reasons ranging from curiosity to conformity to perceived political expediency, many chose New Age ideas to believe in. Especially among church middle management, the movement is a fulminating plague. However unlikely this may seem to readers whose images of nuns and priests were formed when films like The Bells of St. Mary’s were not wildly inaccurate, the evidence is overwhelming.
Some Catholic parishes now offer A Course in Miracles, a study program straight from the monist heart of the New Age. On a bulletin board at the fairly orthodox church where I attended Holy Thursday Mass was a notice of a Jungian dreamwork class. At several seminaries, instructors use “guided imagery” to lead students in “energy-raising” witchcraft rituals during liturgy classes. Within a single week last spring, I heard parental complaints of New Age events at three unrelated Catholic schools, in the Northeast, the South, and the Far West. The mildest involved bringing a yoga teacher into a religion class as guest speaker. The most offensive was a student “retreat” virtually devoid of Catholic doctrine or spirituality, where, as “male bonding” activities, boys painted their faces and pounded drums, while in another room, girls made “womanspirit bags” to hang around their necks. Catholic retreat centers from coast to coast offer enneagram courses, “creation spirituality” workshops, conferences on feminist, native American and even “goddess” spirituality. Catholic bookstores across the country are stocked with heterodox works like Joseph Girzone’s Joshua, Rosemary Ruether’s Woman-Church, Paul Knitter’s No Other Name?, Bruce Lawrence’s Nizam Ad-Din Awliya, John Hitchcock’s The Web of the Universe, Michael von Bruck’s The Unity of Reality and Sandra Schneider’s Beyond Patching, as well as Matthew Fox’s many titles. Professors at Catholic universities—and seminaries—ridicule those who cling to the articles of the Apostle’s Creed as “fundamentalist folk Catholics”; Catholic college students are encouraged to sample translated Eastern mysticism in “centering prayer,” or to attend, for example, a panel discussion on Christology led by feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, who denies the Incarnation. The dismal truth is that the Catholics surveyed by the Princeton Religious Resource Center probably picked up their New Age ideas at Catholic institutions.
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