New Age practices can’t satisfy restless hearts

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Ez 2:2-5
Second Reading: 2 Cor 12:7-10
Gospel Reading: Mk 6:1-6

A prophet is never honoured in his hometown, or among his own kin, Jesus said.

We see that today when people who reject the “rationalistic and materialistic view of humanity” turn not to the Catholic Church, but to “ancient gnostic ideas under the guise of the New Age,” Pope St. John Paul II warned in his Crossing the Threshold of Hope.

It is not that “the Christian ideal” has been “tried and found wanting,” wrote G.K. Chesterton, but that “it has been found difficult, and left untried.”

God made us for himself, St. Augustine said; not that we add to his glory, but that our hearts remain restless until they rest in him. Accordingly, he built the desire for him into our very nature.

For a while, Satan tried to calm this restlessness with material goods and the power of technology. But, for many people, he failed. That is why, today, we see a resurgence of spiritual restlessness and hunger, said Pope John Paul II.

And Satan is ready with new untruths, as we might expect. They even use Catholic language, but their meaning is profoundly false.

Satan tempts us by appealing to our desire for novelty, says the 2003 Vatican document on New Age thinking. With its “masters,” “extraterrestrials,” “psychic powers,” “occult mysteries,” “conspiracies,” “hidden teachings,” and “energies,” it claims to reveal “the secrets of the universe.”

For example, New Age ideals urge us to reject conventional medical techniques such as vaccination in favour of the Indian chakra system; to abandon the study of the Catholic faith (“in plain English,” as I try to teach it!) for what Pope Francis calls a “vague sense of mystery” fostered by the use of a language we do not understand and symbolism in which we have become “illiterate.”

Consider Reiki (a form of “therapeutic touch”) which, people claim, effectively kills pain. The United States bishops have warned it “does not find support” in “the findings of natural science,” but instead claims to be a “spiritual kind of healing.”

The question, then, is this: what spirit is at work in Reiki—the Holy Spirit or Satan?

“The demons cannot work miracles” in the strict sense of “something done outside the order of the entire created nature,” taught St. Thomas Aquinas. However, they can “work miracles” in the sense of “things that rouse man’s astonishment by reason of their being beyond his power and outside his sphere of knowledge.”

“False messiahs and false prophets will appear, performing signs and wonders so great as to mislead even the chosen, if that were possible,” Jesus warned. “Remember, I have told you all about it beforehand.”

However, Jesus also promised to protect us. At Pentecost, he sent his Holy Spirit, to be with his apostles and their successors always, to remind them of all that he had told them, and to lead them to all truth.

Thus he gave us a sure test for the truth of any “new” doctrine: does it conform to the teaching of the Catholic Church? “Put the spirits to a test to see if they belong to God,” said St. John, “because many false prophets have appeared in the world.”

Since the death of the last apostle, John, “manifestations of prophetic gifts must be judged with reference to scripture, tradition, and the [Church’s] magisterium,” says Our Sunday Visitor Catholic Encyclopedia.

All the Holy Spirit’s gifts “are to be accepted with thanksgiving,” said Pope John Paul II. However, “judgement about their genuineness and their ordered use belongs to those who preside over the Church.” Indeed, “the ability to make such judgements is itself a gift of the Holy Spirit, given in various degrees to bishops, priests, and deacons.”

Stay with the Pope and the bishops in communion with him. As the captain told a passenger, we do not have to know where all the rocks are; we just have to know where the deep water is.