Vatican summit aims to combat threat of 'alternative' religions

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http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=531952

 

 

Vatican summit aims to combat threat of 'alternative' religions

 

By Peter Popham in Rome

16 June 2004

 

 

Catholics from more than 25 countries are in Rome this week to

hammer out a strategy for combating the threat posed to Christianity

by "New Age" religions and fads.

 

"Astrologers believe that the Age of Pisces - known to them as the

Christian age - is drawing to a close," explained an exhaustive

report on the New Age produced by the Catholic church last year. And

as priests around the world watch their congregations dwindle

through boredom or plain disbelief, the Church believes that the

moment has come to fight back.

 

Monsignor Peter Fleetwood, one of the authors of the report, said

those at the closed-door conference include priests and lay people

from Latin America "worried that they can be pushed out by something

that has come from abroad", and from Asia where "a lot of

traditional religions are reviving".

 

But for Fleetwood the greatest challenge may be in England and North

America, "where the New Age began ... and where it has become such a

part of everyday life that we don't notice it". That makes it harder

to attack, he says: "Where one sees a threat, it's easier to battle

it."

 

This is an enemy with dozens of heads: the version of the Jewish

kabbalah espoused by Madonna, the Enneagram personality-reading

cult, ancient Egyptian occult practices, Sufism, the lore of the

Druids, Celtic Christianity, medieval alchemy, Renaissance

hermeticism, Yoga, Zen Buddhism, and many more.

 

The report acknowledges the strength of the Enemy Within: "In

Western culture in particular, the appeal of 'alternative'

approaches to spirituality is very strong .... New forms of

psychological affirmation of the individual have become very popular

among Catholics."

 

Under the liberal dispensation of Pope John XXIII and the Second

Vatican Council, Catholic missionaries explored the religious

traditions of lands where in the past their task would have been

restricted to converting the heathen.

 

In Japan, one Jesuit missionary became a Zen Buddhist roshi

("master"). He in fact became a reverse missionary, implanting Zen

Buddhist ideas and practice in Catholic groups in Germany and

elsewhere, where they continue to thrive.

 

But Pope John Paul II's church is far less tolerant about practices

that the Pope's "enforcer of the faith", Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,

dismissed as "spiritual auto-eroticism".

 

New Age is getting a grip on Christians because many are failing to

find authentic spirituality in the Church. They are failing to find,

as the report put it, "the importance of man's spiritual dimension

and its integration with the whole of life, the search for life's

meaning, the link between human beings and the rest of creation, the

desire for personal and social transformation, and the rejection of

a rationalistic and materialistic view of humanity."

 

While one of the two "pontifical councils" involved in taking up the

challenge is that for "inter-religious dialogue", suggesting that

the New Agers be dealt with on a similar footing to Muslims, Jews,

and indeed Anglicans, the Pope himself appears to see the issue as a

simple matter of right and wrong.

 

"We cannot delude ourselves," he says, that "this return of ancient

Gnostic ideaswill lead toward a renewal of religion." It is, he

said, "a way of distorting His Word ... in distinct, if not

declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian".

 

The time for a decisive battle is clearly fast approaching. And the

message to faithful in the report is plain: quit "shopping around in

the world's fair of religious proposals."

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