A Catholic Response to the New Age Phenomenon

Prepared by the Irish Theological Commission in 1994

INTRODUCTION

The New Age is a Challenge to the Church

This distressed, restless generation is challenging the Church to communicate the Gospel of salvation in a more complete and effective manner. The very presence and success of the so-called New Age Movement is evidence that not all Christians are hearing the Gospel in a life-giving and fruitful way. The New Age challenges the Church to look at the way she serves people. Does she just support those in trouble or does she actually try to transform them? Does she show by her activities that she knows the way for those who have lost it? For she must reasonably expect that if she does not meet the real needs of believers people will go outside the Church. This is demonstrated by the fact that many are turning to new ways to get help and are finding that 'The New World Servers' are only too willing to respond.

The popularity of the New Age represents a great cry from the human heart for inwardness, for an authentic spiritual life, and for a greater sense of purpose in life. To meet these needs the Church offers the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It recognises that not everything in the New Age is evil or bad. The concern for a healthy lifestyle and a healthy environment is good. The desire to live a spiritual life instead of empty materialism is good. The search to understand the workings of our minds, the desire to serve others, both individuals, groups and nations, and to transform this planet into a friendly, cooperative society is good. The desire to heal the environment and to heal the planet itself is good. But these powerful purposes are enshrined also in the gospel of Jesus Christ which is committed to recognising the transforming grace of Christ active in the world. The Christian vision sees, however, that the transformation must not only aim at the better but at the truth and must always contend with the reality of sin, which Christ came to overcome. The Church, then, in function of the truth committed to it, must help people discern the inadequacies and the incompleteness of the New Age response and point to the elements in it which are destructive of the truth of the human situation seen in the light of Christian faith and practice.

The Second Vatican Council, arguably the greatest religious event of this century, had as a primary goal the proclamation of Jesus Christ as the good news of salvation for the modern world. The Council wanted all our contemporaries to hear the full message of salvation 'so that by hearing the message of salvation the whole world may believe, by believing, it may hope, and by hoping, it may love' (Dei Verbum 1). The main aim of the Council was to direct the energies of the Church towards a civilisation and culture centred on the love God has for the world he has created. The Council hoped that the world of our time would enter into a way of life inspired by the Spirit of Christ. It invited the Church to go into the world and the world to find its home in the Church.

This explains the positive pastoral tone of the Council and the agenda it set for itself at the end of the second millennium. The fathers of the Council had a childlike certainty that the substance of Christian revelation generates faith, provides the stimulus for hope and ignites the love of God in human hearts and among human hearts. The 'civilisation of love' for which all recent popes have called would require the imaginative and appropriate communication of the riches of the revealed Word which is summed up in Christ, its 'mediator and fullness' (Dei Verbum 2). He is the eternal 'life which was with the Father and has been made visible to us' (I Jn 1:2) so that 'you may have fellowship with us; And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ' (v.3).

In practice, however, the truth is that ignorance, misunderstanding and even, at times, plain misrepresentation, threaten to drive the gladness from the glad tidings. Conscious of the never-ending threat, the Council set in motion, some thirty years ago, a process of aggiornamerzto, a great surge of the Holy Spirit, to scatter the divinely fresh seed of the Gospel on the soil of contemporary culture. The Holy Spirit, the very 'soul of the Church', invited the Church to renew itself and bring the Gospel to bear on the aspirations of the people of the world.

The document you are about to read desires to bring this vision to bear on the so-called New Age movement. It follows the methods of St Irenaeus of Lyons (circa 130-200 AD), one of the first Christians who faced the problem posed to the Church by the subtle system called 'gnosticism'. The approach of Irenaeus was to exhibit 'the unfathomable riches of Christ' (Ep 3:8), and then refute the encircling errors.

Accordingly, we shall begin with chapters on the Christian understanding of prayer and forgiveness. In doing so we would hope to let the radiant fullness of Catholic faith speak for itself. Subsequently we will provide a statement of the central tenets of the New Age and an outline of the questions most frequently asked about the New Age.