II. Disfigurations of the Christian Religion –

The higher a value is, we said above, the more it is exposed to disfiguration. And the more shocking the corruption to which it is subject. Corruptio optimi possima. The corruption of what is best gives rise to what is worse.

Since religion is the most intimate, the most spiritual, the deepest and most fundamental of all human values and activities, it follows naturally that in the life and thought of man it is subject to the most humiliating degradations.

It has known every kind of degradation, even the most monstrous, such as human sacrifice, even the most scandalous and disgusting, such as the immoral practices of some ancient fertility cult.

We are neither interested in these disfigurations here, nor with those which we could find in non-Christian religions. Neither shall we stop to examine the Christian dissidents - Orthodoxy and Protestantism - which, despite the elements of what are often very important values that they have preserved, nonetheless present a regrettable aberration from authentic Christianity.

We shall limit our treatment here to the disfigurations which blight the Catholic religion in the thought and behavior of Catholics themselves.

In this we can do a real service to the sincerity of the unbeliever, helping him to get beyond the disfigurations which hide the real face of Catholicism from his eyes. And at the same time we might put the believer on guard against himself, against off-center and run-of-the-mind and blunted ideas of what religion really means; against an insufficient Christian life, a life that gets tired of itself too quickly.

Superstition -

Both in scientific and popular usage, the term superstition is used to cover a great number of the most different beliefs and practices. At the head of the list are idolatry, sorcery and magic, followed by another large group usually called “vain observances”. This includes charms and good luck pieces, mascots; black cats, not seating thirteen at a table, and similar ideas. Finally, superstition is applied to aberrations from the correct worship which is paid to the true God.

Only the last meaning of superstition is of interest to us here. The other types are too obviously opposed to the very notion of religion to merit our attention except in passing. But the last group of aberrations presents a real deformity in religious activity.

Understood in this sense, superstition consists in religious practices - usually very stereotyped in character - which are thought to produce infallible effects; such as obtaining certain temporal goods (health, success, fortune,) or being reserved from certain evils which threaten our temporal life.

One of the most typical forms of superstition goes by the name of chain-letter prayers. It consists simply in passing along a written prayer, which is generally quite beyond reproach in its wording and content, with instructions that the prayer is to be copied and passed along to a certain amount of people... If the recipient of the prayer-litter complies with the instructions, he can expect the most extraordinary results; but woe to him if he refuses. There is no telling -what evils may befall him.

This is a very characteristic example. It does make use of a religious act. But it is an act which tends to relegate God to the order of blind mechanical forces and assures man that he can automatically disengage the machinery of God’s vengeance by means of a prayer which works just like a machine, automatically. Right here religion ceases to be a personal relation between a spiritual creature, man, and a God who is endowed with intelligence and freedom, a God who knows what is best for us and who governs us according to the secret designs of his love. It evolves gradually into magic, in which the following elements are to be found: fixed and set ceremonial practices, supernatural or preternatural powers which come closer to cosmic forces than to a transcendent and personal divinity, the idea that man can treat these powers with a sort of haughty self-sufficiency and force them to do what he wants them to do by the mere power of some prayer formula he pronounces or some ceremonial he observes.

The origin of superstition is frequently to be found in fear. This is why there is always an increase of superstitions when great calamities overtake the world, such as wars or epidemics or contagious diseases. Prayer turns into a sort of magic spell to stave off the universal danger.

It goes without saying, of course, that it is perfectly legitimate to pray for deliverance from perils and calamities, even only slight ones. The Church teaches us how to do this very thing in many of her official prayers. But we might ask if there is not some tendency towards superstition in those who pray only on occasions like this and neglect all thought of God the rest of the time. Their thinking on the subject runs something like this: they are not really sure that God exists; but still it is possible. Consequently, when confronted by difficulties, it is only logical to go to him for help. They never really know what is happening. If by chance, they should meet with misfortune, they will at least not have to blame themselves for having neglected this first of all precautions. And as long as the future is still hanging over them uncertain, they prefer to get rid of the vague feeling of anxiety that a refusal to pray would give rise to within their soul.

There is no doubt whatsoever about the fact that there is an element of fear in religion. It is a respectful, reverential, filial fear, the fear of ‘him who is not” in the face of “him who is”. This fear is in perfect harmony with our created state.

There is a second kind of fear in religion; that of offending and losing God. This second fear also corresponds perfectly to our human condition. Both fears turn into one perfectly integrated whole in the rapid descent towards forms of fear which are, by their very nature, more or less superstitious. Then God is no longer a God of love. He turns into a haughty, vengeful, and vindictive divinity, not unlike the ancient Gods. No way of looking at God could possibly be more alien to the true spirit of Christianity.

Superstition is also characterized by the fact that it is always interested in achieving some good of the purely temporal order, the healing of some disease, the success of some undertaking, and preservation from some misfortune. Never does a superstitious practice ask God for “the good spirit”, that is, the gift of interior renovation and spiritual perfection as it is described in the Gospel (Luke 11, 13.)

This is not to say that everyone who asks for temporal goods must be regarded as superstitious. Quite the contrary. Even the lowliest requests have their place in the most authentic concepts of religion. In prayer we offer the whole of our personality to God’s paternal good will, the power that creates us and makes us sharers of his life. Our whole person means body and soul, en route towards heaven, living for the time being upon earth. And we have to offer it to God in its totality. But we must observe the proper hierarchy in our desires and place our spiritual necessities before our temporal needs. And, throughout, we must maintain an attitude of humble waiting in complete subjection to the divine will.

It is not at all rare to see men who are only little initiated into the real soul of Catholicism denounce certain ceremonials and practices of the Church which actually have nothing to do with superstition. The principal objects of their misguided zeal are the sacraments, the sacramental, and the veneration of the saints.

The sacraments are visible rites instituted by Christ accompanied by ceremonies which have been developed by the Church. Their purpose is of purely spiritual order, to 	fuse us into Christ, to submit us to his powerful influence so that the very life of God takes root and grows within our souls. Their effectiveness comes from their source, the will of Christ himself, who freely decreed to make these visible signs the ordinary channels of his activity in human souls. It is he, Christ, in his sacred person, at once human and divine, resurrected and glorious, who produces the effects of the sacraments.

That is why they all possess an infallible efficacy from the side of Christ. It is impossible even to imagine any failing in his power. But their grace is never really produced, at least after the recipient has reached the age of reason, unless he has the interior dispositions that are necessary to receive the gifts of God. Here we are caught up in the full tide of the spiritual and supernatural, a thousand leagues from the common misconceptions of superstitions.	.

The sacramental gives evidence of an even more universal penetration of the divine into creation.

In the spirit of the Church which instituted them, they have a very lofty spiritual meaning, even though they are at the same time a request for temporal favors. There is, for example, the blessing for tools. It is intended to surround these tools with the Church’s own power of intercession, that is, the universal prayer of the whole community of the faithful, so that in his use of them the workman might accomplish his temporal mission with success, without danger to his body or his soul and, above all, so that the work he does with their help will contribute to his moral and spiritual elevation. There is certainly nothing superstitious about that. This is nothing but a typical example of the respectful attention the Christian religion shows in even the most commonplace of human realities.

The practice of blessing and using certain objects, such as medals, might seem a little more suspect. It cannot be denied that in the hands of persons who have been poorly instructed those objects run the risk of turning into some sort of a charm or amulet which produces infallible effects in securing temporal goods. In such a case, there can be no doubt that the practice is superstitious. But the spirit of the Church is quite different. In blessing these objects, she intends only to make them symbols of her power of intercession and reminders of every man’s needs to be joined to the prayer and social communion of the Christian Church. If certain graces are attached to them, they are always of a spiritual nature, and, they are never guaranteed as something “mechanical”. They depend entirely upon the prayer of the Church and the fervor that these blessed objects awakens in the persons who use them.

It takes a very superficial and false idea of the veneration of saints, to make a critic reject it as completely superstitious. It is rather surprising, for example, to discover that so distinguished and generally well-informed and well-meaning an intellectual as Lecomte du Noüy can make the categorical statement that “the Catholic religion, born on the shores of the Mediterranean, where imagination is both strong and fertile, had to tolerate the veneration of saints - something essentially superstitious - simply because there was no way of getting around it.” (7)

There is no doubt, of course, that the veneration of saints does lend itself to exaggeration and superstitious disfiguration, and that these tendencies must be checked. But, essentially, the practice is at once very human and very Christian. It is based upon the natural and supernatural so solidarity that exists among men, on the bonds of love that unite them, on faith in their immortality and on their power, stemming from the divine power, to help us in our temporal and spiritual life, and finally on the respect and admiration that it is only proper to cultivate towards those who were the best among us and who are now sharers in the life and glory of God. Far from being essentially superstitious, the veneration of the saints is an evidence of the purest Christian spirit, a spirit which - and the point bears repetition - is based ultimately upon the collective community of all men with God, brotherhood in God.

(7)  Lecomte du Noüy, op. cit. p.134. This whole chapter, devoted to superstition, spoils what would otherwise be a very interesting and thought provoking piece of work. The idea of seeing in superstition an insufficiently developed form of religion or a regressive stage of religion can, of course, be defended. But in illustrating this thesis, he could have come up with a good many examples, even from Christian terrain, instead of presenting as superstitious the dogma of the Immaculate Conception - which the authority whom he follows did not understand at all - or the veneration of the saints in which his authority had eyes only for the abuses he had encountered. 

From: Jean Vieujean, The Living Religion, The Newman Press, Westminster, Md.