Last Updated: Friday - 09/24/2010
Week of February 18, 2008
New Age teachings lead away from Christ
Priest cautions against yoga, homeopathy
By DEBORAH GYAPONG
Canadian Catholic News
Ottawa
Father Dan Dubroy expects a negative reaction when speaks about New Age teachings, even when he addresses Catholic audiences.
That’s because New Age teachings and practices have infiltrated many parishes and Catholic retreat centres, he told an Ottawa Theology on Tap Feb. 5.
He did not realize the extent himself until he read a document on the Vatican website entitled Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life: a Christian reflection on the New Age.
New Age teachings are “not about Jesus,” he said. They involve techniques that lead to inner knowledge that “God is inside me.”
“If God is inside me, then I must be God,” he said.
Yoga, mantras
Some of the practices he described as New Age are: Enneagrams; Yoga, mantras, Zen Buddhism, reflexology, homeopathy, astrology, and Jungian psychology.
“It’s hard to find people in the Church who are totally faithful,” he said, blaming what Pope John Paul II called “cafeteria Catholicism,” where people take what they want, building their own faith, with a little of this and that.
Though New Age teachings and practices can produce “wonderful warm feelings, they involve “no accountability” and “no having to die to self.” He called them a “narcissistic endeavour.”
Though many cathedrals in Europe have labyrinths, he attributed that to the powerful presence of Gnosticism that has competed with Christian doctrine. New Age teachings are the new Gnosticism, he said.
If people don’t worship Christ they are “going to find something else to worship,” he said. Instead of going within, we need to “go beyond ourselves and live fully in Him,” he said. “It has to be Jesus. We can only have a personal relationship with someone who is a person. “Jesus is a human being and He is also God. He is also a place where we have access to God.”
New Age kids
“We’re raising a generation of New Age kids,” he said.
He advised against any techniques that give one control, even when it comes to centering. He said mantras, even if they are Christian words, are about controlling the process and differ from prayers that beg the Lord to “come into my centre.”
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