Believing in fengshui

What is the Church’s stand on Catholics who are superstitous, obsessive believers and practitioners of Chinese geomancy (fengshui) to the extent that they use its symbols and icons in their households, sometimes indulging in its rituals in an extreme manner.

May 15, 2015

Dear Editor,
What is the Church’s stand on Catholics who are superstitous, obsessive believers and practitioners of Chinese geomancy (fengshui) to the extent that they use its symbols and icons in their households, sometimes indulging in its rituals in an extreme manner.

Judian
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EDITOR'S NOTE:
The Catechism of the Catholic Church: 2110 The first commandment forbids honouring gods other than the one Lord who has revealed himself to his people. It proscribes superstition and irreligion. Superstition, in some sense, represents a perverse excess of religion; irreligion is the vice contrary by defect to the virtue of religion.

2111 Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance, in some way magical, to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition. 2117 All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one’s service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health – are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church, for her part, warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers, or the exploitation of another’s credulity.

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