Foolhardy reader dares contradict Party Soldier

My good friend Valentina takes issue with my disapproval of Tarot sets being sold in bookshops. She writes:

"God has given us free will so that anybody should do whatever they want with their lives. "Seeing" and predicting the future should not be seen as a sin. It's just a way to see "on the other side of today" as one of my teachers said one day."

Now, I do believe from my own experience that some people do have the ability to see into the future. I've seen too many uncanny instances of predictions coming true to doubt that. One girl I knew in Germany was told by a fortune teller that her husband's name would begin with the letter Y; she was baffled as she didn't know any men's names beginning with that letter. Then she moved to Germany to study and met a Turkish student, whose name began with - guess what letter?

I don't think, moreover, that people who have this ability are sinning every time they have a presentiment or make a prediction. They can hardly help it. But seeking out such people and regularly consulting them is another matter, and I think it is this that the Catechism of the Catholic Church is talking about when it says:

"All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practises falsely supposed to "unveil" the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to consult hidden powers. They contradict the honour, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone." (CCC 2116)

This may seem a bit heavy-handed (who hasn't glanced at his horoscope in the paper at least once or twice?) but we can safely say that not all of these astrological practises are equally grave; "recourse to Satan or demons" is presumably a lot more serious than having someone read the tea leaves at the bottom of your cup. Nonetheless, they are sobering words. The Catechism seems to have two main problems with them: that they deflect our devotion away from God, and that they feed a desire for power over the natural order and over others.

What's interesting (and what caused my anger when I saw these neatly packadged Tarot sets in a bookshop) is that recourse to these things comes out of a hunger. A hunger for power, but also a hunger for an object of "honour, respect and loving fear". Why is that hunger there? Why isn't it being fed with better food? Once upon a time, the Christian faith supplied that food. People believed in God and had a strong sense of the supernatural. People still have a strong sense of the supernatural, but that sense is no longer being nurtured by the Church. Most Catholic priests today are embarrassed by the supernatural aspects of the Christian faith, and play them down as much as possible. You know what I'm talking about: the parish priest who refuses to preach about the Incarnation at Christmas or the bodily Resurrection at Easter, and for whom the miracle of the loaves and fishes is really just "a story showing how important it is to share." The liberal Catholic who thinks the faith looks down on women, but who dismisses the Rosary and the veneration of Our Lady as reactionary. It should be noted that Valentina's own branch of Christendom, the Romanian Orthodox church, hasn't gone quite so far down that heretical slippery slope - yet - so she might be unaware of the bitter irony of Irish people turning to Tarot when their churches can offer them nothing but simpering commentaries of the nine o'clock news. But people do yearn for the supernatural and the mysterious, even as priests continue to turn away from these things. This is shown even by the success of attacks on the Christian Faith; the Da Vinci Code reaches far more people than the cold, rationalist pronouncements of Richard Dawkins.

That is what annoyed me in that bookshop yesterday. You want true religion? You won't hear it from many Catholic pulpits, and you'll even have a hard time finding it in the religion section of this bookshop. But the occult? No problem! We have it here, a complete set of Tarot cards, neatly packaged and with an explanatory book and DVD, price €9.99. No confused young person should be without one.

What a depressing state of affairs. But it doesn't have to be that way.