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| Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference |
Ancestor Religion and the Christian Faith Pastoral Statement |
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Ancestor Religion and the Christian Faith Pastoral Statement of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
11 August 2006.
There are Catholic Christians who search for healing from traditional healers. Some Catholic priests act as sangomas and call on the ancestors for healing.
We Bishops deeply feel with people who suffer from grave and painful sickness. We understand their desperate search for healing.
However we should remember that we need more than healing of the body. We need healing of body and soul, healing which brings us eternal health, eternal life and happiness. We need total healing.
This total healing Christ alone can give. He told us: “You can do nothing without me.” (Jn 15:15)
Christ is our great Healer who wants to heal people - more than the healing for which they yearn. He wants to share with us everlasting life and never ending health.
Before Jesus healed the paralysed man who had been lowered through the roof, he said to him:
“My son, your sins are forgiven.” (Mk. 2:5).
In other words Jesus was announcing the good news: I heal you from within. I heal you totally. I give you what no doctor can give. I give you health and life everlasting. Only then did Jesus give the man the order:
“Get up, pick up your mat and walk.” (Mk 2:9).
On the other hand traditional healers put their total trust in ancestors equating them with Christ or leaving no place for Christ. In doing so, they look at ancestors as being more than creatures of God. Whereas our Christian faith acknowledges that ancestors live only because God holds them in his hands. Without God our ancestors are powerless.
Therefore with regard to priests who practise ubuNgoma, we your bishops, have taken the following decision that:
Priests and religious desist from ubuNgoma practices involving spirits, and channel their ministries of healing through the sacraments and sacramentals of the Church.
(Resolution of the August2006 Plenary Session of the SACBC. Resolution 2.5.2)
We notice with a measure of concern, that many African Christians, during difficult moments in their lives, resort to practices of the traditional religion: the intervention of ancestral spirits, the engagement of spirit-mediums, spirit-possession, consulting diviners about lost items and about the future, magical practices and identifying (smelling out) one’s enemies, etc. Fear of the spirit world has become intensified instead of the love of the ever-merciful God definitively revealed by Christ through his death and resurrection. What is even more disturbing is the fact that some priests and the religious (and lay people from other professions; teachers, doctors, nurses, etc.,) have resorted to becoming diviner-healers.
It is against this unsettling background that we, the Bishops, have decided to issue this pastoral statement in order to present anew the teaching of the Catholic Church and to renounce those aspects of culture that contradict the message of the Gospel, perpetuate fear in human hearts and undermine the centrality of Christ in our Christian faith.
1. Priests should not be sangomas.
Christ, whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world (see Jn 10:36), through his apostles has made their successors, the bishops, sharers in his consecration and mission. They in turn have lawfully handed on to different individuals in the Church in varying degrees a participation in this ministry. Thus the divinely established ecclesiastical ministry is exercised at different levels by those who from antiquity have been called bishops, priests, and deacons.
Priests act in the person of Christ and not in the persons of their ancestral spirits. They receive authority and power from the church and not from undergoing a ritual to become a diviner-healer. The claim to a double source of power and authority confuses Christians and undermines the image of the priest because the one contradicts the other.
By virtue of the sacrament of orders, in the image of Christ the eternal High Priest (see Heb 5:1-10, 7:24, 9:11-28), they are consecrated to preach the Gospel, to shepherd the faithful, and to celebrate divine worship as true priests of the New Testament. Partakers of the function of Christ, the sole Mediator (see 1 Tm 2:5), at their own level of ministry they announce the divine word to all. They exercise their sacred function above all in the Eucharistic worship or celebration of Mass, by which, acting in the person of Christ and proclaiming his mystery, they unite the prayers of the faithful with the sacrifice of their Head and until the Lord’s coming (see 2 Cor 11:26) make present again and apply in the sacrifice of the Mass the single sacrifice of the New Testament, namely, that of Christ offering himself once to the Father as spotless victim (see Heb 9:11-28). For the repentant and the sick among the faithful they exercise the ministry of reconciliation and alleviation and they present the needs and the prayers of the faithful to God the Father (see Heb 5:1-3). Exercising within the limits of their authority the function of Christ as shepherd and Head, they gather together God’s family as a community all of one mind, and lead them in the Spirit, through Christ, to God the Father. In the midst of the flock they adore him in spirit and in truth (see Jn 4:24). Finally, they labour in word and teaching (see Tm 5:17), believing what they have read meditatively in the Law of God, teaching what they have believed, and putting into practice in their own lives what they have taught.
2. It is God who heals.
Indigenous religious belief attributes the power of healing to ancestral spirits. In this context, the sacrament of the sick pales into insignificance in the eyes of the afflicted because faith in Jesus Christ does not play any role; rather it is the belief in the good disposition of the ancestors. This practice and belief therefore contradicts the teaching of the church on healing.
The Lord himself showed great concern for the bodily and spiritual welfare of the sick and commanded his followers to do likewise. This is clear from the Gospels, and above all from the existence of the sacrament of anointing, which he instituted and which is made known in the Letter of James. Since then the Church has never ceased to celebrate this sacrament for its members by the anointing and the prayer of its priests, commending those who are ill to the suffering and glorified Lord, that he may raise them up and save them (see James 5:14-16). Moreover, the Church exhorts them to associate themselves willingly with the passion and death of Christ (see Rom 8:17), and thus contribute to the welfare of the people of God.
Those who are seriously ill need the special help of God’s grace in this time of anxiety, lest they be broken in spirit and, under the pressure of temptation, perhaps weakened in their faith. Above all this faith must be made actual both in the minister of the sacrament and, even more importantly, in the recipient. The sick person will be saved by personal faith and the faith of the Church, which looks back to the death and resurrection of Christ, the source of the sacrament’s power (see Jas 5:15), and looks ahead to the future kingdom that is pledged in the sacraments.
This is why, through the sacrament of anointing, Christ strengthens the faithful who are afflicted by illness, providing them with the strongest means of support.
The celebration of this sacrament consists especially in the laying on of hands by the priests of the Church, offering of the prayer of faith, and the anointing of the sick with oil made holy by God’s blessing. This rite signifies the grace of the sacrament and confers it.
3. Only ONE God.
The belief that ancestors are endowed with supernatural powers borders on idolatry. It is God, and God alone who is all-powerful while the ancestors are created by him. They can only be helpful to us by interceding for us. When we speak of ancestors or of saints, we should therefore use the phrase “pray for us” and not “do this for us”.
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.
4. We venerate ancestors; we do not adore them.
Ancestor veneration suggests that ancestors are some sort of divinities – even if some people may suggest otherwise. In practice, among Christians who also embrace traditional beliefs, there is no doubt that ancestral spirits enjoy more recognition than Jesus Christ. It is therefore misleading if in Church meetings the ancestors are accredited with power greater or equivalent of Jesus. Those who lead Christian prayer should always attribute all power to God alone.
In local cultures superstition abounds. This is also so when people have not purified their faith in Christ to the extent that they are able to pray “thy Kingdom come, thy will be done …” in the full acceptance of the supreme power of God who is without rival.
Christian rituals are only fruitful when they are followed by personal conviction. Traditional cultures do not demand the same interior disposition towards Christ and it is therefore a disservice to the evangelising mission of the Church if a priest or minister enrolled in the service of the Church also practices out of convictions not integrated into the Christian faith.
5. NO to fortune telling.
God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however, can constitute a lack of responsibility.
All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices 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 conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honour, respect and loving fear that we owe to God alone.
6. NO to witchcraft.
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.
7. NO to simony.
Simony is defined as the buying or selling of spiritual things. To Simon the magician, who wanted to buy the spiritual power he saw at work in the apostles, St. Peter responded: “Your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money!” Peter thus held to the words of Jesus: “You received without pay, give without pay.” It is impossible to appropriate to oneself spiritual goods and behave towards them as their owner or master, for they have their source in God. One can receive them only from him, without payment.
8. Ancestors are with God but do not have God’s power.
A person’s deceased parents and grandparents are his or her ancestors. There is no basis for the claim that one’s deceased forebears gain enhanced supernatural power as a result of death. The traditional African conception of personhood suggests that a person’s body is porous and that the self can therefore be permeated by another person-like being. Thus an ancestral spirit can reside in the body of a descendent and through the descendent perform powerful deeds. Hence the claim that is made that the possessed is empowered with the faculty to predict, divine and heal. The claim that descendents can be endowed with such mysterious and uncanny power is problematic but so too the claim that death enhances the power of the dead.
Christianity teaches that filial piety imposes a duty on the descendents to pray and make offerings on behalf of their deceased parents. They too are in need of God’s mercy in order to enter into communion with God.
9. Herbs YES, magic medicines NO.
The use of traditional herbal medicines and the eradication of disease is not at issue. What is unacceptable is the use of magic, charms and recourse to ancestral spirits in rituals of healings.
10. Many live in God’s presence – but NOBODY is like GOD.
Article 11 of the Apostles’ Creed states: “I believe in the resurrection of the body”. The Catechism says “Nourished with his body in the Eucharist, we already belong to the body of Christ. For those believers who die in Christ’s grace, it is a participation in the death of the Lord, so that they can also share in his Resurrection”.
The New Testament affirms “that each will be awarded immediately after death in accordance with his works of faith. The Church urges believers to works of faith. The Church urges believers to works of charity and penance on behalf of the dead.
The African worldview which depicts the deceased as possessing enhanced supernatural power is out of tune with the teaching of the New Testament and of the Church. According to the latter, “when the single course of our earthly life is completed, we shall not return to other earthly lives”. This of course does not destroy the spiritual bond between the living and the dead.
11. We pray for the purification of our ancestors.
All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.
The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned.
This teaching is also based on the practice of prayer for the dead, already mentioned in Sacred Scripture: “Therefore (Judas Maccabeus) made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin. From the beginning the Church has honoured the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God. The Church also commends almsgiving, indulgences and works of penance undertaken on behalf of the dead:
Let us help and commemorate them. If Job’s sons were purified by their father’s sacrifice, why should we doubt that our offerings for the dead bring them some consolation? Let us not hesitate to help those who have died and to offer our prayers for them.
12. We pray for our ancestors.
Those who die in God’s grace and friendship and are perfectly purified live for ever with Christ. They are like God for ever, for they “see him as he is,” face to face.
13. All should long for heaven – no one should fear hell.
This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity – this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed – is called “heaven.” Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfilment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness.
We pray for our ancestors that they too may be called to God’s grace and friendship. |
| Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (2006-08-30) |
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