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What if you could get a personal message each day from beyond this world? Millions of people seek such messages in astrology charts and readings. But the Church has a better “astrology,” in which God really does have a message for you each day of the year.
Cy Kellett:
A surprising look at astrology, next with Father Hugh. Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic answers podcast for living, understanding, and explaining the Catholic faith. Please remember to subscribe at Apple, or Stitcher, or what’s the other one, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Please, give us that five star review. That really does help to grow the podcast. When you give us that good review.
This week, I want to start out by reading a little bit to you from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, what the church has to say about spooky things. This is from paragraph 2116 in the Catechism. “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 phenomenon of clairvoyance and recourse to mediums, all conceal the 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 honor respect and loving fear that we owe to God alone.”
All of this takes the fun out of fortune cookies for me, but it’s a good reminder of how seriously the Church takes any attempt on our part to usurp the power of our father in heaven, God. Opponents of the Catholic church, however, will often point to all the astrology and astrological symbols that are connected with the history of the Catholic Church to suggest that we don’t reject astrology completely. What gives? We asked Father Hugh Barbour for his insights.
Father, I’m disturbed about something. In a church in France called the Cathedral of Chartres.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Chartres.
Cy Kellett:
Chartres. Is that how you-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Chartres.
Cy Kellett:
Chartres?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Chartres. C-H is sh, sh.
Cy Kellett:
We’re saying the same thing, but [crosstalk 00:00:02:04].
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Chartres.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. There’s a big stain glass window depicting working people doing their work, and the signs of the Zodiac. Is that wrong, astrology? Isn’t that anti-Catholic?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Oh, well, let’s just say that the constellations, which those little symbols represent are made up of stars created by God.
Cy Kellett:
He did do that. Yes.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Of which the scriptures say that when he calls them, they say, “Here I am.” And so, no. What we call astrology was simply the astronomy, antiquity, before the change, when you had the Copernican Revolution in Galileo and all that. We began to believe that, reasonably of course, that the sun is the center of our galaxy, and the sun and the moon don’t-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, the sun doesn’t… orbit the earth, but rather we orbit the sun. And so consequently, the appearance of things in the heavens is not precisely the way they actually relate to us, because it looks to us like the sun is going around us, because the distance so great and our speed is so great. And so, as the sun passes through the heavens, it passes different times of the year, month by month, through different major constellations. Those constellations have names, which are the signs of the Zodiac, the sun signs.
Now, ancient man believed very strongly that these heavenly bodies, on the evidence of the moon, which they could see quite clearly, had an influence over the human body. In particular, the humors of the human body, which is what’s called the human complexion. That is all the different things that go into making up a human body in their proper or improper balance or imbalance. And so, the movement of the planets, or rather the movement of the sun, and those planets, and also the moon through the same cycles, and so on and so forth, I mean they all are co-involved, was seen as having an effect on the different parts of the human body and the passions of the human being, starting with the person’s birth.
It was a completely physical thing, material thing. It was just as scientific in the sense of being limited to the realm of matter, the material causes than as is modern science. It’s just that they were mistaken about the interpretation of the effects of the planets on us, at least to some degree they were. Of course, for Christians, this was not permitted to be used as a way of foretelling the future. It was only to evaluate a person’s… What their temperament would be like, what would they would need for the particular illnesses that they would be most likely to incur. Like Taurus, it’s in the throat, and they have different things assigned. That’s based upon the natural sense that the human body is a microcosm, is a little universe, microcosmos, is reflective of the macrocosmos, the big universe, which is relates to the body. And so that’s-
Cy Kellett:
And so, in a certain sense, this happens… Knowledge, one of the ways knowledge progresses is by differentiation. Once a differentiation is made, it’s very hard for the person who lives in the light of that to remember what it was like to not have that. Like the child who learns the difference between a car and a truck can’t really relate to the child who still the car and the truck are the same thing, so just differentiation. Okay, so now we differentiate astrology from astronomy in a way that wouldn’t have been the case then. It’s hard for us to think like they thought about astronomy, but the spiritual aspects of divination and all that was always forbidden.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Divination.
Cy Kellett:
Divination.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Divinization-
Cy Kellett:
No, not divinization.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Divinization, we want that. We want it to become shares in divine.. But, divination, we try to find out these things, right, for tell the future, this is wrong. Now, you can make prognostications.
Cy Kellett:
Prognostications, yes.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
… based upon visible signs in the present, you can predict what’s going to happen in the future. People use the stars for that. I mean, let’s consider it was universal. I mean, it was used in all the courts of Europe, even the papal court had an astrologer, an astronomer they called him, an astronomer, who set the dates for conclaves and things like that, according to what looked to be more or less propitious. St. Thomas explains why astrology doesn’t seem to work very well for individuals, but it seems to work for a large movements of history. He says that’s because, and for large groups of people, because the masses of people generally follow their passions, whereas an individual-
Cy Kellett:
And individual is like-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
may be much more free from passion, because anything that limits freedom, of course, is to be avoided. Certainly, any practice astrology, which implies that there’s a determined result, or that something’s going to happen for sure, these are all wrong. I think even now, even modern astrologers who practice this would probably say the same thing. All they can do is surmise what they think might be going on a little bit and make some observations about it, if they’re that much on the up and up.
Cy Kellett:
It’s not all wickedness though. It’s not-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
No, no, there’s nothing intrinsically sinful about astrologists’ traditional practiced, because it was never regarded as a form of divination.
Cy Kellett:
In a certain sense, it involves timekeeping too. Okay, so-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
So, yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Is this history of astrology and of attention to the stars in this way, but is this still visible in the liturgical life of the church today?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, you could say it’s what I like to call liturgical astrology. I call it that sometimes in… And calm down, just keep listening. All right. I mention that in [inaudible 00:08:31] sometimes.
Cy Kellett:
Call down all you Scorpios. No, I’m just kidding.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
No. Okay. They wouldn’t be listening anyway. But no, consider our Lord chose to have his own birth announced by this miraculous star that was sought by the Persians, who we know, the Magi from the East, the Caldeans, the Persians, we know that they’re the first ones to draw a map of the heavens with all the constellations and whatnot, and with the North Star and all that. And of course, now the North Star is a different one than it was then, but in any case, because things kind of shift. They were the first ones to do all of that, from the perspective of the Northern Hemisphere. They can tell because they can see by the maps how far south could judge. And so, they know that it had to be around where Iraq and Iran are right now. That’s where they came from, those three wise men.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
This was the professional work of three of the earliest saints, the witnesses to the divinity and power of our Lord Jesus Christ, who came to adore him. The scriptures are not embarrassed by this, and they don’t think that it has anything to do with new age or whatnot. Now, granted a warning. If you look at astrology stuff nowadays, especially online, you’re going to get things linked to all kinds of stuff that’s unacceptable that does try to foretell the future, or even told that you can click now and talk to an online psychic for a price.
Cy Kellett:
Of course.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, that’s all just completely to be avoided because that can be dangerous stuff. It’s at least dangerous for your pocketbook, but it might be dangerous also for your soul.
The actual simple astrology as they practiced then, that God gives signs through the heavens that indicate some disposition of his will and all that. Through all the scriptures, our Lord even says that there’ll be great signs in the heavens, and so on. The apocalypse is full of signs. Our Lady is the woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, and on her head a crown of 12 stars. That’s to show that divine things completely transcend and have utter superiority to material forces. They’re so great that they’re even over the sun, the moon, and so on. The church doesn’t use astrology the way astrologers do, although she evaluates morally. St. Alphonsus says, if you have your natal chart drawn from your birth time and all that, that’s not gravely wrong. That’s just you believe it, or you don’t. It’s either bad science or it’s good science, but it’s not so much a question of morality. It isn’t.
What I like to call liturgical astrology is something much better that is absolutely secure, and will be always helpful, and cannot mislead you, and will also lead you to heavenly things through the skies.
Cy Kellett:
Tell me about this.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And also earthly things.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
What I mean is this, that every single day, in the church’s liturgy, we are offered not just a little paragraph giving us our horoscope for the day, but rather we’re offered the readings of Holy Mass, the particular saint’s day it may be. Because of the church’s martyrology, there’s always a saint or 20 for every single day of the year. It’s just very few of them make it to the calendar where they’re fixed there, but there are tons, believe me. There’s always saints for each day, the readings of the Mass, the church season, the prayers of the particular Mass you’re attending, or the Divine Office of Liturgy The Hours, the readings from there. There are all these things which are meant for you with a certitude for you today.
Everybody that sits in the church praying the Divine Office, like my abbey, we’re sitting there doing the Matins and Lauds. God has a providential message from heaven to each of us that’s speaking to the scriptures and the sacramental signs and the communion of saints. It’s for each one of us to meditate in our hearts what our lips are singing or saying. St. Augustus says, and to define the meaning in it, says, “Direct our life for this day.”
I think people can find very many helpful things and inspiring things if they’ll just pay attention to the dates and times of things, according to the church calendar. For example, have you ever thought of what saints are venerated on your birthday?
Cy Kellett:
June 25th.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right. June 25th. Well, St. June 25th.
Cy Kellett:
St. June 25th. No, I have never thought of it.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
You’ve never thought of it.
Cy Kellett:
I feel such profound shame admitting that right now.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Do you know the day of your baptism? Another point I want to make, we should all know the day of our baptism, so we can celebrate it as the anniversary of our receiving the life of Grace. It’s very important to [crosstalk 00:13:31].
Cy Kellett:
I think I know it. I’m afraid if I say it, my mother will scold will later when she listens to this.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
That’s all right. But our birthday is also very good, because what do we get on our birthday? Not just that we come out into the light, but we get our guardian angel on our birthday, Aquinas St. Thomas. People should develop the practice of celebrating their guardian angels on their birthday, and teach the children to do that. That’s just one thing. That’s your own special feast, because no one else is getting that guardian angel but you on that particular day, and that particular year, at the moment you were born, because you get your guardian angel when you’re separated from your mother, mother’s body. Before that, you’re under her guardian angel. After that, you’re with your own guardian angel, following the teaching of the great St. Thomas. It’s certainly true that we each have our own guardian angel and our birth is the moment when we get it. That’s in the Catechism. Now-
Cy Kellett:
Are you going to tell me any of my saints?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
I’ve got it right here.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, good. I’m just dying to know.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
The 25th day of June, which in the Roman reckoning is the seventh day before the calends of July. That is seventh day before the first of July.
Cy Kellett:
That’s usually how I celebrate it.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right. Okay.
Cy Kellett:
It’s my birthday, but it’s also the seventh day before calends.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
We have at Turin, Torino in Italia, in Liguria, on the coast of Italy there up north, we have St. Maximus. The first Bishop of that, see who converted the crowds with his paternal speech to the faith of Christ and directed them by heavenly doctrine to the reward of salvation.
Cy Kellett:
I like that.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Now, that’s really good. That’s Saint Maximus, Massimo de Torino.
Cy Kellett:
Massimo.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Massimo.
Cy Kellett:
St. Massimo.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
He has sermons and everything. The number two, this is the second one, the commemoration of St. Prosper of Aquitaine. This is a very important person, Prosper of Aquitaine, who instructed in philosophy and literature, lived a very whole and modest life with his wife, and becoming a monk at Marseilles, wrote against the Pelagian heresy, the doctrine of God regarding grace and the gift of perseverance, strenuous in defending it.
Cy Kellett:
I love my saints so far.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
He’s very important. Prosper of Aquitaine made formulaic and popular St. Augustine’s teaching on grace against the Pelagians, So very important, Prosper of Aquitaine. So then also, then there’s another St. Prosper in Emilia in Italy. That’s because sometimes when they have a ran random saint and they don’t know day to put him on, they put them on-
Cy Kellett:
The other guy’s [crosstalk 00:16:09].
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
… the other that’s the same, because he’s his grandfather. That’s his [inaudible 00:00:16:14]. Then we have, in Savoy, we have St. [inaudible 00:16:23], funny name. A virgin who promoted the veneration of St. John the Baptist, the precursor. Interesting.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, nice.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
In Scotland, we have St. Malak or Lewin Bishop. And in Tarancon, Spain, we have St. Rosea, a version of martyr. In Frisia, we have St. Adalbert, who helped St. Willibrord to convert the Frisians. That’s up in the northern part of Holland. And then in Minor Britannia, which would be Brittany in France, St. Solomon martyr who set up [inaudible 00:17:09] as a king there and amplified the monasteries and whatnot, but was killed by his adversaries and venerated as a martyr like St. Thomas Moore.
And then, St. William in the Campagna of Spain, who was a pilgrim first for the love of Christ, and then entered the monastery of Montevergine, which is very important to this day. And then, there is Blessed John the Carthusian who wrote the rule for the Carthusian nuns. And then, there’s Blessed Dorothy, was a widow who lived in a cell by the church, lived a recluse life. She was like an anchoring, a medieval anchoring, and gave herself to prayer and penance. And then, you have some martyrs later on from Vietnam in Nam Dinh, in Tonkin.
Cy Kellett:
I love my birthday saints.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
All right, Dominic Bishop, and Francis martyrs, all right, who were killed by the Emperor Ming Huang who [crosstalk 00:18:10].
Cy Kellett:
Dominic and Francis are good names too.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
You’ve got Maximus, Prosper.
Cy Kellett:
Prosper one and Prosper two.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Prosper two. [inaudible 00:18:17], that’s a nice sounding name. Malak Lewin, Rosea, Adalbert, Solomon, William, John the Monk, and Dorothy, the widow, and Hermetus. And then you’ve got the Bishop Dominick and the priest Francis in Vietnam. So there you are. That’s just your one birthday. That’s a lot. We can all look us up. It’s online, just type in Roman, R-O-M-A-N, martyrology, M-A-R-T-Y-R-O-L-
Cy Kellett:
O-G-Y.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
… O-G-Y, and you’ll find there… There’s one online, and you can click the month, and you can see where they are and their date. I’m using the most up to date one. But the one that on there has still has plenty for every day.
Cy Kellett:
You’re saying in God’s great providence, in his ability to see and govern all things, that there’s a general sense in which this applies to everyone in the church, but there’s a specific sense in which it applies to each one of us that avails ourselves of reading it, that he means for you personally-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Because God’s providence is, regarding human beings, regarding persons, human beings, and angels is always individual. And so, his providence governs natural things according to their kind. He governs dogs with dog nature in mind, but not in view of each individual dog. That’s why you can kill dogs.
Cy Kellett:
But with humans-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
You’re not supposed to, but because-
Cy Kellett:
… he’s got-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
But humans, there’s an individual providence for each one of them, that we don’t exist just simply for the whole human race. We exist for ourselves as individuals as well. God has an individual end for us, whereas mere animal species, they exist for a very great, good, which is the propagation of their kind. But their individual existence is second to it. In our view, our individual existence goes before our existence for the common, even though what’s commonly good for the human race is most of the time what we’re supposed to do. That individual providence has everything. Imagine heaven on your birthday, all those saints celebrated on that day. Congratulate your guardian angel, because he got his job also on that day.
Cy Kellett:
Right. He finally got a job.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And they know about, they know about it. How could they not know-
Cy Kellett:
Of course they know, sure. I never accept all this [crosstalk 00:20:35]-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
… that little Cyril got a guardian angel on the same day as their day in the martyrology. So they have a joint celebration.
Cy Kellett:
Maybe they prayed for me.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Most certainly they did.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, well, thank you, Prosper One and Prosper Two.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
They’re not negligent.
Cy Kellett:
No, they’re not negligent.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Prosper is particularly concerned about predestination and perseverance, so he was praying really hard for you.
Cy Kellett:
I’m so glad. How do I avail myself of this though? Say I’m a person… Like you say, there’s an individual personal message in what you will find. You say, go to the daily Roman Missal and do the readings for the day every day.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, it’s up to you to have a discipline of prayer. You take at least 30 minutes a day to do some kind of spiritual reading. What I recommend is that you first start with a readings, the Mass readings of the day and/or the Feast of the Day, which saint is being commemorated and what readings would go with that. Start with that. You could also check the readings for the Office of Readings and Liturgy of the Hours, if you know how to do that. You could certainly find out, because there’s a whole cycle of readings for the Morning Office and the Office of Readings. I usually a reading from the Old Testament or the epistles, and then a patristic reading from the Fathers of the Church. That’s a very great way. That would be one good way to do it every day.
And then, just pay attention to those readings as they apply to your life today, the particular challenges that you have. That’s a certain indication. Not only that, these readings direct you to a destiny, which is also certain and fulfilling the will of God. That is your eternal happiness, which is what… When people look at their astrology column, what are they looking for? They’re looking for happiness, or some guarantee, or protection, or whatever, insight. We have it all right there in the church’s liturgy. So, the list of saints for each day in the martyrology and the daily readings are very good place to start. But then, other things might start to happen as well. You never know.
Cy Kellett:
Thank you father. I really appreciate you sharing my saints with me.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
It’s a good way to start. We’ll do things that are interesting to us and to our advantage. You tell people pray for 30 minutes every day. But if you said, “Well, why don’t you look in the readings and martyrology and pray to the saints who were venerated that day, and then look at the readings and ask for the insight you need in order to perform your duties, and love those around, you and stay on the right path as best you can?”
Cy Kellett:
You might find out God loves you.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Yes. That’s the most important thing. He certainly does.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. All right. Thank you, Father.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
God bless you. Peace.
Cy Kellett:
Peace. It’s easy to give into temptations, to astrology, and other things that give us maybe a little hint or insight into things from the next world or things from this world in the future, that kind of thing. But we have to really resist those temptations, because God is our father and he loves us. we don’t want to give any hint that his love is not enough for us or that we want to take care of things on our own and not rely on him as our father.
However, we do covet a message each day. What if I could get a personal message each day that’s like the horoscope? So as Father Hugh says, you can consult what the church offers each day in its liturgy and in its martyrology. Because, God really does have a message for you each day.
Thanks so much for listening. I hope you find that message not to be a message of criticism for those who are seeking to find messages in places like astrology and whatnot, but a message of hope and love that God does have a message for you each day. If you want to respond to this podcast, you can reach us focus@catholic.com is our website, focus@catholic.com. Also suggest something for the future. We love to hear from you, to hear about an episode you’d like to hear.
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