Is it superstitious to rely on novenas and relics? Catholic Answers apologist Jimmy Akin clarifies the distinction between faith and superstition. Learn how to approach devotions like novenas and the use of relics with a proper understanding of God’s sovereignty. Discover the balance between prayerful devotion and avoiding magical thinking.
Transcript:
My spiritual director has been cautioning me against using novenas and relics sort of as magic and assuming that every time I use them or pray them that I’m going to get what I want. We heard the story of the woman with hemorrhages and how she was healed purely because she believed by touching Jesus’ cloak, she would be healed, right? So I guess my question is, how can one have that sort of faith without treating a thing like magic?
We’ve got the term magic involved here. And one of the most difficult problems in anthropology is how to define the term magic. It gets used in a bunch of different ways and different people use it differently. And there have been a bunch of proposed definitions for what counts as magic and what doesn’t. Now, I did a whole episode of Jimmy Akin’s “Mysterious World” – it’s episode 79 – on religion, magic, psychic phenomena, and science, where I went through those four categories and talked about what each one of them would mean. Now, one way of thinking about something as magical would be attributing to it more significance than it actually has, as if it had some kind of intrinsic efficacy. It’ll automatically bring about its effect and so forth. And before I get to that, though, I want to back up and talk about where the term magic comes from. So it’s a Greek term, magikos, and it’s derived from the word magos, which originally referred to a particular tribe of Persians. The Magoi, they were a priestly tribe, kind of like the Jewish tribe of Levi.
So if you were an ancient Persian and you wanted certain rituals done, you would go to a magos, a member of the tribe of the Magoi. And he would do religious rituals for you, like say if you were offering a sacrifice, the magos would chant the hymn of the origin of the gods or stuff like that. And what happened was people then, in the Greek world, came into contact with Magoi who were doing their religious rituals. And eventually, the term magos was applied to anybody that was doing a ritual like the Magoi. Magoi is just the plural of magos. And so if you’re doing a ritual that’s kind of like the Magoi, you got called a magos. And you didn’t have to be Persian. In fact, in the New Testament, we read about figures who were even Jewish, but they were called Magoi because they were doing rituals that in some way reminded people of the rituals that the Magoi would do, the Persian ones.
And basically, what would happen is any kind of foreign right, any kind of foreign ritual, was regarded as being kind of shady. And so the term magic, to my mind, is best defined as a ritual that is not approved in the local community. It’s like a shady foreign thing. We don’t do that here. And so I think that the term magic is best used in a neutral way that simply refers to any unapproved ritual or any disapproved ritual.
But that’s a little bit different than what your spiritual director was suggesting, which is attributed in a kind of intrinsic efficacy to, say, in a novena or something like that. And there are some devotions that you will have people make big claims for. You say this devotion and 1,000 souls get out of purgatory. Or you say this devotion in the right way. And you’re guaranteed to have a good death and stuff like that. And I’ve always been very suspicious of claims like that.
What we have to do is recognize that everything is ultimately subject to God’s choice.
God, unless we have a promise from God, which we do with the sacraments, that if we do this ritual, God will respond in this way. So if the priest, a properly ordained priest, says, this is my body and this is my blood, it will become Jesus’s body and blood. We have God’s promise on that. But if we don’t have a promise, which we don’t, a promise that we’re certain of in the case where God has definitely committed himself, which we don’t have in the case of private devotions, then we have to ultimately leave things up to God’s will. In the case of the woman with the hemorrhage who has faith that God will heal her, she definitely has faith. But I would suppose that– and I can’t read her mind– but I would suppose if you asked her and said, it’s clear you have faith in what God is doing through Jesus so that if you touch him, you’ll be healed of your hemorrhage. But do you recognize that God’s might, that if God chose, he doesn’t have to grant that?
I would suppose that she would say, yeah, I recognize that. It’s subject to God’s will. But even though I recognize that it’s subject to God’s will, whether or not I get what I’m after, I still have faith that God can do this and that he will do it for me. And so I’m going to act on that basis. But still it’s subject to God’s choice, to his will. And as long as a person has that caveat of ultimately it’s up to God, and I don’t have an infallible promise, that this will definitely have its effect, then one is not attributing too much significance to the performance of the devotion. The term that I would tend to use rather than magic, because I think that’s best used for disapproved or unapproved rituals, the term I would use is the term that St. Thomas uses, which is superstition. Superstition is attributed too much to something. And so if you attribute an infallible efficacy to something where we don’t have a promise from God that’s equally certain, I would say that’s superstitious. I wouldn’t say it’s magical, because it may be a totally approved devotion you’re using, but it would be superstitious in that you’re attributing too much to the performance of this devotion. And so rather than bringing the kind of fraught term, magic into it, I would tend to use the term superstition in this kind of situation. So I would say the woman with the hemorrhage of blood was having faith, but I suspect if we were able to ask her, she would not end up being superstitious with regard to this. On the other hand, maybe she was superstitious and God just chose to reward her faith anyway.