YOUCAT Question n. 355 - Part I. “You shall not have strange Gods before me.” What does that mean?
(Youcat
answer) This commandment forbids us: to adore other gods and pagan deities or
to worship an earthly idol or to devote oneself entirely to some earthly good
(money, influence, success, beauty, youth, and so on); to be superstitious,
which means to adhere to esoteric, magic, or occult or New Age practices or to
get involved with fortune telling or spiritualism, instead of believing in
God’s power, providence, and blessings; to provoke God by word or deed; to
commit a sacrilege; to acquire spiritual power through corruption and to
desecrate what is holy through trafficking (simony).
A deepening through CCC
(CCC 2110)
The first commandment forbids honoring 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. 2110
Reflecting and meditating
(CCC Comment)
(CCC 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 (Cf. Mt 23:16-22).
No comments:
Post a Comment