In Support of Catholic Superstition

We need to stop referring to Catholic devotions as superstitious.

I’m specifically talking about the weird devotions. If you need to find your keys, pray to St Anthony. If you need to find a parking space, ask your Holy Guardian Angel for help. When you bring new items into your house, sprinkle them with Holy Water. When you buy a car, hang a rosary on the rearview mirror. If you have nightmares, hold your rosary as you go to sleep.

When you have a prayer intention, write it down and place the paper under a saint’s statue. When you greet a priest, kiss his hands. When a sacred image is part of the floor, take pains not to step on it. When you pass a Church or cemetery, cross yourself. When a vested priest passes by, touch the hem of his vestments. When you cross yourself with Holy Water, flick the remaining drops from your fingers to cool the tongues of the Holy Souls in Purgatory.

Superstition is a sin. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us, “superstition is a vice contrary to religion by excess, not that it offers more to the divine worship than true religion, but because it offers divine worship either to whom it ought not, or in a manner it ought not.” This is to say that there are two types of superstition: idolatry, which is the worship of false gods, and improper worship, which worships the True God in a deficient way.

The Catholic devotions above are neither idolatry nor improper worship. If they were idolatry, then there would be evidence of sacrifice offered to the saints or Mary and a rejection of Christ as the source of all. If they were improper worship, then they would run contrary to the ceremonial laws of Christ and his Church. Neither of these is the case. On the contrary, these devotions are balm that brings us back from the excesses of idolatry and improper worship.

To be sure, there are real examples of idolatry aimed towards the saints and Our Lady, and these practices have been expressly condemned by the Catholic Church at large and the local Church in particular. Whether occurring in Cuba under the name Santeria; Mexico as Santa Muerte; Brazil as Candomblé; or Haiti and New Orleans as voodoo, these practices use Catholic images as stand-ins for pagan deities believed to possess power in their own right—not power derived from Christ, but power inherent to themselves. In exchange for favor, the devotee offers sacrifice to these deities, whether that be a chicken, some fruit, or his own soul. Unlike orthodox belief, which holds that all power resides in Christ and is freely granted to his saints, these practices constitute the worship of independently powerful idols. This is the vice of superstition under the first of Aquinas’s qualifiers: offering “worship to whom it ought not,” and it is condemned.

There are also real examples of deficient worship, and the Church has spoken clearly about them. A Catholic must attend Holy Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation; to attend Holy Mass only on Christmas and Easter is a deficiency in worship. A priest must complete the celebration of the Holy Mass once it has begun. For a priest to leave a Mass incomplete for any reason is a deficiency of worship and is furthermore a sacrilege. The Eucharist must be reserved in a manner which fittingly recognizes the True Presence and protects it from abuse. A layman may not steal the Eucharist in order to reserve it in his home, this is a radical deficiency in worship. A Christian is not bound by the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament. In his discussion of superstition, Aquinas asserts that giving worship to God in an improper manner is a form of false religion. For someone living in the era of Christian grace to insist on worshipping God according to the rites of the Old Law would be to worship wrongly.

The Church does not leave these things up to the prudence of the laity; the worship of Christ is regulated by the Church for the good of our souls making clear what is right worship and what is deficient. We do not need to determine these things for ourselves.

When we extend the definition of superstition to include actions which are an affront to our modern sensibilities we bind where the Church has not bound and condemn what the Church has not condemned.

In separating ourselves from these popular devotions we also remove a means of bolstering our Faith. Our forefathers practiced the Faith in this manner, with strange devotions which were ultimately centered on Christ. These devotions carried them through persecutions, through seismic changes, and allowed them to live their Faith in a concrete manner throughout their lives. I would be loath to demean the faith of the Irish peasant or that of a Mexican abuela. We would be fools to discount them as superstitious, and it would do us some good to follow their examples.

The Catholic Faith is perfectly rational, but I am not capable of fitting the entirety of it into my head. The Faith is a mystery, not because it cannot be understood but because we will never understand it fully. Devotions like those I mentioned reveal and support the mystery of Faith. They acknowledge that we will never fully comprehend how the spiritual world operates, but that our limitation doesn’t prevent us from participating in it. These devotions help incarnate the reality of Heaven in our daily lives. They are strange, but mystery always is.