Today’s Irish Times contains an article on comments made by Seán Brady (sub req.), Catholic primate Archbishop of Ireland, who has criticised people for turning to horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, and tarot cards to manage, predict and improve their future.
He says that Irish people have not so much abandoned their faith as they have become distracted from it and that these “new superstitions” were not an adequate replacement for faith in God, which is the only thing to bring about the happiness and stability that people seek.
Without getting into the tedious argument of whether God exists or not comments likes these from a man of God are still hard to swallow whole – even if one assumes that God does exist.
The most die-hard of Christian bases their religion around their “faith”, that is their willingness to believe something that cannot be proven, and so it is difficult to see how someone with such faith can criticise others who feel likewise about something equally unproven.
Of course putting things like horoscopes in the same category as religion instantly explains why he would make such criticism – these “new superstitions” are attracting the interest of others and supplying them with the sense of security, happiness and contentment that the Catholic church previously had a monopoly on. As they are as objective and unaccountable as religious faith, growth in their popularity is just as, if not more dangerous than, the proliferation of another religion.
But would the Archbishop speak in similar terms about other religions? Of course not, he’d be far more careful in his criticism of those who don’t subscribe to his world view for fear of seeming disrespectful or causing an incident. Things like tarot cards are an easy target because they are not centralised and do not assume themselves to be an oracle of God’s teachings, even though they do require the same amount of open-mindedness to be bought into.
One thing does stand out and that’s his use of the term “new superstitions”, which has been quoted already in this article. It has to be asked, is this Brady’s covert or Freudian way of acknowledging what Ireland’s “old” superstition was until recently?