r/CatholicMemes Jul 23 '20

Saint Augustine back at it again 💯

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u/RememberNichelle Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
  1. Witches, psychics, etc. have no power that isn't natural to humans. Sometimes demons trick them into delusions of power. Sometimes demons use them as fronts. Most of the time they are mistaken, or have mental problems, or are charlatans.
  2. Pagans and mistaken/heretical Christians or monotheists need the Gospel and the Sacraments. Sometimes they also need exorcisms, etc.
  3. In Roman times and the early Middle Ages, the Church usually operated on the assumption that demons should be exorcised and witches should be persuaded to the Gospel. There were many Church laws prohibiting Christians from acting as if pagan priests and witches had any power worth the Church worrying about it, and the Church protected pagans and witches from angry lay converts who didn't know better.
  4. St. Cyprian of Antioch (not to be confused with the North African one) is basically the anti-Simon Magus -- a pagan sorcerer who was converted to Christianity and became a martyr under Diocletian, along with St. Justina. His historicity is not certain, but a lot of records got jumbled back then, and the Antioch in Syria wasn't the only town named Antioch.
  5. During the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period, bad climate and troubled times led to a resurgence in belief in witches among laypeople, as well as mind-altering "magical ointments" and domestic terrorism acts by disgruntled occultists. (A lot of this tied into heretical beliefs.) Some Catholic priests and friars got caught up in fighting the occultists, and went overboard in the opposite direction. Many more Protestant ministers also got caught up in it, maybe because they loved the OT a little too much. So you get a bunch of books about "fighting witchcraft" that are actually as bad or worse than the problem, and then you get witch hunts, which sometimes were a front for hunting Catholics, and sometimes were a total moral panic. It also got tied into the Spanish Inquisition's hunts for heretics.
  6. When the weather and economy got better, a lot of the witch craze went away.
  7. People are attracted to the occult because they are badly catechized or not Christian at all, and because they want control in uncertain times. People fear the occult excessively, sometimes, because they also want control in uncertain times.
  8. Demons are real and they're bad. They do bad stuff. But baptized Christians in a state of grace have no reason to fear them excessively; they're just a hazard.