The development of the personality of the human being has a spiritual component to fully correspond to his nature. This goes beyond the mere fact of not being only matter, and makes him look for a religion -in a broad sense- understanding it as that desired reality where he can hope and deposit his desires.
Our survival instinct is linked to the awareness of the passing of time, and of the fact that the future may come; something that does not happen to the rest of animals, the non-rational ones. This is precisely what makes man a seeker of the meaning of his life, which transcends the immediate, the earthly, the ephemeral and passing. That is precisely where religion -as we say, in a broad sense- comes to the fore, fulfilling such yearnings.
Now, the true religion can only be one, for religions contradict each other, and the truth can only be in one place. If one says that Goya was born in Spain and another says that he was born in Sweden, it is evident that they cannot both be right at the same time. One of the two is undoubtedly wrong.
It would be absurd to think that God has revealed several contradictory religions. The only true religion is the one that God has revealed, and we can know it by certain signs, such as the miracles of Jesus Christ.
It turns out that the Catholic religion was founded by Christ-God; all the others were founded by men. Neither Buddha, nor Confucius, nor Mohammed, nor Luther claimed to be God.
Jesus Christ Himself affirmed repeatedly in His life that He was God, and from that condition He founded only one Church, which is holy, catholic and apostolic. All other churches and religions are wrong: some, like Buddhism, because they do not recognize the true God; others, like Protestantism, because they separated from the original and true Church.
But, apart from religions, we have other realities that are not religions, and that nevertheless come to take the place of those.
In order to focus the discourse, we will refer to the phenomenon of the new age -This is not a religion, nor a church, nor a sect, nor a fixed doctrine, but a way of seeing, thinking and acting that many people and organizations have adopted to change the world according to beliefs they have in common. For these people, this is their religion.
How to identify a pseudo-religious reality of the new age?
The objective of the new age is to introduce man to what its ideologues call a new paradigm, that is, a totally different way of seeing oneself and perceiving reality. The most outstanding characteristic of the new ageThe result of all their beliefs is religious, spiritual and moral relativism.
What it promotes is manifested in music, in cinema, in literature, in the field of self-help, in some therapies.
It is about pushing Humanity towards a new spiritual current, and to procure a new era or epoch -new age- for the former.
The Holy See, in 2003, expressly referred to this reality, and stressed the importance of the difficulty of reconciling the underlying perspective of the new age with Christian doctrine and spirituality.
This current emphasizes the importance of the spiritual dimension of man and its integration with the rest of his life, the search for a meaning to existence, the relationship between human beings and the rest of creation, the desire for personal and social change.
However, what is being criticized is that the new age does not offer an authentic answer, but a substitute: it looks for happiness where it is not.
New age and the Catholic Church
In fact, the 2003 document of the Holy See stresses that, as a reaction to modernity, the new age acts above all at the level of feelings, instincts and emotions. Anxiety in the face of an apocalyptic future of economic instability, political uncertainty and climate change plays an important role in the search for an alternative, a decidedly optimistic relationship with the cosmos.
It is not a coincidence - the document continues - that the new age has been enormously successful in an era characterized by an almost universal exaltation of diversity. For many, absolute norms and creeds are nothing more than the inability to tolerate the views and convictions of others. In such a climate, alternative lifestyles and theories have been extraordinarily successful, and therein lies the new age.
With it arises a spirituality that is based more on sensitive experience than on reason, and that puts feeling before truth. In this way, spirituality is reduced to the sphere of the sensitive and irrational: to feeling good, to an exclusive search for one's own individual well-being. Thus, prayer ceases to be an interpersonal dialogue with the transcendent God, and becomes a mere interior monologue, an introspective search for the self.
The characteristic of the new age It is also the spirit of individualism that allows everyone to formulate his own religious, philosophical and ethical truth. It proposes a new consciousness by which man will become aware of his supernatural powers and will know that there is no God outside himself.
Each man, therefore, creates his own truth. There is no good and evil, every experience is a step towards the full consciousness of his divinity. Everything is "god" and "god" is in everything; all religions are the same and, at bottom, say the same thing. It also holds that all men live many lives, reincarnating again and again until they achieve new consciousness and dissolve into the divine force of the cosmos, which is obviously incompatible with the Catholic faith.
How is the God of the Catholic faith different from the God of the new age?
The God of the Catholic faith is a person, the "god" of the new age is an impersonal and anonymous force.
The God of the Catholic faith is Creator of all, but is not identified with anything created. The God of the new age is the creation that gradually becomes aware of itself.
The God of the Catholic faith is infinitely superior to man, but he bends down to him in order to enter into friendship with him: he is his Father.
The God of the Catholic faith will judge each man according to his response to that love. The "god" of the new age is the same man who is beyond good and evil. In the new age the highest love is love of self.
– Supernatural new age holds that Jesus Christ was one more enlightened teacher among many. He maintains that the only difference between Jesus Christ and other men is that he realized his divinity while most men have not yet discovered it. Thus, he denies that God became man to save us from sin.
The new age concept of divinity
– Supernatural new age has no qualms about mixing religious forms from very different traditions, even when there are fundamental contradictions. It should be remembered that Christian prayer is based on the Word of God, is centered on the person of Christ, leads to loving dialogue with Jesus Christ and always leads to charity for one's neighbor. The techniques of deep concentration and the Eastern methods of meditation enclose the subject in himself, push him towards an impersonal or undefined absolute and ignore the Gospel of Christ.
He will also want to redefine death as a pleasant transition without being accountable to a personal God, on the assumption that one decides for oneself what is good and what is bad, which breaks down values and leads to an emotional trap.
– Supernatural new age holds that "things as we now see them"-culture, knowledge, family relationships, life, death, friendships, suffering, sin, goodness, etc.-are mere illusion, the product of unenlightened consciousness.Take the step from the assertion that everything is god to the assertion that there is no god outside yourself.
The revelation of God in Jesus Christ loses its singular and unrepeatable character.Many would be the "messiahs" who have appeared, that is, specially enlightened masters who appear to guide humanity: Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Quetzacoatl, Mohammed, Sun Myung Moon, Osho, Sai Baba and countless others would be prophets of the same stature with the same message.Christianity, thus, turns out to be little more than a passing period in history.
