COMMENTARY: The Church distinguishes harmless entertainment from occult practices and warns against divination, sorcery and attempts to contact the dead.
Magic, sorcery, conjuring and divination involve various strange and ancient practices and terms that can be quite confusing. All of these things fall under the heading of the much larger — and often misunderstood — concepts of superstition and the supernatural.
The Supernatural
In our modern-day secular world and within popular culture, the term “supernatural” often has a non-religious connotation that, to some people, is associated primarily with ghosts and hauntings. The truth, however, is much more profound. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) clarifies that the supernatural is that which surpasses “the power of created beings.” It teaches that the supernatural world exists as a result of God’s gracious initiative and further instructs that, for Christians, our vocation to eternal life is itself supernatural.
Superstition
To the Church, and as defined in the Catechism, superstition is the attribution of a supernatural kind of magical (i.e., occult-like) power to certain practices or objects.
Based on Deuteronomy 18, pagan superstition includes:
Human sacrifice, referred to generally as “immolation” (with this Biblical footnote making particular reference to the ritual
