Does the Church believe Witchcraft is real or a delusion?

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Does the Church believe Witchcraft is real or a delusion? Does the Church believe witches were real?
 
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Real, but that doesn’t mean that every claim of witchcraft, historical or present, is true.
 
They burnt people because of witchcraft back ten does that count?
 
Does the Church believe Witchcraft is real or a delusion?

Yes.
 
The occult, in all of its forms, has a certain, but limited power. The Salem witch hunts were Puritan/Protestant. There was scarcely a single Catholic in the US at that time.
 
I suggest Fr. Pacwa’s book, Catholics and the New Age, as a sort of primer on the occult today.
 
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theCardinalbird said:
Does the Church believe Witchcraft is real or a delusion? Does the Church believe witches were real?
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Demons are able to abuse their gifts (which were intended for noble purposes) to meddle in worldly affairs and sometimes this has been known to happen in extraordinary ways through people that give themselves over to them. This is something that occurs in the present tense, not exclusively in the past.

In past centuries, there was a lot of fascination and rumors going around concerning witches, and the prejudice was focused heavily on women. That was more-or-less superstition from the masses.
 
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Exodus 22:18
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Acts 19:19 Many of them also which used curious arts
brought their books together, and burned them before all men:
and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.
 
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Even Wikipedia gets this right:

The Malleus Maleficarum,[2] usually translated as the Hammer of Witches,[3][a] is the best known and the most important treatise on witchcraft.[6][7] It was written by the discredited Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer (under his Latinized name Henricus Institoris) and first published in the German city of Speyer in 1487.[8]

Kramer wrote the Malleus following his expulsion from Innsbruck by the local bishop, due to charges of illegal behavior against Kramer himself, and because of Kramer’s obsession with the sexual habits of one of the accused, Helena Scheuberin, which led the other tribunal members to suspend the trial.[25]

en.wikipedia.org

Malleus Maleficarum - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

While Catholics may have participated in some witch trials, it was never an official act of the Church.
 
There were some in Maryland, but that may as well have been across an ocean from Massachusetts at that time
 
As much as Catholics have been hated and persecuted in America, it is truly difficult to see any sort of what might be termed cooperation in the witch hunts. Here in über-liberal Washington state, we have a brick Proto-Cathedral which was erected to replace a torched wooden structure. And suspicion/distrust of Catholics was far worse in the rest of the nation.
 
pensmama87 said:
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Maxwell03:
They burnt people because of witchcraft back ten does that count?
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It’s very important to clarify “they.” It definitely happened, but who did it and what were the circumstances?
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Correct. They “they” were the secular authorities. Even if some clergy were held a role in the secular authority. Point it was always the civil govt that sentenced to death. Not the Church.
 
Oh, well there is blood on all hands. No one is innocent there.

But, context context context.

We cannot judge the14th or 15th centuries looking through 21st century goggles. An awful lot of it was proto-fundamentalist Protestants. Can’t remember their legal system, but I think it involved mostly a mob and wood kindling.
 
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