There is a big difference between studying to understand, and practicing and/or participating in. We want to study why accidents occur, or why premarital sex is wrong to avoid them, and do so without participating in them. suggest you please not confuse the two.** It will lead to other things**… like women’s ordination, openly homosexual bishops…, separation from the true Church that Christ built.
Excellent post,
MDK.
Interesting to see this thread “revived” only a few days ago because I myself came upon it this morning and noticed it’s a few years old.
To first address the OP - it is my opinion that to offer yoga classes to youths in the Catholic Classroom is utterly inappropriate, and certainly opens the doors wide open to Eastern religion. This is not material suitable for a 10 year old. In fact, it is unsuitable for adults. Yoga and Buddhism as co-opted practices for Catholics, or converts who use it as a leaping off point to “mend fences” between their upbringing or experiences as they pertain to getting into understanding Catholicism poses a
direct hazard. One need not look far to see much has been written about this very topic.
There is an increasing popularity of Eastern thought taking a spike in contemporary culture (particularly as my experience in the US) - and especially in the form of the rising popularity of yoga again. (As an aside, the recent release by the USCCB Re: Reiki is spot on:
usccb.org/comm/archives/2009/09-067.shtml where there is a link to the actual document) I think it is very rare that you would find a Christian (and most specifically a Catholic) who is
wholly comfortable practicing yoga. The Catholics I know that practice yoga say they repeatedly put on their “armor” when they go to these classes. It essentially begs the question of what yoga actually IS. It’s
not mere work-out of the body!!!
As
happygal, water, and
MMG pointed out through their examples - I am also quite familiar with this. What started as an “innocent” curiosity over finding a “gentler” exercise regimen actually led to periods of spiritual unrest. (I will not delve into it, other than to say, THANK GOD for bringing me back HOME!)
The majority (if not virtually all) yoga studios are laden with images and miniature representations of buddhas, Hindu gods and goddesses, instruction about chakra systems, the kundalini, etc. And any zendo will be just as so. To simply ignore it is not only naive, but it’s an invitation to many unforeseen dangers.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church for example explains:
#2088
The first commandment requires us to nourish and protect our faith with prudence and vigilance, and to reject everything that is opposed to it.
2110 The first commandment forbids honoring gods other than the one Lord who has revealed himself to his people. It proscribes superstition and irreligion. Superstition in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion; irreligion is the vice contrary by defect to the virtue of religion.
2111 Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.
2112 The first commandment condemns polytheism. It requires man neither to believe in, nor to venerate, other divinities than the one true God. Scripture constantly recalls this rejection of “idols, [of] silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see.” These empty idols make their worshippers empty: “Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them.” God, however, is the “living God” who gives life and intervenes in history.
2113 Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons (for example, satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc. Jesus says, "You cannot serve God and mammon."Many martyrs died for not adoring “the Beast” refusing even to simulate such worship. Idolatry rejects the unique Lordship of God; it is therefore incompatible with communion with God.
#2114 Human life finds its unity in the adoration of the one God. The commandment to worship the Lord alone integrates man and saves him from an endless disintegration. Idolatry is a perversion of man’s innate religious sense. An idolater is someone who “transfers his indestructible notion of God to anything other than God.”
for further reading
Christian reflection on New Age practices
:
The success of New Age offers the Church a challenge. **People feel the Christian religion no longer offers them – or perhaps never gave them – something they really need. The search which often leads people to the New Age is a genuine yearning: for a deeper spirituality, for something which will touch their hearts, and for a way of making sense of a confusing and often alienating world. **There is a positive tone in New Age criticisms of “the materialism of daily life, of philosophy and even of medicine and psychiatry; reductionism, which refuses to take into consideration religious and supernatural experiences; the industrial culture of unrestrained individualism, which teaches egoism and pays no attention to other people, the future and the environment”.(8)
Any problems there are with New Age are to be found in what it proposes as alternative answers to life’s questions. **If the Church is not to be accused of being deaf to people’s longings, her members need to do two things: to root themselves ever more firmly in the fundamentals of their faith, and to understand the often-silent cry in people’s hearts, which leads them elsewhere if they are not satisfied by the Church. **
There is also a call in all of this to come closer to Jesus Christ and to be ready to follow Him, since He is the real way to happiness, the truth about God and the fulness of life for every man and woman who is prepared to respond to his love.
