I’ve always taken it seriously; I know a lot of Wiccans. And I agree that there are a lot of ex-Catholics among them, although there are a lot of ex- and badly taught Christians of many denominations, too. And to make things more confusing, a lot of Wiccans attend at the Unitarians, which the Unitarians are all for. And of course, not everybody who does pagan or witch-themed religion is even Wiccan.
The problem is that, as various commenters have said, the beliefs are so various. Some people are open about their beliefs; others are oathsworn not to talk much about them. Some people think magic really works and gets results, some think it’s just really powerful prayer, and still others just think it’s spiritual and has no outward effects. Theology? Nothing consistent. Some think the whole thing came down from antiquity, while others are totally okay with the idea that a weird English guy made it all up from bits and pieces of better and worse things.
The thing is – and I’m spectacularly bad at understanding this sort of thing – that most of the occult religions seem to appeal not through the mind, but through the heart and body. People want something strange and old and different and mysterious, people want to have a deep mystical experience of God; and people want to have power if they don’t have a call and a purpose. They want some kind of justification for their sex lives. They want to feel a sense of belonging, or of being part of an insider group if that’s denied. They also want to understand and to know. They want a life with seasonal rhythms and prayers for all occasions. They seek these things (some good, some just human) in all kinds of crazy places.
I too think they really want to be Catholic. But how to help them get there?
sigh
I think that logical argument is probably secondary to converting Wiccans. Useful, yes, but not as useful as “We are a group of Catholics who are nice people and who truly believe in God. We are serious about what we believe, and about how we worship. Spend some time with us.” I suspect that if there were more groups like this (kindly ones, maybe not easily shocked), that you would see more “pagans” joining the Catholic Church, or even that you would see fewer people joining pagan groups in the first place.
However, there are a lot of apologetics against Protestant or anti-Catholic ideas which will probably come in handy with Wiccans. Stuff like “Mary is a pagan goddess, really, and Catholics stole the pagan gods – oh, wait, no, they cruelly suppressed them and oppressed the people” are common. The Crusades seem to come up with monotonous regularity. Female ordination is an issue, unless you’re dealing with one of the single-sex priesthood variants. Communion not being cannibalism comes up. And so on.
It’s the atheists and agnostics who seem to want to have an argument about every detail of the Bible or Catholic practice. Wiccans want to believe that differences don’t really matter, and tend to want to claim that “we do the same thing, but it means more” or “little do you know who you’re
really worshipping” if they like you. They will feel that you are one of the few Christians who is a good person and tell you so… Like atheists, they are often profoundly scarred by bad experiences with people claiming to be religious who were hypocrites or just plain cruel. Otherwise, they’ve experienced a lot of religion they felt was empty and untrue, they never got any religious training to speak of, all their religious training was New Age-y, or they’ve had a profound religious experience which they interpreted as pagan. (Or which was demonic and intended to mislead them – but don’t jump to that conclusion. For a lot of people, becoming pagan
is getting closer to God than they were before. It’s sad.)
I’m one of those persons who’s a lot better at describing what I see than figuring out how to deal with it. I probably could enumerate every way I’ve messed up apologetics to Wiccans, though!
