New Age Invasion - Is This Spirituality Replacing Catholic Faith?

The First Commandment is "I am the Lord Thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before Me." But, according to one local convert from the New Age, San Diego Catholics who aspire to know their God better are sometimes presented with information on strange gods instead.

Moira Noonan, a resident of Encinitas, authored Ransomed From Darkness which tells the story of her conversion from New Age spirituality to the Catholic faith. Noonan believes most Catholics are being insidiously exposed to New Age ideas in the Church.

I finished RCIA about 10 years ago. Actually, I was baptized Catholic and attended Catholic school as a little kid. New Agers are constantly searching, always looking for something new. The first true — I hate to say it — 'enlightenment' which dawned on me was that I didn't want to be reincarnated. And I thought, "How do I get off this wheel of reincarnation?" I remembered something from when I was a [Catholic] kid about 'eternal life.' Yet I was constantly being bombarded with reincarnation in the New Age. I just said, 'I don't want to come back. If there is eternal life, or if any of those Sacred Heart nuns who taught me as a kid are in eternal life now, won't you pray for me right now?' It triggered something.

Reincarnation is one of the biggest demonic heresies in the world. When you consider how much of the world's population believes in reincarnation, it's scary. All New Agers believe it. And most of the people I knew in the New Age were fallen-away Catholics.

What do people mean when they say, "I'm not religious, but I'm very spiritual?"?

"Spiritual" seems to be one of the trendy catch words coming out of the New Age movement, because New Agers never say, "I'm of this faith" or "that faith". What they say is, "I'm spiritual" because the New Age movement came from the spiritualist movement. The spiritualist movement was a big movement in America around the turn of the century, with people like Madam Blavatsky. This all came from the time when people started believing in Darwinism. We didn't need God anymore. Now people are saying that they are "spiritual." We don't need any religious truth or religious facts, because we can make up our own gods again.

Is their any link between homosexuality's ascendancy and the New Age movement?

I don't recall seeing homosexuals in the New Age movement, or at least I never met any. They seem to prefer to stay in their own community. But apparently now the lesbian movement is huge in the New Age. This is what's happened to some women's religious orders. Many of them were feminists who turned to Wicca or white witchcraft. It's much more pervasive on the East Coast and, thankfully, I was never a part of any of that. I agree with our Church['s position] that it [homosexuality] is gravely disordered.

I used to go to confession at the Cathedral downtown. One time, when I walked in, I saw a book on the Enneagram (a New Age personality type test) sitting on the priest's chair. What's wrong with the Enneagram?

First off, the Enneagram is being used in almost every Catholic spiritual direction and retreat house in America. It's now the main tool for teaching people how to do spiritual direction. Its origins are occult, not Christian. Now why is this different than using traditional Catholic spiritual direction and counseling, such as St. Ignatius of Loyola's exercises to discern God's will? The Enneagram isn't about working with God's will or understanding it, it's all about personality. It's a personality exercise, not spiritual, and it's not based on God's will. It relies on the human spirit, rather than something divine."

I really don't want to mention these sisters by name, because some of them were very helpful in my conversion a long time ago. I can tell you that they are in a beach community where they operate a retreat house. They also use the Celestine Prophecy for spiritual direction. The Celestine Prophecy was a popular New Age novel which, like the Da Vinci Code, was taken as fact but in reality slanders the Catholic Church. It enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1990s. It's all about developing psychic powers. I was a former New Ager and I sure didn't need these nuns teaching me New Age stuff after leaving the New Age movement. After that experience, thank goodness, a priest from out of state got me to go to Prince of Peace Abbey for spiritual direction. And that is the only place I would recommend anyone in San Diego to go."

For some time now, the La Providencia retreat center in Alpine has been offering Reiki. It's been said that Reiki is just a type of massage therapy. Is that correct?

I don't know anything about La Providencia, but I can tell you about Reiki. Reiki is psychic healing. It is not reconcilable in any way, shape, or form with the Catholic Church, because it uses spirit guides. Spirit guides are fallen angels — not guardian angels but deceivers. It's not Swedish massage. It's occult massage. In order to do Reiki, you have to follow a master. It's like being consecrated to a guru or master. I can say that, because I was an advanced Reiki master healer.

Some photos posted on the internet from Cardinal Mahony's latest religious education congress, show people walking around through labyrinths.

They're using labyrinths in Christian churches and New Age churches. The big difference is that in the New Age churches, they are doing it to a mantra. If it's done in a Christian setting and with a Christian mindset, then I wouldn't have any objection to it.

I can tell you that here in North County, there is a coastal parish where I just finished a basic catechist course — I really don't want to mention it by name -- that is so bad you cannot believe it. This is where they are training people to be religious education teachers in parishes. I was told by this instructor not to mention Mary, the rosary, statues, novenas or "any of that superstitious stuff." This is the director of religious education for that parish who teaches the class. It was so unbelievably awful. And, just as in the New Age, he told us that no stories in the Bible were literal events." He said that the Bible is, "nothing but stories, not an accurate account."

Thanks for the info. Below is Malachi Martin's analysis of the Enneagram. Exerpted from the preface to the new edition of "Hostage to the Devil"

Foreword- Malachi Martin.

...Among the vast array of disposing factors likely to lead to Possession, the Enneagram Method is nowadays far and away the most common and pernicious. Given the general state of religion, it is not surprising that the Method's popularity is enormously enhanced by its having been enthusiastically adopted and propagated by Catholic theologians and teachers from the major religious Orders-Jesuit, Dominican, and Franciscan -and by some of the official organs used by the bishops of the United States and Canada charged with teaching religious doctrine to young and adult Catholics.

Moreover, because the Enneagram Method is currently presented as an authorized teaching of the North American Forum on the Catechumenate -the body that supplies to the parishes and dioceses of the United States and Canada precisely those materials intended to bring communities and individuals to maturity of faith - the Method penetrates the full fabric of religious belief and participation, literally from cradle to grave.

So effective has the Enneagram Method become in strangling genuine Catholic faith, that it is now considered by some as the most lethal threat to date in the campaign being waged to liquidate orthodox Catholic belief among the faithful.

True to its name - enneagram means "nine points," or "marks"- the Enneagram is a nine-pointed mandala-type figure within a circle. The mandala character of the Enneagram is meant to represent the lotus and, as described by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, is "a symbol depicting the endeavor to reunite the self."

The Enneagram came to the West from a now dead Asianic spiritual master, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff claimed in turn that it originated with the Sufi Masters of Islam. It reached the United States via "spiritual teachers" in Chile, Bolivia, and Peru and in the early 1970s was first broadcast here from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and Loyola University in Chicago. There is now abundant literature on the subject.

According to Enneagram teaching, there are exactly nine types of human personality, each of which is represented by one of the nine points of the Enneagram figure. Each human being is inalterably confined to one, and only one, of those personality types. But within his or her type, each person is infinitely self-perfectible.

Two characteristics of the Enneagram Method comprise moral teachings that are irreconcilable with the basic moral teachings of Catholics in particular and Christians in general. The basic presumption presented to the mind by the Enneagram Method is that each individual is self-perfectible, morally speaking, within that individual's personality type.

This presumption is in reality a late revival of an ancient heresy known as Pelagianism. It is at odds with the basic Christian teaching that we absolutely depend on the action of divine grace for all moral perfection. Of ourselves, we are helpless. Not only are we not infinitely self-perfectible; we will never of ourselves even escape the grip of our sinful nature. Only supernatural grace enables us to do that. And that grace is simply gratuitous on God's part.

The teaching of the Enneagram Method cuts both God and his grace out of the loop. In fact, there is no longer any loop at all. The individual is cut off from effective knowledge of his or her dependence on God and his supernatural grace for ultimate perfection. He or she is confined to an inalterable personality type, which has been laid out by Enneagram Masters.

The second faulty moral characteristic of the Enneagram Method completes the damage caused by the first. Having fatalistically accepted one's own category, the participant is dependent for perfection on the Enneagramatic exercises suitable for one's personality type. In other words, the soul of the Enneagram disciple is opened out and made docile, with the goal of receiving the promised self-knowledge congruent with his or her type. The soul becomes an apt and classic receptor-an aspiring vacuum -ready for the approach of an intending Possessor. In such a setting, the intending Possessor may come as what St. Paul described with dramatic precision as an Angel of Light. But the danger is all the more insidious for that. For in such a situation, the condition commonly called "perfect Possession" may be the result.

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