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Catholic World News News Feature

South African bishops warn against ancestor worship, traditional practices September 01, 2006

The Catholic bishops of South Africa have warned against excessive reverence for ancestors, the Fides news service reports. The bishops said: ?“The belief that ancestors are endowed with supernatural powers borders on idolatry.”

“We notice with a measure of concern that many African Christians, during difficult moments in their lives, resort to practices of the traditional religion” the South African bishops said in a recent Pastoral Statement “Ancestor Religion and the Christian Faith.”

The bishops refer to practices which include “the intervention of ancestral spirits, the engagement of spirit-mediums, spirit-possession, consulting diviners about lost items and about the future, magical practices and identifying (smelling out) one’s enemies, etc.”

?“What is even more disturbing," the bishops write, "is the fact that some priests and the religious (and lay people from other professions; teachers, doctors, nurses, etc.) have resorted to becoming diviner-healers.”

To answer the challenge posed by this reliance on traditional religious practices, the South African bishop issued their statement explicitly renouncing cultural elements that contradict the Gospel message, and reaffirming the significance of the ordained priesthood.

“Priests act in the person of Christ and not in the persons of their ancestral spirits," the bishops remind the faithful. "They receive authority and power from the Church and not from undergoing a ritual to become a diviner-healer. The claim to a double source of power and authority confuses Christians and undermines the image of the priest because the one contradicts the other.”.

Those who have recourse to the practices of ancestral religion are mainly people in difficulty, especially the sick, the Bishops note adding that “indigenous religious belief attributes the power of healing to ancestral spirits. In this context, the sacrament of the sick pales into insignificance in the eyes of the afflicted because faith in Jesus Christ does not play any role; rather it is the belief in the good disposition of the ancestors. This practice and belief therefore contradicts the teaching of the Church on healing.”

"The first commandment forbids honoring gods other than the one Lord who has revealed himself to his people," the bishops observe. They call upon the faithful to avoid invoking ancestors except by asking for their prayers, and to reject horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, and claims of magic, charms and recourse to ancestral spirits.