Why is catholicism a cult

Despite the endless warnings about the evil lurking in the outside world, my curiosity about all things beyond the confines of our closed community was insatiable. I was in training to become a big sister, like my mother, and a celibate bride of Christ.

Nothing could have been further from my dreams: a prince for a husband and a beautiful house surrounded by a flower garden and lots of children. When at the age of 16 I was forced to become a postulant, I felt trapped. At the same time, I developed a series of crushes on grown men within the community. We were not taught biology, much less sex education, and I did not know what these feelings meant or what to do about them. It was a death sentence of sorts—being banished from the only place in the world that was safe.

In June , not more than an hour after my graduation and two months shy of my 18th birthday, I was expelled from the center without so much as a goodbye to the rest of the community, whom I considered my family.

Sister Catherine died two years after my expulsion from the community. After her death, a number of children at the Center informed their parents of the secret, violent beatings they had received, leading to a mass exodus of families.

In the early s, Father Feeney became reconciled with the Catholic Church, though he never recanted his views on extra ecclesiam nulla salus. The community of men became a Benedictine Abbey, while the women came under the auspices of the Diocese of Worcester. While some members formed a new schismatic community in New Hampshire, the Still River community is in full communion with the Catholic Church. After the publication of my book, I began to share my story at libraries and clubs and on radio shows around the country.

I came to realize that my listening audience agreed with my daughter: I had been brought up in a cult. The signs that I had overlooked were now staring me in the face: blind obedience to an absolute authority, centralized financial control, paranoia about the outside world, separation of families, scorn for those who left the cult. Why had I missed what now seemed so evident? My telling of the story might have been impaired had I approached it from the point of view of describing a cult. That was for the audience to discern and for me, ultimately, to accept.

Truth be told, I believe my telling of the story might have been impaired had I approached it from the point of view of describing a cult. Pure and simple, the center was my home, and I loved it and the people who were part of it. They were my family, all of them. I cared, therefore, how those who consider the center their home today would receive the book. Sign up for our newsletter. My mother, on the other hand, was completely supportive.

She and my father left the community with two of my siblings in , three years after I was expelled, and my other two sisters left in She was in her 80s and read every chapter as I was writing it. She encouraged me to keep on going. She died six months before the official launch date.

I have been asked how I could forgive my parents for what to many seems like abandonment. I understand that point of view, but I saw and still see it in a different light. Even as a child I was aware of a creeping grasp that Father Feeney and Sister Catherine had on everyone at the center.

I felt that my parents and I were suffering together, and when we were once again reunited as a family, several years after I was banished, I never felt anger toward them nor the need to forgive them. I am also asked how I can remain Catholic. Again the answer is uncomplicated, at least for me. The sins of some people within the church, or, for that matter, other churches or governments or corporations, do not invalidate the good that is offered.

There is no religion that does not find itself challenged from time to time on account of the behavior of its leadership. In return, they would reward the prayers with miracles.

Since the general belief is that the grave is the house of the soul, many are adorned with photographs, flowers, stamps, images of saints, and elements related to the affinities that the deceased one had in life, such as soccer team logos or miniature cars if the person was a mechanic or a driver. Some are so well maintained that a padlocked glass encloses them, nevertheless, the graves of identified deceased people are more cared for than the ones for the NNs.

These beliefs and practices are reinforced both by Catholic priests and a layman specialist in the cult of the souls called the animero Footnote 5 souls keeper. Every Monday a crowded Eucharist is held in the cemetery, and throughout November the animero , accompanied by believers, prays a novena Footnote 6 to the souls in the cemetery chapel and makes nightly processions through the streets of the town Fig. Although the belief in souls in Purgatory is well known in Colombia, the cult of souls, like other popular religious expressions, has not been a recurring theme in the research agenda of the sociology of religion in Colombia since, as we will see below, they have concentrated more on religious diversity understood in terms of the coexistence of the Catholic Church and other Christian churches.

In Colombia, the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, such as Protestant and Pentecostal are the most visible religious organizations. The Catholic Church has been the predominant religious institution since the Spanish colonization, so much so that the political constitution of declared the Catholic religion as the official religion of the nation and entrusted the church with the teaching of Catholicism in public educational institutions.

This dynamic has led studies in Colombia to concentrate on the Christian churches, ultimately paying much less attention to other expressions, such as religions of Eastern or African origin and those framed within so-called popular religion.

The idea that the Colombian religious landscape has experienced a Catholic monopoly, challenged by the emergence and expansion of other Christian churches, has been favored. However, this idea overlooks religious diversity, which is not limited to the coexistence of the Catholic Church with the Protestant and Pentecostal churches.

There are no studies that seek to understand the process of religious change in Colombia from a broad perspective. Practically all research is limited to historical or ethnographic case studies on a particular religious organization […]. Since there are no official numbers to account for this process, characterizing this religious and social transformation—from a quantitative perspective—is a complex undertaking.

If there are not enough studies and data that address religious diversity in Colombia, beyond the study of the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, why does the idea of a Catholic monopoly persist? And precisely how is the idea of a religious monopoly understood? Scholars, Frigerio argues, would generally agree that:. Religious institutions really were institutions properly speaking, that is, regulatory agencies for both thought and action Berger , p. In this sense, studies have accentuated a hypothetical situation of change that distinguishes between a before—exclusively Catholic—and an after—diversified by the Pentecostal explosion:.

Most quantitative research compares the current situation with the supposed past provided by this theoretical perspective. Therefore, the current empirical data are read by comparing them, explicitly or implicitly, with a past determined by the theoretical influence rather than empirical evidence, and what is novel about the current situation is that it concerns a hypothetical past in which Catholicism would seem to function as the sacred canopy of our societies Frigerio , p.

However, it is necessary to mention that while most people identify themselves in surveys as Catholic, this corresponds specifically to a question about religious affiliation. This dynamic becomes even more evident if one considers that, as Christian Parker highlights in his analysis of Latin American Catholicism, many of those who identify themselves as Catholics adopt other beliefs and practices outside the guidance of the institutionalized church and its control. Footnote 9. However, the aforementioned surveys in Colombia raise the question to what extent those who identify themselves as Catholics follow Catholic teachings and practices.

Likewise, although in the survey We acknowledge that quantitative studies on religious diversity in Colombia contribute to a general picture of the composition of the religious landscape through the measurement of religious identifications. This is also true concerning other elements of such identifications, for example sexuality, gender, and political affinities. However, in order to capture religious diversity and complement the image of religious identifications, it is necessary to study beliefs and practices that transcend the teachings of the churches.

The surveys we discussed have not—and perhaps cannot—address these sufficiently. For instance, the beliefs and practices of those who in the surveys identify as Catholics, but seem to distance themselves from the Catholic Church.

In what follows, we present the Colombian case of the cult of the souls in Purgatory and point to structural similarities with other examples in Latin America. The case is prominent among the devotions that people adopt beyond the doctrines of religious institutions, in particular those of the Catholic Church.

Its analysis indicates directions for scholarship on religion in Colombia, as well as Latin America as a whole, that transcend the limitations described above. In Colombia, this can be observed in different cities and regions through different forms, such as the cult of folk saints Footnote 11 Losonczy ; Vignolo Here the focus is on the beliefs and practices constituting the religious life of people who identify themselves as Catholics and have adopted the cult of the souls in Purgatory.

Perhaps the main characteristic of popular Catholicism is its relative independence from the Catholic Church.

It can follow an autonomous development with great capacity for adaptation. This can be observed through different elements. On this subject, it is not surprising that Catholics in Colombia attend the Eucharist, pray the rosary, pray the novena for the souls and practice the sacrament of confession as well as perform Works of Mercy Footnote 13 in the name of penitent souls Bastidas et al.

Every night during November, at approximately PM, the animero performs a small ceremony in the cemetery chapel. Dressed in a specific outfit consisting of two rosary necklaces wrapped around each arm, a black waterproof poncho with a hood that has the face of Jesus painted in white on the front, and rubber boots. Before going out to the street, he goes through the cemetery praying and ringing a bell to, according to the tradition, call the souls of the deceased who rest there to accompany him in the procession, an activity that he repeats in reverse when the procession ends, returning them to their resting place.

The priests not only invite Catholics to pray for the dead at the Eucharist celebrated every Monday—since Monday is the day of the dead, according to Catholic tradition—of the year in the cemetery chapel, but they also lend the chapel to the animero to carry out his activities. Additionally, they invite people to pray for the souls in purgatory when they hear the sound of the bell announcing that the night procession is passing by their houses, well aware that people perform certain activities not to commemorate the memory of the deceased, but for magical purposes.

Because anyway, as you see, he is inviting them to pray, and that is what people do at home, pray Interview. November 5th, Some attend the Catholic Eucharist and also the activities with the animero , while others solely attend the activities with the animero and see the Eucharist only as an offering to the souls, who in return are supposed to perform miracles.

Jennifer Scheper, for instance, highlights that although popular religion may have a partial autonomy, it is not necessarily opposed to ecclesial religion:. In fact, in some contexts it is not possible to distinguish between popular religion and ecclesial religion.

For example, priests may share in the local beliefs and practices of their parishioners, just as parishioners may incorporate traditional rites into their daily lives. We see this, for example, when priests lend their support to the celebration of locally significant patron saints or affirm local experiences of the miraculous. Also, community rituals and celebrations designed and organized completely by laypeople are often felt to be incomplete without the presence and benediction of clergy Scheper , p.

For example, De la Torre shows how some people can resignify beliefs from Eastern and New Age traditions and incorporate them in their own matrix of popular religiosity. Included in the data presented by de la Torre is the case of a woman who:. She detects neither conflict nor rupture between the knowledge of parapsychology and popular Catholicism, but rather it serves her to resume her activity as a healer De la Torre , p. In another example, De la Torre incorporates the case of a woman who, vice versa, reinterprets Catholic beliefs and rituals in terms of New Age meanings and communicates them to a group of followers both through workshops and meditation classes, and publically through a radio program:.

Without distinction of religions or races, all beliefs lead us to the existence of the same God. Both in her workshops and in her radio program, new age concepts are present in the signifiers of traditional Catholic devotion: The Virgin, the saints, the guardian angels, Christ, or God the father, all are spiritual guides.

Since popular Catholicism follows its own logic, it allows not only the emergence of new religious forms that differ from each other, but also results in a lack of internal homogeneity in terms of the different popular expressions underlying beliefs and practices, as will be shown in the following section. Popular Catholicism has no canonical books that specify a body of teachings or precise instructions on how to proceed with rituals.

Therefore, it is common that different beliefs circulate among the believers without a consensus. Some people, for example, say it is necessary to visit the cemetery during the whole month of November, while others claim that one only has to visit on Mondays.

Some people, in addition to visiting the cemetery, deem it necessary to attend the Eucharist, and raise prayers for the souls of the deceased, whereas others consider praying at home to be enough. On the one hand, some people regularly attend the Eucharist—in the cemetery or in the parish—or pray and walk through the streets of the town in the night processions with the animero and, on the other, as the following interview excerpt illustrates, not every believer attends such processions or the Eucharist:.

November 17th, This cult began in the s at an uncared-for grave, which became well known for miracles attributed by the believers to this dead person, so much so that in a few years the tomb became a small sanctuary adorned with flowers and plaques of gratitude. Regardless of the ambiguities, people tend to invest hope for the resolution to urgent problems in the supposed earthly intervention of supernatural beings, such as the souls of the deceased, which will be addressed in the following section.

Unlike Catholicism, which promotes the performance of good works through a promise of salvation in the hereafter, popular Catholicism is characterized by a focus on seeking relief from the most urgent worldly needs. This can, among others, be seen through two features: the strong presence among the poor population Footnote 21 and the performance of some magic rituals. Interviewees commonly ask the souls for help in solving a wide range of problems, such as finding a job or a better job, securing admission to a public university Footnote 23 , finding a cure for an illness, winning prizes in gambling houses or in getting a house.

But people also enlist the souls in matters related to behaviors or actions that are generally disapproved of socially, such as the commission of crimes. The presence of popular Catholicism among the less fortunate classes has also been identified in other specific cases in Colombia and other Latin American countries. In this context, the best-known practice is the adoption of NN bodies found floating in the Magdalena River.

Faced with this situation, the practice of praying, naming the unidentified body, and the maintenance of a clean and sometimes decorated grave in exchange for a miracle, became widespread.

Some people promised to attend the Eucharist, others promised to pray with the animero , and yet others combined these with promises of daily visits to the cemetery. Considering that the people found in the river were predominantly victims of forced disappearance, devotees believe that, since relatives and acquaintances do not know they are dead, nobody prays for them.

Hence, the nameless souls are more in need of prayers than others and, therefore, more effective in granting miracles. One of the most common offerings is the recognition of the miracle through plaques of gratitude that believers leave on tombs converted into altars.

Generally, people give thanks for a favor by referencing the date it occurred on a marble or stone plaque that is left as a public testimony to the miraculous event Footnote In daily interactions, people either communicate to others the process of achieving such results, or the animero explains the proper set of practices for such purpose, when people need advice in this regard.

From the perspective of sociological theory of religion, this version of religion, situated at the intersection of institutionalized religion and non-institutionalized religious practices, is particularly interesting.

Popular Catholicism has a structurally ambiguous relation to institutional Catholicism. On the one hand, many of its practices and their underlying meaningfulness, as well as lack of negative sanctions, can be regarded as being in strong contrast, if not direct contradiction, to established church religion.

On the other hand, even though this tension comes to the fore in practical and doctrinal terms, there is hardly any expressed antagonism of the two forms of religion. Clearly, Catholic sanctity, around which the souls-cult is formed, is a highly regulated form of religious practice, both in terms of its establishment through a set of carefully controlled legal canonical procedures and in the regulations regarding proper worship that result from this process.

In these ways, popular religion breaks away from the regulatory framework of the saint as a salvation good as well as from the power structure underlying it. It does so, however, while leaving intact the relationship between saints and their worshippers as well as the underlying rationale for entering into this relationship.

The saint worshipping practices we observed can, therefore, be described as partial negations of Catholic practice, since they wrest authority over worshipper-saint relations from the regulating force of the Church, while leaving their structure and purpose largely intact. In addition, Popular Catholicism uses the symbolic structure of official Catholicism as a useful resource for the maintenance of its validity.

Popular Catholicism takes the elements of official worship, such as prayers and the Eucharist, and uses them as a link to a new structure of beliefs and practices. Although, traditionally, the popular has been defined in opposition to the official, we argue that such opposition rests on the denial of institutional authority, but not necessarily in symbolic terms, although it is empirically verifiable that the church can also capitalize on elements of popular worship.

However, this is a matter that transcends the limits of the discussion in this article. Nonetheless, the release of this and other practices from institutional oversight brings with it considerable variation in terms of legitimate interpretations and even resignification of beliefs, and enables popular religion to adapt to different institutional and popular traditions, as well as the variety of individual life circumstances among its adherents. Generally, its adherents pursue rationally weighted ends in the form of miracles or favors that occur in the earthly realm and not a promise of salvation in the hereafter—since popular Catholicism does not stimulate salvation and well-being as a product of good works rewarded by God.

This lends popular religion a decidedly magical character. This aspect is closely linked to the conspicuous absence of the concept of sin and transcendental retribution for faulty behavior. The negative side of the salvation economy is also transferred to this world in that faults and failure do exist in individuals, but they become relevant only as factors limiting or disturbing the innerworldly transactions set in motion through magical manipulation.

Means-ends rationality does exist in a sanctioned form within Catholicism, and the individual shortcomings that might prevent the establishment of a magical transaction in popular Catholicism are treated by institutional Catholicism as well, albeit in form of a transcendental relation that endows the priest with the power to regulate this relation through the granting and denying of salvation goods.

So there is kinship between popular religion and church religion, and we contend that it is demonstrated particularly well by the absence of overt criticism or contradiction of Catholic doctrine, practice, and institutional power as well as the formal and informal acts of legitimation that the animero receives from priests.

With this case we have brought to the fore a definitely more peaceful relationship between church and popular religion as usually associated with Latin America, that being the cradle of Liberation Theology with a long history of a highly tense and conflict laden relationship between lay believers and church hierarchy. Although the results may be generalizable for other world regions, they may serve as point of comparison for the ongoing process of religious change in countries of different world regions.

The Colombian armed conflict is the longest internal war in Latin America. It involves the confrontation between left-wing guerrilla groups and the Colombian army since the mids, and right-wing paramilitary groups since the lates. Over time, the conflict has worsened, leaving thousands of civilian victims and multiple human rights violations by all the armed groups involved. However, despite the demobilization of powerful armed groups, multiple factors have allowed the conflict to continue and even worsen.

This is the short name for the National Institute of Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences , the Colombian official institution that controls and manages the forensic science system. The novena is a traditional prayer in Catholicism through which devotees, during nine successive days, generally make petitions and implore favors to saints, Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary. In Colombia, even the souls in Purgatory have their own novena.

Unlike other classic topics of study in Colombian sociology—such as politics, violence, and the armed conflict—religion has not occupied a central place in the research agenda. Something similar can be noted in the case of Pentecostalism. For example, as Susana Andrade points out, despite the expansion of Pentecostalism among the indigenous communities of Chimborazo, Ecuador, many people keep practices typical of their tradition regardless of whether they were considered sinful by the teachings of foreign evangelical missionaries.

In the survey, The works of Mercy refer to fourteen actions whose purpose is to help the needy. With other and similar characteristics, the figure of the animero is also present in other towns of the Andean state of Chimborazo, Ecuador. In this regard see: see Arias y Veloz The Spanish Limpia refers to a purification ritual using plants, some of them medicinal plants, in baths and fires, with the purpose of achieving protection from any danger, chasing away bad luck and getting rid of spells.

However, it can refer not only to a negative atmosphere, but also bad luck. In fact, the skeletal remains were moved to another cemetery in the south of the city, which resulted in the migration of a good part of the believers, who also built a small sanctuary.

A person at the new sanctuary claimed that the one now known as Salome was her aunt and popularized a prayer with the image of a woman. As expected, new biographical versions began to circulate Bastidas et al.

For his outstanding contribution to Colombian astronomy his image appeared on the old twenty-thousand-peso bill and the International Astronomical Union named a crater on the moon after him Bastidas et al.

The same happens with the folk cult of official saints, whose biographies are completely unknown to believers, despite the existence of the respective hagiographies. And when media do not present the politician in a favorable light, they are disparaged as the carriers of "fake news.

So, too with some televangelists, whose followers number in the hundreds of thousands and who live large on astronomical collections. Where are the Catholic churches in all this? The ongoing pandemic has displayed the preaching skills of hundreds of priests and bishops.

Some are very good. Some are just plain awful. Sacraments, gone by the wayside, inch back into daily life endangered by the predicted second wave. Which brings the Catholic experience back to simple preaching, the skill so well-honed by Pentecostals, charismatics, evangelical and by certain politicians. Their words energize and excite and send individuals out with new purpose, new energy. It is not enough to argue that ordaining married deacons as priests will bring people back to Catholicism.

It is not enough to answer the synod participants' call to restore the tradition of ordaining women as deacons. It is certainly not enough to ask for more foreign missioners to take up residence in one or another country bereft of Catholic ministry. While married priests and women deacons might address the twin problems of language and culture just about anywhere in the world, the church needs something else. Tweet this. No, these solutions are not enough. The added benefit to restoring married priests and women deacons, of course, would be to demonstrate belief that women do not defile the sacred and that women can indeed image Christ.

But even that may not be enough. The problem presents its own solution. Catholicism survives where it adapts to and is adopted by the local culture. Local languages and customs are the key.

Respect for women must be unlocked. She will speak at the Oct. Her most recent book is Women: Icons of Christ.