South African bishops to their priests:

Southern African bishops have told priests they can no longer act as traditional African healers.

Priests must "desist from ‘ubuNgoma’ (traditional healing) practices involving spirits and channel their ministries of healing through the sacraments and sacramentals of the church," said the bishops of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, which represents South Africa, Botswana and Swaziland.

In an Aug. 11 pastoral letter, the bishops expressed concern that "many African Christians, during difficult moments in their lives, resort to practices of the traditional religion: 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 one’s enemies."

Fear of the spirit world is intensified "instead of the love of the ever merciful God definitively revealed by Christ through his death and resurrection," they said. "More disturbing" is that some priests, religious and lay Catholics have "resorted to becoming diviner-healers" and "call on the ancestors for healing."

snip

Priests must act in the person of Christ, not ancestors, and thus should not be diviners. Priests "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," the bishops said.

"By virtue of the sacrament of orders," priests "are consecrated to preach the Gospel, to shepherd the faithful and to celebrate divine worship as true priests of the New Testament," they said.

snip

"In practice, among Christians who also embrace traditional beliefs, there is no doubt that ancestral spirits enjoy more recognition than Jesus Christ," the bishops said, noting that "in local cultures superstition abounds."

Noting that indigenous religious belief attributes the power of healing to ancestral spirits, the bishops said that the sacrament of the sick "pales into insignificance in the eyes of the afflicted because faith in Jesus Christ does not play any role (in indigenous belief); rather it is the belief in the good disposition of the ancestors."

Well, I guess so.