Full Question
Please
help me find a way to explain to my seventh-grade students why the
daily horoscope is a bad idea for them. One student insists that
horoscopes are “entertaining.”
Answer
The Catechism of the Catholic Church instructs us:
All forms of divination
are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead
or other practices falsely supposed to “unveil” the future. Consulting
horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots,
the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a
desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other
human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They
contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.
(CCC 2116)
I see nothing entertaining about that.
Jim BlackburnAstrology
The pagan world was dominated by belief in astrology. Pagans believed that the stars were divinities, or that they were controlled by divinities. Apollo was the god of the sun, his sister Diana was the goddess of the moon, and the known planets were named after gods as well (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). Because of this common pagan belief, the Old Testament contains repeated injunctions against star-worship (Deut. 4:19, 17:3; 2 Kgs. 17:16, 21:3–5, 23:4; Jer. 8:2, 19:12–13; Zeph. 1:4–6).
In the New Testament age, astrologers taught that all things were in the grip of Fate, which could assign one destiny to one man and another destiny to another. Fate was extremely powerful and sometimes was even said to rule the gods. However, what destiny Fate would assign to a man could be determined by reading the stars.
Today some Christians are influenced by revived paganism in the form of the New Age movement. Some even suggest that Christianity originally held many occult beliefs, such as astrology. But the early Christians, like the early Jews, were vehemently opposed to astrology, even attributing it to demonic origin.
The Church Fathers were willing to impose strong sanctions against astrology to protect their flocks. In A.D. 120, the noted mathematician Aquila Ponticus was excommunicated from the Church at Rome for astrological heresies. Augustine records that such sanctions were still in force in his day, three centuries later, and could result in a person’s being excommunicated.