The Occult & Black Magic With Jimmy Akin | The Catholic Talk Show

hey everybody welcome back to another episode of the catholic talk show today we're going to be talking about the occult that's right today we are joined by jimmy akin from catholic answers and the mysterious world podcast to look at the dark forces and how they affect the lives of catholics now this isn't just catholics in our own generation i mean this has affected catholics throughout every generation even all the way back to the acts of the apostles let's find out [Applause] [Music] all right well it's good to be back uh having uh jimmy uh on another episode this is definitely a very interesting topic probably broad in range and so it'd be good to hear some of your research into this area and uh get a good conversation going yeah and you know jimmy is going to be taking optimistic approach this and looking at all these different areas of the occult and and using aquinas to really understand what the church teaches and how it views these things but we're talking things like astrology and healing crystals and psychic powers drawing lots and even demon babies right um so we're going to get into a really cool episode with jimmy aiken who's really a fantastic apologist and if i do say so myself he's got the beard of all three of us combined and then some he's a beard hero of ours and an apologetic heroes of ours it's great to be on uh with jimmy i mean this is exciting for me i love his podcast i love his work on catholic answers so man it just gets cool and cool doing this show all the time and howard wishes he could have your beard oh he does a little demon baby compared to that angelic man now if demon babies don't suck you into this show i don't know what will but starting out i think it's really interesting that just recently in the scriptures we had galatians and it was saint paul expressing to us in the context of the the solemnity of pentecost what are the fruits of the spirit but he also warns us he warns us of the fruits of the flesh and the works of the flesh and he expresses that now the works of the flesh are manifest which are immorality uncleanliness licentiousness idolatry witchcrafts enmities contentions jealousies angers quarrels factions parties envies murders drunkenness carousing and such like so today we're we're specifically focusing in focusing in on that witchcraft element and and the occult and the acts of the apostles you know in the in the missionary journey to ephesus it's very interesting because if you want to check this out i would highly recommend going to chapter four of the acts of the apostles and verse 17 and this became known to all the jews and gentiles living in ephesus and fear fell on them all and the name of the lord jesus came to be held in high honor and many of those who believed kept coming and openly confessing their practices of this form of witchcraft and occultism and many who had practiced magical arts collected their books and burnt them publicly and they reckoned up the prices of them and found the sum to be fifty thousand pieces of silver thus mightily did the word of the lord spread and prevail i wonder how many silver pieces barnes noble is making right now off of the witchcraft and occultism of uh you know at least 30 i can tell you that much at least 30 my brother so jimmy i think a good way to start this episode is what is the occult i mean it's it's it's such a sinister sounding word and it's you know i'm sure everyone's heard it but what technically how can one understand what we mean by saying occult well the term has changed meaning over time it comes from the latin word occultus and that just meant hidden and so back in aquinas's day anything that people didn't understand would be called a cult because it had a hidden explanation and aquinas talks about how there are many things in the world that man is not able to assign a reason for you know there's lots of phenomena in nature they didn't know why this happened and so they would say well that's it has an occult reason it has a hidden reason that we don't know um a classic example that aquinas gives is magnets um because magnets obviously have an influence they have a power that affects certain you know p certain kinds of metal and other magnets but nobody knew how they worked and so aquinas would say well magnets have an occult power and that didn't mean evil or sinister or demonic or anything like that it just meant something that people didn't fully understand and so there's been a shift in the meaning of the word occult between aquinas's day 800 years ago and our day uh today in english when people talk about occult stuff they do mean things that have at least a reputation for being sinister or demonic or things like that magical shady but that wasn't the original meaning of the term and it's fascinating when you read aquinas and what he has to say about subjects that we would consider a cult he's actually very even-handed he does not automatically say well this thing is a cult therefore christian should have nothing to do with it um he's he acknowledges that there are hidden aspects to god's design for the world and that it can be legitimate to use things like magnets that have properties that people don't fully understand or can't fully explain they're part of god's creation on the other hand there are sinister demonic things as well and superstitious things and so aquinas actually articulates a set of principles for how to sort the good from the bad a while back i wrote an article and i actually put these principles in kind of an algorithm so you can see okay here's a practice and you ask these questions about it and aquinas will tell you if it's good or bad whether you can use it or not and he comes to some surprising results at times you know i'm jimmy i have the link for that article i'll make sure that i post that so if you go to catholictalkshow.com and look at this episode's page we'll make sure that we have a link both to that article that jimmy wrote with that algorithm but then also catholic answers and his podcast mysterious world um but father rich i think one of the unique things about the catholic talk show is that this is the only place that you're going to learn where both thomas aquinas and insane clown posse have something in common and that's they have no friggin idea how magnets work and i think that makes us really unique and an outstanding reason that you should subscribe and like this channel so if you're watching on youtube make sure you click like subscribe and follow and if you're listening in go to catholictalkshow.com or at catholictalkshow on any of the major social medias like facebook instagram twitter and tick tock now as well and you can follow us now father rich in the priesthood you know i'm sure you've had people who've felt that they've been affected by occultic powers powers of evil darkness etc and they're coming to you because you know the caller kind of gives them the confidence in the priesthood of jesus christ to find a way to protect themselves from these evils that lurk and prowl about have you had any experiences in the priesthood with either the occult or people being affected by it all the time i mean just even just the other day i was out at the mission grounds and and just witchcraft happening after hours people hopping the fence and and uh you know doing these uh very satanic uh rituals on on the mission grounds to face the beauty and the integrity of the most important property in you know the united states of america arguably in in north america you know the establishment of the catholic faith uh by by the spanish in 1565 those grounds are assailed constantly with uh you know with with you know this occult practice um but all the time you know even in my priesthood people coming uh because of concerns that they may be possessed or or uh oppressed by demonic influences or that you know i just got a phone call the other day some brother of mine in my men's prayer group um you know from past communities called up and said you know i'm i'm worried that i sold my soul you know so it happens it happens all the time and i feel such a great solidarity you know we opened up in relationship to saint paul's ministry and and the apostles ministry this is what priests do and and this is what we need to call upon is the power and the name of jesus christ and it shows that we do have a spiritual proclivity toward fascination and and toward you know powers that we can manipulate or control and sometimes it gets us into some very risky business yeah catechism 2117 very firmly and distinctly warns against catholics dabbling in the occult so catechism 21 17 all practices of magic or sorcery by which one attempts to tame occult powers so as to place them at one service and have a supernatural power over others even if this were the for the sake of restoring their health are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion these practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons wearing charms is also reprehensible spiritism often implies divination or magical practices the church for her part warrants against the faithful the warns the faithful against it recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of either evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity now i think you know i gotta say shield like the the fact that you're pointing this out that's one of the most important catechetical references that you just shared and it falls under the context in the catechism from 2110 to 2117 and then beyond that falls underneath the commandment you shall have no other gods before me so we highly recommend again we we're constantly picking up the bible we're constantly picking up the catechism and we're sharing what the catholic church actually teaches so take a moment you know after the show pop open the catechism 2110 and read through those catechetical references because it's really going to fill out very substantively you know just that introduction to what this is all about now as part of that and i think it was even mentioned there jimmy i think the most common form of a cult that a lot of people practice and is widely accepted uh is is astrology um now you know we'll hear things like the the the magi where astrologers or their signs in the heavens um you know we've done an episode on astrology before but i'd like to get your insight is you know how much of astrology is the occult how much of it is harmless how much of it is damaging or uh dangerous to a soul well um so what i can tell you is that there has been a big shift in how astrology has been regarded over the course of christian history now early on it was very quickly recognized in the age of the church fathers that there are some forms of astrology that are directly contrary to the christian faith and the ones that the church fathers and that later theologians were very concerned about was anything that was fatalistic anything that would deny human free will and say that the stars control men's fates and so that was recognized very early on as something that's just flatly contrary to christian truth because we have free will from god now it's also obvious though that the heavenly bodies do have an effect here on earth i mean the sun you know that's why the presence of the sun is why the day is warmer than the night the moon affects the tides the sun drives the weather to a significant extent and the ancients therefore said well okay so what about the other bodies that we see what about the planets the wandering stars and and they thought that the planets would have more of an influence than we would today because the scientific revolution had not occurred yet and so uh you know people natively find patterns in things even when there's not really something there we we our our brains are wired for pattern recognition and so they would look for patterns between what they were seeing in the sky and what they were seeing on earth because they knew the heavenly bodies have an influence they just overestimated how much it is and that example of that be like when when mars was the closest to earth you know hearing you know ruminations of now there's going to be a massive war there's going to be like so much bloodshed i remember hearing something like that yeah uh and in particular because pagans had associated different deities with the planets like mars is the god of war maybe the motions of the planet mars will tell you something about when wars are going to be fought um so yeah watch out mercury is retrograde that is so bad right i mean wow look i can't be blamed for the things i do right now because mercury's going backwards i mean that's the kind of things that you hear in astrology that to me are utterly ridiculous but you're right and i think i've read and you know mystically klein is saying that they're they do have an influence i mean even if you look at things like quantum entanglement you know matter has an effect on matter it is part of creation but you know to what extent they control our nature or our decisions or our outcomes i think is a good distinction as to whether or not they're harmful right right and in aquinas's day it was astrology and astronomy were basically the same thing they had not been disentangled yet and so asking back then do you believe in astrology would be like saying do you believe in astronomy you know people would say well of course there i believe that there's stuff going on with the stars they just thought it was a lot more aquinas thought and he talks about this in the summa theologiae aquinas thought that astrologers could use the stars to predict things like the weather and droughts and even some human events like wars because even though in aquinas's view the stars can't affect our souls they can affect our bodies in his view and so they could for example stir up feelings of anger in people and that could lead those people now that people have free will they could choose to say no to their feelings of anger but most people don't they just kind of go with their feelings and so he would say astrologers could predict things like wars at least probabilistically they couldn't do it with infallible certitude now after aquinas's day the scientific revolution happened and we would today say the stars have much less influence and it's superstitious now to try to attribute this kind of influence to the stars but they knew less in aquinas's day and it wasn't superstitious for them but from what we know now it would be and so the catechism has a pretty strong statement against using horoscopes it's funny because i just had one of my kids that was confirmed in the faith and we're all standing in line and i've got this is on may 18th just a few weeks ago and and you know i'm standing in line with bishop estevez i've got 85 kids all processing in my meeting with bishop went great and i'm introducing him to the kids and one of the kids brings up like a horoscope thing you know and i'm like and how much she enjoys looking at horoscopes and and it was started by like um father are you sagittarius or are you this or that and i'm like i'm like i'm i'm a priest of jesus christ you know like i i said i rely on the power of god you know and and uh and we had this exchange i said catholics we don't we don't lean into horoscopes or you know astrology at all you're embarrassing me in front of the i was feeling i'm bishop oh my gosh this is a total cancer gemini move the pool right it's like i have totally failed you why did we not talk about astrology um another another thing jimmy that you've mentioned some of the things uh in particular that article you wrote are like healing crystals and maybe kind of a folk medicine which i think a lot of times if you look at the classic example of a witch it's this you know woman with all these exotic you know eye of a nude yeah right but then you also look at someone like saint hildegard von bingen with her physica and very much it's kind of on the same typecast where she's looking at the humors and the relationship of these different herbs and physical materials even rocks to how they can affect the body so what's the divide and you know what can and cannot be used by catholics in a natural homeopathic or you know holistic sense this is a really fascinating one because you know we have new agers today who are all into like crystal healing and you put a little piece of quartz around your neck or maybe you've got a a bracelet with a magnet in it and it's supposed to have some health benefits and actually this goes way back um originally now uh father richard quoted the passage from galatians where paul's listing the works of the flesh and in the translation he he quoted he mentioned witchcraft if i'm if memory serves in the greek text there the word is pharmakeia and pharmaca is where we get the english word pharmacy because at the time medicine and magic and religion were all bundled up together kind of like astronomy and astrology were and so there was some suspicion in the christian community about various medical practices because you would have these people who were physicians and maybe not christian and they would be doing stuff with herbs um but then in addition to the herbs they would be saying pagan prayers over them and so it was all kind of tangled up together and it took centuries for those to become disentangled but that's why we have the image of which is you know preparing potions with various natural ingredients when it comes to inorganic things like rocks and stones and so forth uh again in the science of the day it was thought that these would have beneficial health effects so for example hildegard of bingen in her physica in the section where she's talking about emeralds she thinks you can use emeralds to treat epilepsy and she says if someone's having an epileptic fit put an emerald on their tongue and i guess hopefully they don't swallow it but uh she she thought that uh that that would have a beneficial therapeutic effect aquinas thought you could use sapphires to stop bleeding he also thought you could use gold to him to treat depression and not just because you're happy you have gold and so you're rich he thought the gold itself would have an effect on your mood and we you know with subsequent scientific study we found that well okay they're kind of wrong about those things but it doesn't mean they're wrong about everything because if you've ever noticed if you uh are out in public and you look at door handles and railings frequently you'll see they're made out of copper or they are copper alloy or you know like brass and if you look in the plumbing in a lot of buildings you'll see the pipes are made out of copper and the reason for that is copper is a kind of metal that has a natural antimicrobial property and so it will kill germs and that's why it's used for water piping to try to kill the germs in the water that's why it's used for door handles and railings that people put their hands on so actually some of these substances do turn out to have therapeutic effects and that's really the the thing that has to be sorted out um rather than saying oh we should just banish all thought of using inorganic substances okay that's kind of superstitious in one way that's being too scared of it but on the other hand we shouldn't be credulous and just accept any claim like emeralds are going to cure epilepsy what you have to do is look at what the science says about what properties do these things really have and if it has a beneficial therapeutic property well then you can use it for medicine if it doesn't then it's superstitious to use it what i love about that is that we're continuing to perceive the mystery of what it is and continuing to scientifically expose this is what it can be used for and and there has to be a sense of you know science and and you know that sense of uh you know fetus at ratio that that faithfully we're continuing to engage all of creation learning from it and then drawing that into the mystery of god itself like we can we can come to study the the very properties of anything that is in existence but ultimately at the very end of it it still remains a mystery but it's just that we know we we know more about it yeah and you know you look at maybe the evolution of the way a chemical is treated you know in the 1880s you know it's like well i'm kind of depressed okay well you know go drink some heroin right it's great some coca-cola you know here's some cocaine back in the day yeah right yeah whatever man it's you know it's like a fish concert you know in the old west right um but then you know the understanding of the effects kind of you know catch up and those things are no longer acceptable but back then i mean these were medical doctors these are modern men of science you know at the time but then you look at a thing like lsd and you know it started off as an experiment then it's completely pushed back again so now there's a thought developing in science of micro dosing for depression right so there's always development of the understanding of sciences so to hold aquinas to his view but not hold the entire medical field to the development of the understanding of material usage is an unfair thing to do just because he was a medievalist you know right what's really valuable in aquinas are the principles that he articulates the science of his day has been superseded but the principles he uses are are actually quite good so he would say well if you let's say you've got a thing you want to use it to treat somebody uh for a medical condition will it work is one of his questions and if it works then you can say okay how does it work is the effect purely natural and aquinas would say well if it works and if it's purely natural you can go ahead and use it on the other hand if it works but it's not purely natural we've got more questions to ask because if it's not natural then there's something supernatural going on so what's the source of supernatural power is it god is it angels is it demons and depending on the answer that it'll either be acceptable or not acceptable depending on who you're calling upon to do it now we're getting into it now we're really getting into it so breaking that open you know like what would be uh you know kind of articulating what that is is it is it um that that the human person then manipulates this power as it's as its own to perform this type of effect or like how would you start to describe you know the practices of witchcraft or sorcery or the occult uh in that respect kind of in a theological framework and why it's bad so there's a there's a kind of mix of different practices and some of them aquinas would just classify as superstitious others are much more sinister an example of a superstitious one is um back in the day in his day people would make these um what they called astronomical images and it would be uh something that was you know some kind of substance it could be an emerald let's say so they have a little emerald thing they would want to use it to treat a person but then they would say i want to increase the power of this thing so what i'm going to do is i'm going to carve an astrological symbol on it maybe the symbol of the planet mars and that will attract power from the planet mars to make this even more effective in treating someone and aquinas would say that's just superstitious because a symbol can only be recognized by an intellect and so the planet mars is a planet and it's not it's just a star in his view and so as a result writing a symbol of mars is not going to draw any extra power from mars so you're just being superstitious in what you're doing you're believing too much in this thing on the other hand uh demons do have real power and aquinas would say if you're if you're invoking demons that's obviously really bad and the fascinating thing is there were people in his day who would push back on that idea in fact um there were a class of there were priests in fact who were engaged in magical practices they were the educated ones you know they were the ones who could read the latin tomes and so forth and so there was kind of an undercurrent in the priestly community where some priests would say look um god made everything including the demons christ is stronger than the demons so why shouldn't we call up demons and use the power of christ to get them to do our bidding and like maybe force someone force a demon to heal somebody trying to domesticate them almost exactly yeah now aquinas's viewpoint is do not do that um you cannot trust these guys uh they will always betray you don't think that you're going to be able to master them in such a way just by saying i command you in jesus name that they're always going to do what you want they'll also lie to you and so he would say this is a very mistaken view and it's dangerous and you should stay away from them but it is something that some people were arguing in favor of and trying to do that in a christian context so what we're talking about here i think too is now we're getting into even more of a nitty-gritty where it's like the intent of participating in something like this obviously if it is supernatural symbol driven beyond that of the natural world then the person could have an intent or not have an intent i mean they could just be carrying on a tradition or not carrying on tradition or whatever it is the the thing that always comes up to me and i don't do it i'm probably too uh fat and out of shape for it is yoga right you got you got these people and my in my opinion i look at them i don't know any of the deities of the indian whatevers but i look at them like they're stretching i mean that's how i look at it i'm like oh it looks like they're stretching i don't understand what's wrong with it but but i've also heard a catholic argument where it's like hey they're actually performing something that is for you know calling on something that's supernatural that's not of god is there a relation between those two things there so what aquinas would say is um that this is a practice that can be looked at more than one way if your intent is just to do stretching exercises then that's all it is to you on the other hand put my arm behind my head i'm praying to the god kali yeah well then to me that becomes a symbol for praying to the god kali but for someone else it wouldn't be and so it it really will depend on your intent it's like it's these would just be these bodily postures would be the equivalent of words and what a word means depends on who's using it um in you know uh in you can have a word that means one thing in english and it can mean something completely different in japanese right so it's really the community of users of symbols that give the symbols their meaning and if you're giving particular postures meaning that is a prayer language to pay gods well then you shouldn't be doing that right but if you're a member of another community for whom those symbols those bodily postures don't have that symbolic meaning then all you're getting is exercise and i think that's built on the fundamental premise that those postures really don't have any power over god even if you do have that meaning they don't have power over god god can still work in and through that to reach you and bring you to him and if if god didn't want people to be able to put their arms behind their head he wouldn't have built us with the ability to do that i don't know that that's a yoga stretch but it should be it should be i think i could do that you know when i was in india i was i was spending some time in mumbai and working with the daughters of saint catherine and some diocesan priests and you know at that time i was going back and forth between you know what's your position on yoga no pun intended and you know like i realized you know when i was with this community of priests and the lay faithful they would gather and spend time before the blessed sacrament in adoration and exposition of the blessed sacrament and then they would go up to a flat and there would be like 30 40 people and they would go through and exercise you know exercises of what you know appears to be yoga essentially but it's all in the context of a very prayerful time with jesus in the blessed sacrament and centering prayer and and really meditating and exercising the body and it was very evident to me witnessing that firsthand that this is this is something good that's that's kind of being disposed to jesus christ and and um it was it was an interesting experience now father rich how long we've known each other half a decade more you know i'm going to disagree with you here and i certainly agree that again like brian said you know moving your body in a particular way without intention has there's it's not a you know you're not messing with a ouija board right yeah i mean it's just a movement you're not calling on the name of any any type of deity but consciously pursuing yogic practices in my view and in the view of a lot of people is inoculating you towards another religion now and it's also weakening your bond but the own with the own traditions of your church now there's a nuance right obviously people can do yoga poses i mean there's a group um soulcore fantastic women they do stretches and poses to pray the rosary and it's a great exercise but the pursuit of yoga how many times have you said have you seen someone's like i got really into yoga and all of a sudden i just can't stop reading saint anselm it doesn't happen that way you and i know it both that when people start going down that road they start to find or pursue spirituality in a different community it depends on the community well everything there's always like everything everything that was being done by this community was strictly catholic well you just read it yourself you just disputed yourself ryan because you said you know these these women did yoga and they're like we want to infuse god into it so that's it exactly they were praying the rosary in india they were doing all of those practices would you guys at least concede that it's rare that somebody's spiritually mature enough to not go down that road and start to drift away from the church it could certainly happen it happens all the time and and i will give value to what you're saying because i do see it pastorally but it always always always depends on the community more often than of course and more often than not an internationality you have someone of little or no faith who starts getting into yoga and then whipped away and they get whisked away you know it's not somebody with a fully developed conscious or a very mature sense of faith that it's gonna damage it's gonna damage people who are relatively agnostic or non-practicing who then find their spiritual fulfillment in that and then start going down that road of well now i need to align my chakras and what happens we need catholic answers right now where are you coming in where are you coming in with your mighty beard of wisdom put the pipe put the pipe in and then you know i would i would say that um you know that there is this danger here because in our culture uh yoga and similar practices are associated with non-christian religious ideas um on the other hand i that doesn't mean that i would say all christians should stay away from them in fact you could make a counter-argument that christians should move into this field and do like we're going to do these poses to pray the rosary or put it in a christian context so that it becomes a form of evangelization precisely to the people who would otherwise be attracted to uh to yoga because you've got these people who are there that what they want is exercise and they think oh this is a kind of low impact exercise it looks like it's healthy it's got a good reputation i'm going to go to this yoga class and then when they go to the yoga class where they're there for exercise they then get all this stuff about chakras yes and so it would be better to have an exercise class that these people could go to where it's like okay now we're going to use the bodies that god gave us and we're going to praise him by what we're doing with our bodies yeah so that's soul soulcore.com they have online courses they have dvds they have they're developing an app and great ladies out of carmel indiana i believe ryan yeah um amazing stories too these women have just amazing stories and i don't know if you know this too the next season actually ryan shiel is going to have his own specific video exercise series and it's all the different postures that we could take from yoga and put in a christian practice so we can be ortho orthodox and and talk about orthopraxis you're going to show us those different moves shield rich i am made out of gristle and steel i do not bend i am flexible like a good intellect should not be but a good faith should be but no you know jimmy that is again that's such a measured answer and our society doesn't like measured thoughtful responses but they just want to they want you to say no throw every yoga mat into a pit and burn it with all the amulets and demon babies and then everyone else wants to say well no yoga is the greatest thing since don't know something else like yoga slice bread yes first introduced in 1927. that's right i like that quote but you know there is a nuance to it and i think that is you know taking that domestic approach and that nuance saying why how you know going through these questions if more people in our society would have that kind of discernment that power of discernment there's a lot more things that could open up to the world that can be used as like you said a tool for you know evangelization that right now we're probably not i don't know wise enough to be able to use and aquinas is so helpful with that and being thoughtful about it and then looking at saint ignatius because like the jesuits mastered the fact of going into different cultures and adapting and drawing in and sanctifying so that they could meet the people where they are in their practice and draw them in more deeply so i love this conversation yeah so keep so keep talking trash about catholicism yoga teachers because we'll come in we'll steal your whole thing everything will be hard yeah like we've done with everything else don't don't force our hand we'll do that um jimmy now there's a couple things that are a little bit more i guess we talk about things that maybe are physical or part of the creed of the discernible visible world but let's talk about those things that we profess you know in the creed of the invisible world the things unseen demons ghosts yeah uh spirits um aliens not aliens but all those types of things you know aliens on another show that's right we'll have jimmy back on and do a whole episode on aliens i'd love to yeah but what is the church what does aquinas say what does the formidable jimmy aiken say about demons ghosts and uh you know okay vampires witches etc yeah so in terms of in terms of demons uh they're real uh they are fallen angels and they're created intellects that do not by nature have bodies they are stronger and smarter than humans and you cannot trust them and you want to stay away from them uh in terms of ghosts uh you know there's this common meme in our society you see it going back into the 20th century and even the 19th century if ghosts don't exist of course they do uh a ghost is english has this double vocabulary that comes from romance languages like latin and german which is the base language that english comes from and so you have two words for the same thing in latin as i'm sure father richard could confirm spiritus means spirit in german geist means spirit well you bring those into english spiritus becomes spirit geist becomes ghost but they mean the same thing which is why the holy spirit is also called the holy ghost so if spirits exist ghosts exist the question and they do the christian faith teaches we have spirits that survive death so ghosts are real the question is do they manifest to people now a lot of times people may think a ghost is manifesting when really it's their imagination or they just need to re readjust their air conditioning vent to get rid of the cold spots but and it's not really a ghost but as catholics we would say god does sometimes allow the spirits of the dead to manifest to people like fatima you know all of the marian apparitions and other apparitions of saints that's those those are real human spirits in mary's case she's also got a body that god allows to manifest um if you if you uh look a little more broadly and look at what aquinas would have to say aquinas would say that not only can the spirits of the saints manifest to us he would say the spirits in purgatory can manifest to us and there are reports of that in catholic history where a spirit will manifest who is apparently in purgatory and they may for example ask for prayers to help get him out of purgatory aquinas would go even further and say if god wants it he can have the spirits of the damned manifest to the living perhaps as a way of scaring them back onto the straight and narrow this is kind of the christmas carol jacob marley shows up and tells you what awaits you if you don't repent kind of thing going on so um something interesting though you said that god you said that god would allow that would in any case demons be able to manifest in a soul like that as well well demons could can show up and pretend to be all kinds of stuff uh they can pretend to be good angels and there's no reason why they can't pretend to be a human spirit as well okay in fact there there are situations where even people who were having genuine apparitions like sister sister lucy at fatima for a while questioned is this really the virgin mary appearing to me or could it be the devil so demons can show up and and impersonate all kinds of things okay yeah and i think uh didn't padre pio say that angels will try to appear to him as either the blasted family or saints if i recall that would something um that would happen interesting to investigate yeah and saint ignatius of loyola goes into a great uh expose if you will of a lot of the uh discernment of spirits and you know the angel of darkness cloaked with light and and uh you know so i highly recommend discernment of spirits of saint ignatius of loyola getting to know padre pio and i typically don't like to do this because this is just more of like my own private my own private life and my my experience spiritually um i have to exercise discernment and things that i that i say but it's really i i feel encouraged to just share this experience that i had in uh next to the world trade center after my cousin and so many people tragically died i went up uh with father tetlow many many years ago and we visited and prayed and i stayed right across the the street at this hotel and um and i could not sleep and i was just i was restless and you know i had my eyes closed and i i began to see just like faces of of people just you know like this filtering of faces and what happened to me in prayer is just this this vocation this calling that i felt very deeply subjectively just i need to i need to pray i need to pray and sacrifice this kind of restless you know that i can't sleep so i'm going to hit my knees and i'm going to pray for these people intentionally um and and it just it really musters up exactly what you're sharing jimmy's is something that i first handedly experienced um in that in that respect yeah absolutely and that's a great thing to do when i you know i even though you know a bishop didn't come in and investigate your experience these experiences are real and if you think you may be having one you know it doesn't hurt to pray amen should always be a catalyst for prayer right yeah and to and and that's why subjecting yourself to the power in the name of jesus christ is so important we heard that in the scriptures as we began this episode and and really seeing that power and seeing the effect of the power and the name of jesus christ uh you know is is realized in the apostolic college and their missions to ephesus and galatia and all these different uh acts of the apostles encounters with with you know the great commission and jesus sending them out in his name to do these things and how people turned away from powers of sorcery and and manipulation and they started to burn those books that that were leading them away from christ burn these practices that were being encouraged through these books turning away from that and turning more securely to christ because i've got to share like there is no greater power to witness and there's no greater power to be a part of than the powerful name of jesus and it's important to separate elements in our lives that would keep us away from him just like the ephesians did with those magical books yes jimmy so i i had one last question for you and i think this is one that you know i've had people ask me before is about curses you know can people be placed under a curse by you know a sorceress or a sorcerer or you know an incantation and if if curses are real how would one be lifted so um i did a whole episode of jamaican's mysterious world on curses so i'd encourage uh you or listeners yeah who are interested in that to check out that episode um curses what a curse is is where you uh speak classically it's where you speak ill of someone in the hope of causing that to happen to the person and the question would then be well what would cause it and the options would seem to be well um god or his agents you know ain't like angels or demons or some kind of innate human ability and that would be a uh what we today would call a psychic power and so if someone is uh if you're innocent you know you're a christian you're under god's protection you rely on god um you i don't think you have too much to worry about when it comes to curses because god's not going to put one on you you know even if someone says oh i hope he breaks his leg well god's not going to cause you to break your leg and god's not going to order his angels to to have you break your leg and most of the time i mean you can't really get demons to do what you want anyway and so even if there's some someone who's praying to a demon and saying oh make him break his leg the odds of that happening are pretty low um i mean i can't rule it out altogether but god protects his people and i don't think we need to live in fear or worry about that and experience shows that you know that curses are not really very effective if they were they would be used all the time and they're not because they're not really effective most of the time then that would leave could there be an innate human ability that you could use to harm somebody what we would call a psychic power and this would be a form actually of telekinesis also called psychokinesis making something happen at a distance interestingly aquinas said yeah aquinas said there is in his view there is a uh power in the soul that you can use to remotely affect people for the worse um this is this is aquinas's explanation for the evil eye and so he thought that if the soul is vehemently moved by hatred it can actually remotely now he had a he had a kind of aristotelian physical uh physics uh explanation for how this would work but he said if the soul is vehemently moved to hatred and evil you could remotely affect people for the worse and he thought children were the most vulnerable for that because they as the victims because they have these weak little bodies compared to full-grown adults um interestingly he didn't consider the reverse could you if the soul is vehemently moved by love could you maybe have a positive effect at a distance and maybe heal somebody but aquinas was open in principle to the idea that there could be psychic abilities like this however if one thing is fairly clear from modern parapsychology and all the research that's been done in the last 100 or so years if these abilities exist they're weak and so once again i don't think that people would have to really worry too much about curses not if you're not if you're a faithful christian who's trusted in god that if you're not image that experience of like the eye you know just hearing you say that i immediately think of lord of the rings with the eye that's burning and like you know there's so much space you know geographically between them but it's like this immediacy of effect yeah what aquinas thought because in aristotelian physics there has to be a medium you can't have like um action at a distance without some physical medium connecting stuff so it's like you can't hear anything without the medium of air you know to transmit the sound waves aristotelian physics thought that was true of everything which incidentally is why uh isaac newton got accused of natural magic when he proposed gravity because it could work across a vacuum and so he was accused of this spooky action at a distance with his magical gravity but a quiet what aquinas said is so the soul gets moved by hatred and it infects the hatred infects the eyes and then the eyes transmit the harmful stuff through the air until they strike the victim of the evil eye wow powerful so hate hate laser beams basically hate laser beam would that be like going to a red sox game at yankee crowd stadium the crowd just starts evil eyeing the other team and they end up breaking down and making a mistake i i my knowledge of sports is limited but that sounds accurate i'm pulling that into you out of the golf course delacross [Laughter] [Music] jimmy we one last day i guess yeah and only because you promised it and this is not a promise i could not let uh not cash in demon babies oh yeah sure i know this is the thing i've been really kind of like i don't know anything about demon babies besides sometimes when uh you know go to maybe one of my friend's house and their kids are acting up that's about the only demon babies i know there is a demon baby in the passion i believe there is yeah in the passion mel gibson's the passion of the christ oh that little demon babe was terrible oh my gosh yeah i know yeah it's like right up your spine man so so on this question aquinas considers well could there be uh could there be babies that where like human women have been impregnated by demons and this is actually something that has been wondered about for a long time because if you go back into the old testament in genesis 6 there's this mysterious story where the sons of god take wives from the daughters of men and there are born to them the nephilim and nephilim is an aramaic word that means giants and so this is people have said well this is the explanation for for why there were some giant people in the bible like goliath you know um that they were their ancestors weren't fully human they were angelic sons of god and and uh the the and and there's a very interesting case to be made for that in cr which is really surprising i also have an episode of mysterious world on the nephilim where i talk about this um and but if you read the literature of this period it actually supports that view now when the age of the church fathers came along there was a kind of reevaluation of that because they didn't have all the ancient near eastern literature that they were reading um and there was a question of well okay so if demons are are and are uncreated intellects how could they how could they impregnate somebody well one of the things that aquinas and others said is demons can assume temporary physical forms and these physical forms that were referred to as aerial bodies the idea was they use the matter in the air to make a temporary body and then when they're done with it it dissolves and so that they could physically interact with people through these temporary assumed bodies but then there's a question how far can they duplicate what humans can do with their bodies aquinas was of the opinion that they couldn't really reproduce that they couldn't um that they they they couldn't manipulate matter in such a way as to actually reproduce frankly i'm not sure why he thought that you know because if they can manipulate matter why can't they why can't they go all the way um but uh and we know they can manipulate matters so without a divine revelation of their limits i wouldn't know what their telekinetic limits are but in any event aquinas said he didn't think that they could actually impregnate anybody but he thought they could do it indirectly because there are all these reports in the literature of the period of demons showing up in various forms and having relations with human beings so an incubus shows up and has relations with the woman a succubus shows up and has relations with a man and aquinas's idea was okay so you could have a demon show up as a succubus and get the germ cells needed from a man and then take those germ cells appear as an incubus have relations with the woman and use the germ cells you got from the man and the woman can become pregnant but aquinas's point even though he thinks this happens he credits the reports of this happening he's his ultimate point is the baby is still a human because even though there were demons involved as kind of ivf guys ivf lab technicians really it's still the son of a man hmm wow that sounds like a soap opera i'm telling you man or like a netflix series my goodness like that's just it's like a big demon shape-shifting multi-gendered relationship that results in a little damien baby i mean except some mysterious stuff yeah except aquinas would because aquinas doesn't think that you that the demons could really manipulate the the baby so it's still really a human baby it's got a human soul you baptize it it's a little bitty christian and everything is fine hmm we got a bad lot of babies man [Laughter] well jimmy this was incredibly insane we got to have jimmy back on for some more man this is right up our alley this is yeah this is perfect jimmy you know so you've got a lot of answers in the catholic faith you've got catholic answers how how can other people uh you know how can our people get in touch with you do you have a web domain how you know you've got your podcast how can we get in touch with you yeah so um so uh check out uh catholic.com that's catholic answers website where i work people can also check out jimmy aiken.com my last name is very easy it's a lot easier than people think it is because they want to add all kinds of extra letters to it it's just four letters a k i n just like it sounds akin so go to jimmyakin.com and you can check out all the kind of stuff i'm doing on my own including uh my podcast jimmy akins mysterious world it's available wherever you get podcasts it's available on youtube we have all kinds of uh interesting episodes what we do on that show is we look at mysteries from the perspectives of faith and reason and we look at both natural mysteries and we look at supernatural mysteries so we did a pair of episodes these are episodes 105 and 106 on aquinas in the occult so you can go back and listen to those for even more detail as i mentioned we did one on the nephilim we have just a whole bunch of stuff it comes out every friday this last friday we did a medical mystery from the 1990s that was the toxic woman medical mystery that was so bizarre it helped inspired an x-files episode and over the next two weeks we're going to be doing an interview with one of the government's former military psychic spies and as always we treat all these mysteries from both the perspective of reason what would reason have to say about this and the perspective of faith what would faith have to say with the catholic faith specifically have to say about this continues to guide us guide our church feed us in razio faith and reason it is such a blessing to have you on the show now sheila i think you're you were just about to share something i was just gonna say the reason you know when we're going down to record in florida and you guys like do you want to fly i'm like no i'll drive this because i want to spend a couple hours listening to jimmy akins podcast uh mysterious world's awesome uh jimmy just you know like like you heard of this episode breaking it down very reasonably but very um attuned to that there is you know some mysterious stuff out in this world and it's not all just physical there is a supernatural world um if you're interested in that kind of stuff seriously there'll be a link on catholictalkshow.com you can subscribe to his podcast you can find out his work um with catholic answers and then also our sponsors hollow and catholic monthly and um you know something that shouldn't be mysterious and won't result in demon babies or curse it would be going to patreon.com catholictalkshow and finding different ways that you could support us instead of giving us the evil eye through the scream right father rich that's absolutely right and we've got some swag for people that support the show let me tell you i had a buddy of mine one of our parishioners here at st john paul ii wearing his catholic talk show hoodie on a plane in atlanta and they were like there are three guys hey you watched the catholic talk show my brothers and sisters this is amazing stuff to talk about each and every episode we want to thank you so much for following us and having us on your commute or your morning routine we want to wish you all the very best but most importantly we want to wish you a greater relationship with jesus christ and we are calling out for that so as we pray together let's finish this episode with philippians chapter 2 on unity and humility the name of jesus christ that is above every other name have this in mind in you which was also in christ jesus who though he was by nature god did not consider himself equal to god being equal to god a thing to be clung to that we could actually understand it but emptied himself taking the nature of a slave and being made like unto men and appearing in the form of man he humbled himself becoming obedient to death and even death on the cross therefore god also has exalted him and has bestowed upon him the name that is above every name so that at the name of jesus every knee should bend of those in heaven on earth and under the earth and every tongue should confess that the lord jesus christ is in the glory of god the father amen amen god bless you let's keep our unity and our humility first at hand and god bless you and we'll see you next week peace [Applause] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: The Catholic Talk Show

Views: 36,006

Rating: 4.9109178 out of 5

Keywords: Catholic, Catholic Podcast, Catholic Talk Show, Ryan Scheel, Ryan DellaCrosse, Father Rich Pagano, Catholic Radio, Catholic TV, Catholic Show, Matt Fradd, Mike Schmitz, Robert Barron, Catholic Answers, Catholic Stuff You Should Know, Bishop Barron, Breaking In The Habit, Occult, Black Magic, Astrology, Jimmy Akin, Mysterious World, Amulets, Ghosts, Demon Babies, Satanism, Satanic, Evil, Ouija Board

Id: I48XEUAnrKg

Length: 61min 14sec (3674 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 07 2021