What matters is to grow the group and make the “business” more profitable. Fidelity to Christ, to His Gospel and to His Church is of no interest. That is why there are so many sects. It is the law of supply and demand.

Religion as a public matter

In ancient times each people had “its own” religion. This represented the soul of the people and expressed its deepest values, its enigmas and aspirations. Any attack against religion was regarded as an attack against the people itself, and therefore the guilty party became deserving of the harshest punishments.

In Greece, for example, the great philosopher Socrates was condemned to death for a religious reason. By teaching young people to reason, he pushed them to “doubt” certain religious beliefs, which earned him death.

Persecution

Rome in itself considered itself tolerant in the religious sphere toward all the peoples it had subjected. It allowed them to keep their “gods,” on condition that they accepted the superiority of the Roman religion, in which Rome itself was regarded as the supreme divinity.

When the general Pompey (63 B.C.) annexed the province of Judea to Rome, the religious problem arose, since the Jews refused to acknowledge any god other than Yahweh. Nevertheless the problem was soon solved, since the Jews were not proselytizers by nature, feeling satisfied to be, they alone, the “chosen people.” For this reason Rome easily allowed them to continue with their religious beliefs, since they represented no danger to others. The problem became great when Christianity appeared, with an irrepressible missionary zeal. To Rome it seemed that this could represent a serious danger to the future of the empire, since the new religion aimed at undermining the very foundations of the state, represented by its religion. For this reason it responded with a fierce persecution, which lasted almost three hundred years with continual ups and downs.

Official Religion

At last, in the year 313 A.D., the emperor Constantine decreed freedom of worship, upon recognizing the futility of the persecution, since the new religion was prospering more each day anyway, and upon realizing that it managed to form honest and hardworking citizens who loved their homeland and progress.

Such was the enthusiasm for becoming a Christian that within a short time almost all Roman citizens joined the Church, leaving few followers of the old cult. These normally lived in the little towns far from civilization. From then on the word “pagan” (pagus = village) began to be used in the sense of non-Christian. With this new reality in mind, Catholicism was soon regarded as the official religion of the empire. After the fall of the caesars (476 A.D.) and the rise of the new kingdoms that took their place, Catholicism continued to be regarded as the official religion. Based on the ancient custom of considering religion a public and not a private matter, the following juridical principle was gradually formulated: “Cuius regio, eius religio” (whose the region, his the religion), according to which the subject was obliged to hold the religion of the king. Where the king was Catholic, all were obliged to be Catholic; where the king was Lutheran, all were obliged to be Lutheran; where the king was Anglican, all were obliged to be Anglican, etc. For those who would not obey, the death penalty was applied.

Religious Freedom

In the Catholic regions there were normally no great problems in this regard. Where there were great problems was in the countries ruled by Protestant or Anglican kings. Following the Lutheran principle of the free interpretation of the Bible, groups of believers dissatisfied with the official religion soon began to arise, provoking a strong repression on the part of the governments.

To escape persecution and be able to live their faith in peace, many fled to the English colonies of North America. Once there, people who were generally fleeing persecution on account of their faith established the principle of religious freedom, which, when the United States became independent from England, became law. Already in Europe many thinkers were struggling in the same direction. In this way, little by little the principle of religious freedom made its way until it became a universal principle, with rare exceptions, especially in the Muslim sphere.

Explosion of the sects

Up to this point everything seems logical and positive. The problem arose when religion began to be considered like any other business, a commercial enterprise made of supply and demand, marketing and the pursuit of profit as the determining element.

What now matters is no longer the sense of fidelity to Christ, His Gospel and His Church. What matters is to increase the membership, to win people over by any means whatever, to collect as many goods as possible. Evidently, in the whole affair there is no lack of serious persons who sincerely seek God; nevertheless, the general impression is that the founders and leaders of the sects seem more like businessmen than prophets, more expert in psychology and oratory than in Bible and asceticism.

Return to the sacred

After the failure of the ideologies and the boredom caused by the insatiable pursuit of pleasure, we are witnessing a general phenomenon of following the sacred and the spiritual. Nevertheless, this return is not taking place by way of the historical churches, in attachment to the rational and the revealed, but rather as a response of man himself to his longing for security and his search for meaning in life, dabbling in everything from the Bible to the Eastern religions, paganism, esotericism, occultism, gnosis, psychology, etc.

For this reason, today the Catholic must become more critical toward the religious phenomenon, becoming aware of the risks entailed by an approach to that phenomenon without specific preparation in this regard.

The fact is that many who at first seemed very tolerant in the religious sphere, after having naively adhered to one of these new groups, turned into extremely sectarian, fanatical and fiercely anti-Catholic people.

What would have happened if, before blindly getting into one of these new religious systems, they had known something about their own Church? Without doubt they would not have let themselves be so easily convinced.

Conclusion

The sects are not as good as they seem at first sight or as they would have us understand. In them there is a bit of everything: good faith, search for meaning in life, spirituality, the overcoming of certain negative attitudes; but at the same time there is also deceit, exploitation, alienation and the pursuit of power. Therefore, if we are truly committed to the concrete human being, we cannot dispense with an attentive analysis of this phenomenon which, beneath the mantle of a profound religiosity, hides the most varied interests, at times totally contrary to the ideals proclaimed in words.

Author: Fr. Flaviano Amatulli Valente