Madrid, Spain, Nov 28, 2024 / 07:30 am (CNA).
The Spanish Bishops’ Conference has published a doctrinal note criticizing the practice of so-called “intergenerational healing” or “healing of the family tree” promoted by some Catholic priests.
The doctrinal note was published in response to these practices “in some Spanish dioceses, especially in the area of prayers and retreats organized by new religious movements of a charismatic nature.”
After receiving reports from various experts “in the fields of dogmatic theology, spiritual theology and psychology,” the conference’s Commission for the Doctrine of the Faith prepared the text that was approved for publication.
The doctrinal note identifies as originators of these practices Anglican missionary Kenneth McAll, Claretian religious John Hampsch and Catholic priest Robert DeGrandis of the Society of St. Joseph, “who has popularized the practice in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal due to his involvement in it.”
These authors teach “the intergenerational transmission of sin and, correlatively, the possibility of intergenerational healing.” The way to “cure” physical and mental illnesses resulting from the sins of ancestors consists of “identifying the sin in one’s own family tree” and breaking “the bond of sin” through “intercession, exorcisms and, especially, the celebration of a Eucharist,” which results in a supposed healing, the doctrinal note explains.
The bishops warn that “merging aspects proper to the Catholic faith with others that are foreign to it, results in a syncretism that appears Catholic with aspects that concern, explicitly or implicitly, questions of eschatology,” as well as ecclesiology, anthropology, and the theology of the sacraments.
The magisterium of the Catholic Church on sin
In the doctrinal note, the Spanish bishops emphasize some magisterial points to be taken into account on the question of “intergenerational healing.”
First, they state that “sin is always personal and requires a free decision of the will. The same is true of the punishment for sin. It always involved personal responsibility.”
In connection with this, they note that “the only sin that is transmitted from generation to generation is original sin,” but they also point out that this transmission occurs “in an analogous way,” that it does not have the character of personal guilt and that its punishment “does not pass on” to the next generation.
The prelates explain in the second instance that although in the Old Testament it is affirmed “that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children,” this conception of corporate responsibility, “which called into question the justice of God,” evolved “making man responsible for his own destiny”.
“In the New Testament Jesus rejected the concept of a hereditary transmission of sin, breaking with the logic of ‘personal and collective guilt-punishment’ in the well-known scene of the healing of the man born blind,” the bishops explain.
Baptism, Eucharist and intergenerational healing
The Spanish bishops also point out that it’s not possible to “maintain there is an intergenerational transmission of sin without contradicting the Catholic doctrine on Baptism,” the sacrament in which “the forgiveness of all sins occurs.”
Regarding the Eucharist, the prelates note that “the so-called ‘Masses of healing or deliverance,’ closely linked to the practice of intergenerational healing,” are not found in the Roman Ritual and therefore “the introduction of such intentions into the scope of the celebration of the Holy Mass seriously changes the nature of and distorts the Eucharistic celebration.”
The doctrinal note also refers to prayer meetings “whose purpose is to obtain from God the healing of the sick,” to reaffirm that, although “any member of the faithful can freely lift up prayers to God asking for healing,” when it comes to meetings “they must be subject to the supervision of the local Ordinary.”
“These prayers for healing, as well as prayers for exorcism, liturgical or non-liturgical, cannot be introduced into the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, the sacraments and the Liturgy of the Hours,” they specify.
In conclusion, the Spanish bishops affirmed that “basing ourselves on the Word of God, we wish to affirm that you can’t be guilty of someone else’s sins you had nothing to do with nor can anyone be held responsible for the sins of previous generations, but that each person is responsible for his own life and his own sins.”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Spanish bishops have a just cause in addressing a trend that, although it may possess degrees of value, poses the danger of becoming a sect, cultic in form. Who the bishops, CNA attribute its origins seems related to generational concepts of sins passed on as a curse.
Exorcist Fr Amorth referred to curses inflicted on progeny by evil forebearers that could be alleviated by exorcism. That may have truth. It may not. If we pursue addressing it as a dimension of faith practice we open the Church to occultism. As Spanish bishops assert we don’t find evidence in scripture or Apostolic tradition. It opens the mind to fears and false beliefs that bad habits, physical impediments result from previous evil rather than the weakening of the will in resisting sin, or humbly accepting impediments due to accidents of nature. It reduces receiving the Eucharist to acquiring relief from natural impediments, habitual sin without the requirement of personal effort.
But we are often, individually and as a human community, affected negatively by the sins of others. For instance, a person who grows up in a household full of pornography as a few of my acquaintances did, is going to suffer psychologically at least from the side effects of being in that atmosphere. Does not that damage call for some spiritual healing? I get that they are not guilty of their father’s sins, but those sins may well have affected them greatly, and that calls for an effort to heal them of the damage of the father’s sins, does it not? It would have been helpful if the bishops had acknowledged this sort of thing and used that fact to draw some distinctions about the effects of sin downstream or corollary from the original actor.
I can believe that this is an issue that needed to be addressed, so do not mean general criticism, but, at least as summarized here, there are a plethora of related questions that might be asked and addressed.
Well said, Mark.
Yours truly agrees about “being affected negatively by the sins of others” (or positively by acts of virtue). The article addresses only the case of false intergenerational guilt for past sins, but does not speak to the “healing of memories” that might actually be intergenerational. Yes? Not only the “father’s sins,” but also the great grandfather or before? How differently might we ourselves feel even subconsciously if, say, the Luther rupture point in Christian history (affecting the Communion of Saints?) had turned differently?
Or, at least, through the openness of prayer cannot a person become spiritually insightful about how a current situation or resentment traces back to actions made by family members or others unknown in past generations? Not a theologian, but a novelist, gives us this kind of depth perception. Georges Bernanos:
“‘We couldn’t go on living if we thought of such things. ”No madame, I don’t think we could. I don’t suppose if God had given us the clear knowledge of how closely we [all of us] are bound to one another, both in good and evil, that we could go on living, as you say'” (“Diary of a Country Priest”).
Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, an Exorcist at the Saint Michael Center in NYC, holds monthly Deliverance sessions on YouTube.
In each of those sessions, he devotes a section to Deliverance from Generational curses.
I highly recommend these sessions as I have found them to be helpful for me.
See: https://www.catholicexorcism.org/prayers-for-priest-exorcists
I don’t know who is more worthy of condemnation: the priests who preach intergenerational sin or the prelates who claim that divine revelation “evolves”, implying either that there is no objective revelation (and a rupture between the Old and New Testament).
It is very bizarre that this notion of “generational curses” or “generational spirits” has made such in-roads in the traditional Catholic community over the last decade or so, given that it first came into Catholicism from Pentecostalism via the Charistmatic Movement. Oddly, the main “traditional” proponents of this novel theory (both clerical and lay) never acknowledge this fact, nor do they explain how their “version” is different (if indeed it is). At the most, they claim that their theory is “compatible” with Catholic doctrine, but they cannot point to any Church document or standard pre-Vatican II manual of spiritual theology which endorses their view. The more common explanation when pushed is to say that they learned it from the devil (!) during exorcisms. The difference between Modernism and Catholicism is that Catholicism derives its beliefs from attested revelation whereas Modernism derives its beliefs from “experience.” The whole thing has a very gnostic feel about it. There is no doubt that grave sin – especially repeated grave sins against the First Commandment – can open the door to extraordinary diabolical influence, but the idea that it habitually happens that a person, without any act of the will on his part, can become afflicted because of the sin of another (even in the case of a “curse”) is repugnant. I do not doubt for a moment that the *devil* acts this way (legalistically claiming a right to obsess or harm a person on the basis of a blood oath or whatever rashly taken by one of his ancestors), but the devil can only act with God’s permission, and the idea that *God* acts this way (seemingly throwing up His hands as if baptism and the other sacraments and the normal life of grace are not enought to protect His beloved children and that He, God, has not choice but to respect the rights of the devil) is absolutely preposterous.
Fully on board with the Spanish bishops, that no one is responsible for the sins of another, might we still flip the coin to consider, instead, how unified we are in the grace of the Holy Spirit?
This from St. Peter Damian (d. 1072):
“The Church of Christ is united by a bond of mutual love so strong that not only is it a single entity [!] subsisting in many members, but in each member [!] it is also mysteriously present in its plenitude. So it is that the entire universal Church is rightly said to be the one an only bride of Christ, and each person [!], through the mystery of the sacrament, is believed to be the Church in its fulness [!]. One in all and entire in each, holy Church is single in the plurality of its members thanks to the unity of faith, and manifold in each of them thanks to the one of charity and the diversity of charisms, for they all come from One.
“[….] If those who believe in Christ are one, then through the mystery of the sacrament the entire body is present where bodily eyes see but a single member [!]. Solitude prevents no one from speaking in the plural; nor is it inappropriate for the multitude of believers to speak in the singular, for through the power of the Holy Spirit, who is present in each and fills all, it is clear that the solitude is full of people and the multitude forms a unity.”
NOW, we also believe that this Communion of Saints is trans-generational, even as invoked in each Mass. But, also, that there is—from “the beginning”—a universal and catastrophic fracture. (No exemptions except for the Incarnation and the Immaculate Conception.) And, as the bishops recall, the name for this doctrine is Original Sin. So, yes, we are not accountable for the sins of our ancestors, and yet even with the sacraments there remains a personal predisposition or tendency of concupiscence which is understood as the effect of Original Sin.
As a science, theology includes crucial subtleties….
Where Luther got it wrong was to conclude that now we are depraved through and through, but for the totally gratuitous role of added grace—even without works. The Catholic doctrine, instead, is that each of us remains fundamentally good as originally created, and therefore capable of walking in cooperation with graces given. That is, we are not knee-capped by the actual sins of earlier generations.
Such Pharisaically-issued diktats from those who have neither spiritual insight nor personal experience, just like those Spanish Bishops making lofty proclamations from their gold-leafed cathedra.
I have trouble believing that the bishops of Spain are of any higher caliber, character or holiness than the most of the mediocrity that we have in the US.
We are learning more about generational curses and the demonic which can and sometimes does get passed down through generations.
I’ve been there, experienced that.
Please watch this very short but very insightful denerational deliverance prayer by Msgr. Rossetti of the St. Michael Center in NYC:
https://youtu.be/CE3qeshUZD8
Might the Spanish bishops and others pause and consider.
The Lord said the world is subject to Satan and this would include time also a creation. The “higher” devils would know how to impress upon our inherited defects and even our good sense and thus enliven linkages in their intrinsically oppressing familiarities and other such of the kind.
Isn’t there the recognition that children and the generational line inherit or suffer curses and oppressions etc., from their Freemasonic parentage or forebears who dabbled in occult. “The children’s teeth are on edge ….. ”
I had this reflection on Valtorta’s recounting how objects got away from Jesus as he worked in his father’s carpentry jobs and his own, in the shop. The Lord is without fault and yet things without willpower had a mind of their own. He would have the human sense of it and the Divine one: they would show their track and power and He with power could track what they showed. What they “willed” to do is all that they could do, slip, knock, fall, bounce, pitch, break, multiply noise, come to a rest, set up to repeat.
Didn’t our Lord attend to souls who were completely and totally beside themselves, utterly powerless and put out by their own derangements on account of so much helplessness and confounding.
The various dimension-ing in/to Original Sin and its fall-out/work-out through ages. But Jesus Christ, You are the Lord of the Ages and Every Age, the Lord of All Sway and Era.
I agree at least every bishop should be concerned who is purporting to do exorcism. So then there is an urgent sense in which these kinds of prayers and group involvements, often in Mass, on topic in the article, above, have to be taken in hand.
Elias, with respect to your reference to “[the fathers have eaten sour grapes and] the children’s teeth are on edge,” this does reflect a belief among some ancient Jews, but God specifically CORRECTS them for this error and tells them NOT to say that: “And the word of the Lord came to me, saying: What is the meaning? That you use among you this parable as a proverb in the land of Israel, saying: The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children are set on edge. As I live, saith the Lord God, **this parable shall be no more to you a proverb in Israel**” (Ezekiel 18:1-3). All the more so now in the New Covenant that our Lord has cast out the “prince of this world”!
Thank you Peter, I would accept to stand corrected but I see the Scripture meaning as nuanced. It is not saying we are not affected, only that we face penalty on one’s own account. It is further nuanced for what is portended for the reign of the Saviour as we are discussing it, Who comes to unburden not simply spare.
We are and can be affected yet we are held to account on personal responsibility.
Dt. 24:16, 2 Kg. 14:6, 2 Chr. 25:4, Ez. 18:20
Jer. 31:21-30
Prv. 30:11-14
Mr. Rasavage, I am sorry to learn of the spiritual calamites you have experienced. With respect, however, the assertion of the bishops of Spain (and of other theologians who have raised concerns with the “generational spirits” theory) is that this opinion cannot be found in Catholic doctrine. In spiritual theology, there is indeed a practical aspect based on common experience (especially the mystical experiences of the canonized saints), but like every branch of Catholic theology, opinions and teachings in this domain MUST be based on revealed Catholic doctrine in order to be entertained and understood correctly. The following are serious questions and are not meant to provoke you in any way; sincerely, I am trying to understand your point of view. Aside from subjective experience, where in Catholic doctrine (Scipture, Tradition, Magisterium) do you find evidence for this belief system? How can it be shown to be at least implicitly contained in continuous Catholic doctrine, as opposed to being a novelty (whether an absolute innovation or imported from Pentecostalism)? What exactly do you *mean* by “generational curse” or “generational spirit”? (Different proponents might mean different things, and I am sincerely wondering what you take it to mean, so that we are not just talking past each other.) How does generational sin relate to and contrast with original sin and concupiscence? How exactly is it transmitted? In other words, are we talking about an actual personal demon (a “spirit” in the strict sense, therefore) that literally attaches itself to a physical bloodline and DNA? Why does God allow this sort of affliction to come to a person who is not personally guilty of sin? Does the devil actually have acquired rights that God is obliged to respect? Finally, if you are holding up your own experience as a proof, how do we adjudicate between different experiences to get at the actual truth (which implies a reality beyond ourselves)? Plenty of exorcists are on the record as warning *against* this generational spirit stuff. I personally know several good priests whose judgment I trust, who have told me that in *their* pastoral experience, spiritual problems have occurred with some of their parishioners not from *having* generational spirits but from *believing* in them and therefore getting tied up in knots in their spiritual lives because of attributing all ills to an outside force and expecting everything to be fixed by the “right” deliverance prayer rather than putting in the humdrum everyday Christian work of prayer, the sacraments, daily battle against one’s predominant vice and careful attention to the duties of one’s state. Although it is not impossible that God’s inscrutable providence in isolated cases could allow this sort of obsession for a greater good that only He knows, a generalized belief in generational spirits has the effect of making people paranoid in their spiritual lives and taking away their own responsibility. The classical rules of the discernment of spirits which are a commonplace of traditional Catholic spiritual theology do not allude to anything resembling this novel theory of generational spirits. AT BEST, the *possibility* of generational spirits is a permitted theological opinion, but its proponents speak of it as if it is a matter of course and then fail or refuse to demonstrate where it is found in actual Catholic doctrine but then lash out at anyone who questions it. That is what we are objecting to.