Years ago, while traveling with my children in Africa, I heard about a Catholic charity that ran a home for witches. That sounded mysterious and interesting, so we stopped for an afternoon to visit. It was a rough compound where perhaps a hundred rather forlorn old women sat on the dirt floor staring into space or working with spindles and looms, mumbling to themselves. A few old men, too, sat with vacant stares.
In parts of Africa, it is not uncommon that a village will fix on an old woman as a witch--when a child dies or a cow wanders off, for example. Sometimes the witch is a man, even a child. The accused "witches" are expelled from the village, banished forever and left alone to die. A Catholic organization had stepped in to establish a refuge for them. I felt sadness, watching what seemed an ill-equipped home for the elderly and incapacitated, and admired the compassion of the nuns who were dedicated to their welfare. But I was shocked later to find that my colleagues, highly educated and intelligent though they were, were convinced that the mumblings we heard were curses, and believed that I had endangered my children by taking them there.
Memories of this visit to the home for witches were revived when Pope Benedict XVI spoke about witchcraft during his African visit in March. His message was that the Church must combat ancient superstitions with its teachings.
For all the surface rationality and modernity of lives everywhere, fear of witches is still widespread, a reminder that ancient superstitions are durable and widespread, triggered especially by fear of the unknown. In Africa, the juxtaposition of magic and reality is in your face, in markets where gris-gris (an extraordinary range of products used to ward off, or bring down, evil spirits) sit side by side with Chinese-made plastic cookware and corn and onions. But nowhere is the tendency to find a witch, to blame someone no matter how flimsy the evidence, very far away.
Throughout history, hard times have sparked sharp increases in superstition. Witch hunts seem to be part of crisis and turmoil. We are surely seeing that today and will see more as the economic and social storms intensify.
Accountability is a term on everyone's lips these days. As people cope with skyrocketing food prices, home foreclosures, sudden pink slips, and the disappearance of life savings in a shrinking retirement or college fund, they want to know who is responsible, whom to blame for the cataclysm. There's a real danger in this atmosphere that we will revert to ancient instincts to find the witches among us.
Now more than ever, though, we need to resist these tendencies. We must not assign blame in haste, anger, and fear. We do need to delve deep to understand the root causes of the crises we face. There is plenty of blame to assign. But if we revert to the collective fears that drive us to witch hunts we will not find the sober intelligence and wisdom we need to find our way out of crisis.
