The Serpent in the Yoga Studio: One Priest’s Reckoning With the New Age

Newsroom (15/05/2026 Gaudium Press )  Millions of Catholics today begin their mornings on a yoga mat, close their eyes for a guided mindfulness session at lunch, or seek healing through Reiki in the afternoon. For many, these practices feel no more religiously fraught than a cup of herbal tea. For Fr. Gustavo Lombardo, an Argentine priest of the Institute of the Incarnate Word (IVE) currently based in Spain, they represent something altogether more serious — a quiet but consequential defection from the faith.

Lombardo has spent two decades preaching the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, including through his long-running website Ejercicios Espirituales Online, launched in 2007. Over time, something alarmed him: across Spain, retreat centers rooted in Ignatian spirituality were blending those very Exercises with New Age practices — yoga, Zen meditation, mindfulness. His academic investigation into that phenomenon, pursued through a master’s degree in Social Sciences and Humanities at Abat Oliba CEU University in Barcelona, has now become a book: Turning Our Backs on God: A Discernment Guide for the New Age, Yoga, and Other Postmodern Spiritualities.

The result is equal parts theological scholarship, cultural critique, and pastoral warning — a 460-page argument that the spiritual landscape many Catholics navigate daily is far less neutral than it appears.

Gnosticism With a Wellness Label

The book’s central thesis is deceptively simple: the New Age is not new. In Lombardo’s framing, it is the resurrection of ancient Gnosticism — the claim to achieve divinity through purely natural means — now wearing the language of wellness, science, and self-care. Its intellectual genealogy, he argues, runs through Kabbalah and Freemasonry to the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky, and its animating philosophical convictions are pantheism (everything is God) and monism (no real distinction between Creator and creature).

These convictions, Lombardo insists, are not peripheral features of New Age practice but its very foundation — and they stand in direct contradiction to Catholic doctrine. The Holy See reached a similar conclusion in 2003, when it published the document Jesus Christ, Bearer of the Water of Life, explicitly warning of the New Age’s incompatibility with the faith. That document, in Lombardo’s telling, has been widely ignored.

The Problem With Yoga

The book’s longest chapter is devoted to yoga, and Lombardo anticipates the most common objection before it is raised: that yoga can be practiced “just as physical exercise,” stripped of its spiritual content. He finds that argument undermined by yoga’s own masters.

He draws extensively on the testimony of Fr. Joseph-Marie Verlinde, a Belgian scientist who spent three years as a disciple of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India before eventually becoming a Catholic priest. Verlinde recounts his teacher’s amusement at Western practitioners who believed they were simply stretching. The guru’s point was precise: the techniques produce their spiritual effects regardless of the practitioner’s intentions or awareness.

For Lombardo, this is the theological crux. Yoga, properly understood, is a path toward merging with an impersonal divine — a dissolution of individual personhood into a universal force. That destination is the inverse of the Christian vision, which is built on a personal relationship between a created soul and a personal God. The techniques, he argues, cannot be severed from the religious system that generates them without misunderstanding both.

Mindfulness: A Rebranding, Not a Reinvention

Mindfulness presents a different challenge. Where yoga is visibly rooted in Hindu tradition, mindfulness has been successfully repositioned as a clinical, secular intervention — taught in hospitals, schools, and corporate wellness programs with the imprimatur of peer-reviewed research. Lombardo subjects that repositioning to scrutiny.

The practice originated as a Buddhist meditation technique aimed at achieving enlightenment. Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh introduced it to Western audiences in the 1960s. It was then Jon Kabat-Zinn who, beginning in the late 1970s, stripped the practice of its religious labeling to make it palatable to medical institutions. Yet Kabat-Zinn himself, Lombardo notes, has acknowledged that mindfulness is “the heart of Buddhist meditation.” The secularization, on that account, was cosmetic.

Lombardo also cites Pope John Paul II’s characterization of Buddhism as “largely an atheistic system” whose path to salvation is “contrary” to the Christian one — a theological judgment that, for Lombardo, applies directly to practices derived from Buddhist contemplative tradition.

“The Reiki practitioner opens themselves to a ‘universal life energy’ of indeterminate origin, suspending critical judgment. Since this force does not come from God or grace, this openness leaves the subject exposed to the influences of the evil one, who, as Saint Paul says, ‘disguises himself as an angel of light.'” — Fr. Gustavo Lombardo

Reiki occupies its own chapter, and Lombardo is careful to distinguish his critique from cruder dismissals. The danger, he explains, is not that practitioners consciously invoke demonic forces. The mechanism is subtler: by opening oneself to a “universal life energy” of undefined origin — suspending the critical faculties in a state of receptive passivity — the practitioner creates a spiritual vulnerability. Since that energy, Lombardo argues, cannot be identified with divine grace, the opening it creates can be exploited by what Saint Paul describes as the one who “disguises himself as an angel of light.”

Several exorcists, Lombardo reports, have documented cases they associate with yoga and related practices. He cites the late Fr. Gabriele Amorth, widely regarded as the world’s most prominent exorcist, as well as Fr. Chad Ripperger in the United States and exorcists in Mexico, Spain, Chile, and Canada. Fr. Verlinde himself, he notes, discovered he was possessed during a Mass celebrated by an exorcist, after years of dedicated yoga practice.

The Infiltration of Catholic Theology

The book’s most provocative section may be its fourth, in which Lombardo turns his analysis inward — examining the penetration of New Age ideas into explicitly Catholic theological writing. He focuses on two figures: Pablo d’Ors, a secular priest from Madrid, and Javier Melloni, a Spanish Jesuit.

In d’Ors’s work, Lombardo identifies a spirituality in which conscience displaces God, sin is recast as ignorance rather than moral failure, suffering loses its redemptive character, and salvation is achieved through “inner awakening” rather than grace. That framework, Lombardo argues, is Gnostic, monistic, and pantheistic — however Catholic the vocabulary in which it is expressed.

Melloni, he contends, dissolves the unique divinity of Christ into a “cosmic Christ” accessible through all religious traditions, and explicitly proposes integrating Ignatian Exercises with Eastern practices — a synthesis Lombardo regards as a fundamental distortion of both.

The Teilhard Question

A dedicated chapter addresses the theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose influence on New Age thought Lombardo documents through a striking data point: Marilyn Ferguson, whose 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy became an informal New Age manifesto, cited Teilhard twenty-six times and identified him — through a survey of over two hundred movement figures — as the single most cited intellectual influence among self-described “Aquarian Conspirators,” surpassing Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, and Abraham Maslow.

Lombardo pushes back against any suggestion that the Church has since rehabilitated Teilhard. The Holy Office issued a decree in 1957 ordering his books removed from seminaries and Catholic bookstores. A formal Monitum followed in 1962, declaring that his works “abound in ambiguities and even serious errors that offend Catholic doctrine.” That warning, Lombardo emphasizes, has never been revoked — a fact he regards as directly relevant to contemporary programs that propose undertaking the Spiritual Exercises “according to Teilhard de Chardin.”

An Unexpected Frontier: The Alien Phenomenon

One of the book’s more unexpected chapters examines the extraterrestrial phenomenon, which Lombardo situates within the larger New Age cosmology. “Beings of light,” “ascended masters,” and channeled communications from other worlds, he argues, are not fringe curiosities but integrated elements of a coherent Gnostic worldview. He treats the alien narrative as a tool of social engineering with preternatural dimensions — another piece, he writes, of the same ancient puzzle.

The Antidote: Ignatian Discernment

Despite the gravity of the threats he catalogs, Lombardo ends on a note of theological confidence. The final chapter, titled “You Are Strong!,” is an exhortation rather than a warning. Catholics who know their faith and live it, he argues, have nothing to fear from the New Age. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, properly undertaken, are in his view the most powerful available antidote — precisely because they do not offer techniques for self-transformation but bring the soul into direct encounter with the person of Christ.

In the prologue, Fr. Miguel Ángel Fuentes, IVE, captures the book’s animating conviction: what presents itself as spiritually novel is, in the end, “only nostalgia and revival of ancient paganism, esotericism, occultism and gnosticism that the light of the Gospel managed to partially dispel for some centuries and that now looms again over the world darkened by the twilight of the civilization we are living in.”

For Lombardo, the task is simply to name that reality clearly — and to point, again, toward the face that was always there to be contemplated.