The Cine Teatro Salesianos de Vigo, owned by the congregation founded by Saint John Bosco and located a few meters from the María Auxiliadora school run by the religious order on Venezuela Street, will host the show Mediumnidad by Argentine medium Noelia Pace next Saturday, October 17 at 8:00 p.m. Tickets, at 52.80 euros, are still available on the salesian theater’s own website.
A spiritism session with a Salesian seal
The Cine Teatro Salesianos website does not disguise the content of the event. It describes the evening as «a unique proposal that combines spirituality, reflection and healing», in which the audience «feels and vibrates with the souls» and learns «to coexist with the souls» and to «identify the signs of the beyond». Pace presents herself as a medium, tarot reader, seer and astrologer; in Argentina she has made her fortune on television programs and podcasts, where she transmits messages from deceased relatives to emotional presenters and boasts of having predicted the outcome of the World Cup final.
Her Spanish tour, from October 12 to 27, passes through Bilbao, Santander, La Coruña, Santiago de Compostela, Vigo, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Palma de Mallorca, Alicante and Murcia. In all those cities she performs in commercial venues. Only in Vigo does she do so under a Catholic roof.
What the Church says
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is categorical: all forms of divination and «the evocation of the dead» must be rejected, because they conceal «a desire for power over time, history and men» and contradict the honor due to God alone (n. 2116). Spiritism, adds number 2117, often involves a divinatory or magical practice, and the Church warns the faithful to guard against it.
There is, therefore, little room for ambiguity. What is announced in the theater of the Salesians of Vigo is, at best, a cold reading show that trades on the pain of those who have lost a loved one; at worst, exactly what the Church forbids its children because of the spiritual danger it entails. In neither case is it understandable that a congregation dedicated to the Christian education of young people should lend its stage, and even less so a few meters from the classrooms where the Catechism is taught every morning.
Silence of the congregation
To date, neither the Salesian community of Vigo nor the inspectorate have offered any explanation of the criteria by which the theater is ceded, nor have they announced the cancellation of the event. Don Bosco, who founded his work to take the boys of Turin off the streets and bring them closer to the sacraments, would hardly have imagined that his house in Vigo would end up selling tickets to talk to the dead.