The Evil Eye: What It Means and What the Catholic Church Says

The “evil eye” is one of the oldest beliefs in the world: the idea that a look of envy, often hidden behind praise, can bring harm to the person it falls on. A baby who is admired too much falls ill; a new house or a good harvest suddenly goes wrong. The person who casts it may not even mean to.

The phrase also names the charm people wear to turn that look away: the blue-and-white glass eye known in Turkey as a nazar, sold today on bracelets, necklaces and key rings all over the world. When people ask what the evil eye means, they usually mean one of these two things, the envious look or the blue eye that is supposed to stop it.

Italians call it the malocchio, Spanish speakers mal de ojo. Families from the Mediterranean, Latin America and the Middle East often grew up with it, Catholic families among them, which is why so many Catholics ask what the Church makes of it.

The belief is far older than Christianity. Nearly two thousand years ago the Greek writer Plutarch recorded a dinner-table argument about people said to have the evil eye (Table Talk, book 5, question 7). His guests traced its power to envy, and thought children the most at risk.

Christians inherited the word along with the fear. The Latin for casting the evil eye, fascinare, is where English gets “fascinate”, and the Greek word for it is the one St. Paul uses when he asks the Galatians, “who has bewitched you?” (Galatians 3:1). Paul is not describing a spell. He is using an everyday word for being led astray.

Medieval theologians discussed it too. St. Thomas Aquinas took up the question in the thirteenth century (Summa Theologiae I, q. 117, a. 3) and began from a limit: matter does not obey created spirits at will, “but the Creator alone.” The rest of his answer leans on the medicine of his day, which nobody holds now, and on the general teaching that anything the devil does is permitted and limited by God (CCC 395). The Church never made his speculation part of her teaching, and the Catechism does not mention the evil eye at all.

The Bible uses the phrase often, and almost never for a curse. In Scripture an “evil eye” is a way of looking at other people: with envy, or with a tight fist.

• “… and your eye be evil against your poor brother and you give him nothing” (Deuteronomy 15:9).
• “Don’t eat the food of him who has a stingy eye” (Proverbs 23:6). In Hebrew it is, word for word, an evil eye.
• “The eye of the envious is wicked … An evil eye is towards evil things” (Sirach 14:8, 10, in the Douay-Rheims).
• In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the owner asks the grumbling laborers: “is your eye evil, because I am good?” (Matthew 20:15).
• Jesus lists “an evil eye” among the things that “come from within and defile the man,” beside deceit and pride (Mark 7:22–23).

The opposite is a generous eye: “He who has a generous eye will be blessed, for he shares his food with the poor” (Proverbs 22:9). And when Jesus says that “the lamp of the body is the eye” (Matthew 6:22–23), he is speaking of the heart behind the eyes, which fills a whole life with light or with darkness.

So the Bible turns the old fear around. The danger it warns about is not someone else’s glance at you. It is the envy that can grow in your own heart.

The Church has no teaching that a look can curse you, and no special rite or prayer “against the evil eye.” What she does teach touches the question from three sides.

Trusting objects and rituals to keep harm away is superstition. The Catechism places it under the first commandment: superstition is “a departure from the worship that we give to the true God” (CCC 2138), and it can creep even into good practices: “To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition” (CCC 2111). On charms it is short and direct: “Wearing charms is also reprehensible” (CCC 2117).

Envy is real, and it is a sin. “The tenth commandment requires that envy be banished from the human heart” (CCC 2538). Envy “is a capital sin” (CCC 2539), and the remedy the Catechism gives is good will and humility: “rejoice in your brother’s progress” (CCC 2540).

No creature holds power over you apart from God. The devil is real, but “the power of Satan is, nonetheless, not infinite. He is only a creature” (CCC 395). And the Catechism, explaining the last line of the Our Father, gives back the calm the evil eye takes away: “One who entrusts himself to God does not dread the devil” (CCC 2852).

The honest answer is that it is better not to. A charm is an object trusted to keep harm away by itself, and that is exactly what the blue eye is made and sold for. The Catechism’s line is plain: “Wearing charms is also reprehensible” (CCC 2117).

That calls for no fear and no special “cleansing.” If you own one, put it away. If you trusted it to protect you, say so simply in your next confession, and leave it there. What matters is what you trust, not the glass: something kept in a drawer as a memory of a grandmother is not worn as protection. If you are unsure, ask your parish priest.

The same goes for the red string bracelet, the horn-shaped cornicello and the hand-shaped hamsa. Whatever their history, once they are worn to ward off harm, they are charms.

Many Italian and Mediterranean families have a custom for “taking off” the malocchio: drops of olive oil in a bowl of water and a few words passed down from one generation to the next, often with the Sign of the Cross. Most people learned it from a grandmother they loved, who meant nothing but good.

The Church’s view is still clear. The Catechism warns that recourse to “so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another’s credulity” (CCC 2117), and treating any gesture as if it worked by itself is superstition (CCC 2111). Christian words do not change that: a prayer is something we ask of God, never a technique that obliges him.

So there is no need to judge the people who taught it to you, and no need to keep it up. If someone in the family is unwell or afraid, the Church’s own help is better: pray together, bless them with the Sign of the Cross, and ask the parish priest for a blessing.

The Catholic answer to the fear behind the evil eye is not a stronger charm. It is the ordinary life of faith, which needs no special words and nothing to wear.

• Pray the Our Father. Its last line, “deliver us from evil,” is the Church’s own prayer for protection, and the Catechism describes it as asking God to show the victory “already won by Christ” (CCC 2864). The words, with what each line asks: the Our Father.
• Go to confession and to Mass. The sacraments are Christ’s own gifts to his Church, and confession is the place to lay down both a fear and an envy.
• Use sacramentals as prayers, not as charms. Holy water, a blessed medal and the Sign of the Cross are good things, because “by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace” (CCC 1670). They do not work by themselves, and that difference is the whole point. See holy water and the St. Benedict medal.
• Ask God for help. The St. Michael prayer and Psalm 91 ask God to protect you; neither speaks to a spirit, and neither promises an outcome. At bedtime, a family can pray the Church’s night prayer together.
• Bless instead of fearing. If you think someone envies you, do what Jesus asks: “bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:28). And if the envy is your own, the Catechism’s remedy is to “rejoice in your brother’s progress” (CCC 2540).

“If God is for us, who can be against us?” St. Paul answers his own question a few lines later: nothing in all creation “will be able to separate us from God’s love which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:31, 39).

If you are frightened, sleeping badly or convinced that someone has cursed you, you do not have to sort it out alone, and you should not try to fight it with rituals.

Talk to your parish priest. He can hear your confession, pray with you, bless you and your home, and, if he judges it needed, he knows whom to ask in the diocese. The way to more help runs through your parish, not around it.

See a doctor too. Headaches, exhaustion, anxiety and dread that will not lift are real and treatable, and asking for medical help is not a lack of faith. The Church says the same: illness, “especially psychological illness, is a very different matter; treating this is the concern of medical science” (CCC 1673).

Prayer and medicine are not rivals. Many people need both.

• Catechism of the Catholic Church, on vatican.va: 2110–2117 (superstition, divination and magic), 2138, 2538–2540 (envy), 395 (the limits of the devil’s power), 1670 and 1673 (sacramentals, exorcism and illness), 2852 and 2864 (deliver us from evil).
• Scripture in the World English Bible, Catholic Edition: Deuteronomy 15:9; Proverbs 22:9 and 23:6; Matthew 6:22–23 and 20:15; Mark 7:21–23; Luke 6:28; Romans 8:31–39; Galatians 3:1. Sirach 14:8–10 in the Douay-Rheims.
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 117, a. 3, reply to the second objection, on newadvent.org.
• Plutarch, Table Talk (Quaestiones Convivales), book 5, question 7.