Should one guard against cartomancy and all its so-called fortune-tellers who read your future in tarot cards?
Yes, because many have associated themselves with Satan. Through a pact, a pact of friendship with him. They are not possessed, merely associates of Satan. Through his agency, they divine. He "puts them to work," if you will. People go to see them, derive benefits from it, and thus continue to go. And for those who consult them, the first effect of their contact with Satan is to completely distance themselves from God.
What interests Satan is to distance you from God and throw you into sin. He wants people to go to hell, whereas God wants them to go to heaven. And by binding oneself to fortune-tellers, by renouncing prayer, one begins this journey of distancing oneself from God, of placing oneself in the hands of the Evil One.
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Cartomancy is perhaps the most widespread form of superstition, even though it is difficult to find it practiced directly. For me, the occasion arose with a request from an Argentine bishop. In a letter, he told me he was faced with a case on which he was asked to give an opinion. However, the subject of cartomancy is never or almost never addressed in ecclesiastical texts, which is astonishing, given how widespread the habit of having one's cards read is.
Here is the case as presented by this bishop.
He has a practicing Catholic in his diocese. However, she reads cards to help people. Not at all for lucrative purposes, and without mixing in anything unhealthy. Is this practice licit? Questioned by a letter written in Latin, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did not respond.
I believe it did not respond because it has never examined the subject. For my answer, of which I clearly stated it was a personal point of view, I based myself on precise criteria and I estimated that, according to these criteria, cartomancy counted among the forms of superstition and in particular of divination.
One uses, as is always the case, basic playing cards, or special cards, but often, most often, they are tarot cards. The goal is to make the future known, or to have access to occult things, and that is where the danger lies. The foundation, and thus the moral condemnation, resides in the desire to know the future or occult things by using a means unsuitable for the objective; in other words, one attributes to the chosen means the power to indicate a reality or events, without taking into account the fact that the cards absolutely do not have this power.
Even if one does not invoke the demon, explicitly or implicitly, and even if one does not resort to magical-type oddities, with colored candles arranged in a certain order, for example, or with herbs, or with saucers intended to hold oil, etc... It remains nonetheless that one attributes to an object a power it does not have, with the aim of knowing things that God, and He alone, knows... And this represents a grave moral fault, an indication of a rebellion against God who is the sole Lord of history; it is also an indication of an abandonment of faith and prayer in favor of a psychological dependency.
Source: Father Gabriel Amorth – Confessions (Memoirs of the Vatican's Official Exorcist)