My last letter identified 12 visitations from heaven; this will consider 12 invasions from hell. Our age has become dark: war, hatred, violence, polarization, confusion, decadence. Life in this world is always spiritual warfare: it is important that we be clear that the conflict is not just political or psychological, but we are engaged with "principalities and powers"...with supernatural forces of evil, with Lucifer, his legions and his formidable kingdom established and explosive in our world. The Accuser, the Liar, has engaged our own weakened flesh and a world distanced from God into an Axis of Evil: the world, the flesh and the devil. Our tactics and strategy in this combat includes the political and the psychological, but even more fundamentally the spiritual, our communion with God and his kingdom in prayer, liturgy, fellowship, virtue, sacrifice, faith and the obedience in love. Let's consider the clear initiatives of Satan in our world.
1. Misogyny. Lucifer's greatest hatred, after God himself, is woman. His first target was Eve. His antagonist, who crushes his head, is Mary. The female embodies and expresses, in herself, in an incomparable manner, Created Beauty, Good and Truth. The male represents God; but the female in herself, as created, as not-God, is the very epitome of created Goodness. Our mother Mary is the singular epitome of this, but every woman reflects it as well. Satan despises her; including her feminine body. She crushes the Evil One; she steps on his head with complete serenity. An ancient tradition has it that Lucifer's rebellion was the response of his pride to the fact that he would be subordinate to Mary, a fleshly woman, as Queen of the angels and the saints, of heaven and earth. And so we find across our globe and throughout history diverse expressions of the hatred of woman: honor killings, polygamy, rape, pornography, prostitution, and other. We see this interiorized in women themselves in self-hatred expressed in eating disorders, cutting, promiscuity, transgenderism, and other. The militant feminism of the 1960s in large part has been anti-woman in its mimicking of a crude machismo: promiscuity, abortion, and bourgeois materialism. Any disrespect for the feminine, as in language contemptuous of the womanly body, is demonic. What disparages woman is from hell; what honors the feminine is from heaven.
2. Anti-Paternity. To be sure, there have been abusive, oppressive, misogynist forms of "patriarchy," but the heavenly mission of the masculine is to image God our Father in a humble, wholesome, holy paternity. Such requires the happy combination of gentle strength, purity of heart, and deflation of the expansive male ego. Such has become rare in our world. Since the Cultural Revolution, notwithstanding the demonic assault on woman, I observe a remarkable resiliency in the feminine. For example, within the Afro-American community, with its family structure devastated by centuries of slavery and recent currents of sexual liberation joined with entitlement and resentment, black women manifest, in my view, a miracle of patience, generosity, faith and love. By contrast, the crisis within this community is first and foremost the failure of masculinity as paternity. This crisis is across our entire nation and indeed the globe: Lucifer has effectively destroyed paternity by drawing us men into violent machismo or effete weakness. His assault is upon paternity as the foundational icon of the Fatherhood of God.
3. Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. This was (in my view) Lucifer's greatest accomplishment since his deception of Eve in the garden. It was a multi-faceted masterpiece of seduction as it:
- Built upon the prosperity, pride, and self-assurance of a flourishing post-war USA and Europe in a materialism, arrogance, secularism and disconnect from the heavenly and the holy.
- Deconstructed sex differences, expressive of the Divine, and disparaged both femininity and paternity, stripping us of our primary icons of the holy.
- Tore sexuality, in contraception, from its sacred embodiment in spousal fidelity-generosity-fecundity and set it free to burn recklessly in lust, infidelity, impurity, covetousness, misogyny, and license.
- Destroyed the family, nuclear and extended, as well as local, mediating communities and institutions of solidarity leaving the isolated, atomized "Individual" uprooted and dependent upon impersonal, oversized federal government and global capitalism.
- Exaggerated an extravagant confidence in science/technology into presumption of an unrestrained, god-like power over life and death: abortion, reproductive technologies, environmental degradation, and weapons of mass destruction.
What has emerged is a new view of the human: secular and detached from God in a disenchanted universe; sexually liberated from the bondage of chastity, marriage, family and tradition; omnipotent by virtue of science/technology; androgynous as replaceable units of production and consumption in an impersonal, mechanized, cosmopolitan world order.
4. Communism, Notwithstanding the colossally significant collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, this God-despising, human-crushing system remains in control of China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and remains confident in its enduring ambitions for global domination. It is a pure expression of evil in its defiance of God and destruction of human dignity and freedom. Close to one out of five people on the earth remain under this slavery.
5. Islamic Extremism. There are benign, liberal forms of Islam, but scholars differ on the weight to give Pope Benedict's incisive Regensburg critique of a violence and anti-rationalism evident in the religion. What is evident across the globe, however, is pervasive violence in the form of terrorism, persecution of Christians and Jews, state imperialism (Iran), as well as a deep misogyny evident in polygamy, honor killings and a toxic patriarchy. In its more benign, West-friendly forms (Saudi Arabia) it is still brutally intolerant of other religions. About 1.8 billion people are Muslims, almost one in four across the globe. While not all endorse violence, misogyny and intolerance, there is an evident failure, across the globe, to resist these forces clearly and forcefully. The religion of Islam is far from a pure expression of evil like communism. It is the most ambiguous of religions: Mohammed drew from much of the good in Judaism and Arian (Jesus is not God) Christianity in his devotion to the One God, embrace of the moral law, teachings on mercy and compassion, and other. But he also regressed, renouncing the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the salvific crucifixion, to the misogyny of polygamy and unrestrained tribal, "sacred" violence of Jihad. And so, violence against non-Muslims, as well as disrespect for the feminine, broadly characterizes the Islamic world today. These are evil.
6. Ethnic Violence. We see across the globe explosions of ethnic/tribal/national violence: Ukraine, Palestine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, ISIS and Al Queda, Nigeria, Sunni vs. Shiite, and in recent history Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Cambodia and other. Notice: these are not racist, but ethnic. Most entail one group against another within the same race. True racism as in Nazism, South African and the slavery of our South is not a dominant world dynamic. Racism is overrated; tribal violence is underrated. Rene Girard and his protige Gil Baile have famously considered the role of mimesis (imitation), the inevitable eruption of mimetic rivalry and its primal resolution by violence against a "scapegoat" onto which the community projects evil and vents violence. So, we see today: Russians hate Ukrainians, Sunni/Shiite, Palestinian/Israelis, China/America, Democrat/Republican, etc. The devil is called The Accuser and so he delights to "demonize" one group against another, breeding self-righteousness, contempt and finally violence. This is, since Babel, the plight of sinful humanity. Only on the level ground before the cross of the Victim-Who-Did-Not-Victimize, only in the Pentecostal Holy Spirit of the Crucified/Risen one is this enmity overcome.;
7. Addictions. Here we see Satan exploiting the weakness of our flesh: alcohol, drugs (fentanyl), sex (pornography), eating, work, gambling, anger, anxiety. These are social pandemics; they are psychological pathologies; they are moral vices; but they are also the working of "outside agitators" which is to say the demons. Even within the entirely non-theological AA literature there is recognition of a spiritual force, beyond the personal and social, that must be rejected in the Higher Power. At the heart of the 12-programs is a reliance on God, however conceived. A true addiction is another pure form of evil: it devastates personal dignity and freedom, marriage and family, and wrecks havoc on the community. Happily, we have in the 12-step tradition, especially when joined with religious practice, the antidote to this evil. Here again our recourse is to prayer, personal and communal, solidarity in contrition, accountability, compassion, and service.
8. Class Warfare. Every developed, sophisticated society diversifies itself into distinct classes, with specified tasks, prerogatives and powers; this is not bad in itself. In a wholesome society, unified under a just, harmonizing religion, the classes serve each other (more or less) generously and trustingly. Imagine a feudal society in which peasants farm, knights defend, craftsman make, priests/religious pray and preach. In the absence of such Gospel-like dynamics, however, the rich and powerful dominate the poor and the weak; the classes divide, the one bloated with privilege and arrogance, the other simmering with resentment and jealousy. The USA 1945-65 enjoyed a prosperous, relatively wholesome integrity with decreasing disparity between rich and poor, a vigorous labor movement for the working class, and steady improvements for minorities. In the 60 years since then, however, we have moved inexorably into a toxic, caste-like economy: the educated, connected, competent doing very well; with an underclass of the marginalized, uneducated, less-connected and less-competent falling deeper into a Culture of Poverty with its paralyzing patterns of discouragement, passivity, resentment, and despair. This is unhealthy for both parties: the one arrogant, indifferent, decadent, lacking in compassion and purpose; the other dying deaths of despair.
9. Priest Sex Scandal. This might be the most brilliant, effective of Lucifer's assaults. As with the Cultural Revolution, it entails aggressions:
- In part it flows out of the Sexual Liberation as it prevailed in the years (1970-2000) immediately after the catastrophic 1960s. To be fair, however, many of the worst abuse cases were perpetuated by theological conservatives (Maciel, McCarrick for most of his career) so it is not merely a consequence of the loosening of sexual mores.
- It expressed sexual addiction, suddenly pervasive in society and Church, before the widespread recognition of its nature and its treatment in 12-step sex addiction programs.
- Over 80% it entailed the abuse of teen boys so it was accompanied by militant homosexuality.
- It was abetted by a cultural, clerical, and episcopal climate of denial, avoidance, disbelief.
This demonic strategy succeeded in corrupting the priesthood and the Church as iconic of the Fatherhood of God.
10. Assault on Marriage, Family and Religious Life. Catholic life is founded upon the twin pillars of the "states of life:" marriage/family and the priestly/religious life. Satan's purpose is clear: destroy the family and priesthood/religious life. The surest resistance to the powers of hell are: a holy (not perfect, but prayerful) marriage and a holy priestly or religious life. Satan has released all his fury against these two institutions over the last half century, with immense success. The result: weakening of the family and the Church and the isolating of the vulnerable, unhinged, manic-depressed "Individual."
11. Weakening, Polarizing and Liberalizing of the Church. In this last 60 years since the Council and the Cultural Revolution, a largely prosperous, bourgeois Catholic Church has suffered (despite the resistant pontificates of John Paul and Benedict) an irrepressible progressive compulsion to accommodate to the broader, now anti-Catholic society. The most horrific instance is the decision of Pope Francis to give absolute control over Chinese Catholicism to the Communist Party. The other expression is the impulse to accommodate the sexual liberation in the West. We see around us a "Catholic Lite": abortion, divorce, contraception, cohabitation rates match that of the general population; disbelief in the Real Presence in the Eucharist; normalization of homosexual relations; a soft secularism in diminished sense of the holy, the supernatural, the demonic; ignorance, indifference or even contempt for Catholic cults of adoration, the rosary, the saints, the precepts (laws) of the Church, chastity, the consecrated life and all that sets Catholicism apart from post-Protestant secularism. In elite, liberal, especially academic circles, there has been a religious embrace of leftwing politics as salvific; in response we now have a crude, populist, rightwing explosion of resentment and rage.
12. Abuse of Internet and Social Media. Although blessings in some ways, these technologies have intensified many of the demonic currents above. They have accelerated the drift of our young into loneliness, isolation, and vulnerability to pornography, social insecurity, anxiety, negativity and reduced agency, solidarity, wholesome solitude and prayer. The marked increase in emotional pathology among teenage women over the last decade is especially troubling.
Conclusion.
A sober, realistic consideration of the explosion of evil across our globe does NOT ...repeat NOT... leave us discouraged, passive, self-pitying or even resigned. Rather, we are heartened by the words of Christ: "The gates of hell will not prevail." Note: our Lord does not say "the gates of heaven will prevail against the attacks from hell." Rather, it is hell that is defensive, unsuccessfully, against the initiatives from heaven.
We are on the offensive. We take the initiative. We are heartened that, in the power of the Holy Spirit, all the fury and chaos of hell is entirely vincible. We are strengthened in faith, hope, love and virtue...We are challenged by demonic assaults to stand ever more patient, hopeful, steady in the strength of God...We exult and delight in the graces from heaven flowing to us and in us and through us.
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
Mary our Mother, we place ourselves under the mantle of your holiness, your purity, your beauty and your love.
Come, Holy Spirit!
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