The Trouble with Angels

Some time ago I read Joan Wester Anderson’s thrilling collection of stories attesting to angelic intervention in human affairs. If you do not believe in angels, check out these true stories of angelic intervention. This exhilarating book offers overwhelming evidence that heavenly beings are very much with us -- combating evil, bringing news, warning of danger, consoling us in our suffering. The flip-side of these spiritual faculties, as readers of these pages can attest, is the existence of a dark kingdom, using the same intelligence and power to prevent the spread of God’s kingdom, get more recruits, and consolidate the powers of evil in the world. In Luke 4:7, Satan declares that power over the kingdoms of the world have been delivered to him, and he offers Jesus a share in this power, if only Jesus would worship him; As we hear in the Lenten reading, Jesus avoids the temptation, but does not contradict Satan’s claim of power. With some restrictions, the power is there. The spiritual landscape we encounter includes extraordinarily intelligent, gifted, influential and murderous demons capable of outsmarting all the forces of the other side.

In my book I recounted Pope Leo XIII’s account of a vision of Satan, which gave birth to the St. Michael prayer. As told on this blog, future popes have also discerned diabolical opposition—one thinks of Pope Paul VI’s warning about the “smoke of Satan” in the Church, and Pope Francis’ recent remarks ascribing the persecution of Christians to the devil, and exhorting “Let us renounce Satan and all his works and seductions because he isa seducer.”

We should not lose sight of the tremendous advantages that Satan has in his intention of subverting the Body of Christ—with the help of human minions bent on exterminating Christianity, often aided by great numbers of misled Christians anxious for the Church to gain acceptance by the modern world. The greatest plus for Satan is the experience he has had with Christians for two thousand years, coupled with his awareness of what sort of things destines one to hell. Libido just may have pride of place.

Since the onset of the sexual revolution, we have had to face an ever-increasing display of sexual problems. One has only to think of the tremendous increase in the number of post-1960s illegitimate births and abortions, sexually transmitted diseases, opposition to censorship of pornography (especially on the Internet), and the resulting sexual addiction (in some extreme instances resulting in murder). Consider too the tremendous blows to marriage and the family done by adultery, the battle over the homosexual lifestyle in the United States, Canada and Europe (now to the point of the redefinition of marriage under the law); the increasing incidences of sexual harassment, child pornography on the Internet, Internet predators, date rape, and of course, the divorce rate. Then, too let us not forget the abortafacient properties of the Pill. Clearly attempts to reduce procreation so as to block God’s favorite thing to do, amounts to an offense against Him, is not a matter to be lightly dismissed.

As I recounted in my third chapter, dissent from Humanae Vitae’s proscription against artificial contraception originated a crisis of faith in the Church. The dissent that ensued after Pope Paul VI’s visionary encyclical set the stage for pervasive dismissal of the Vicar of Christ's authority in faith and morals. Given this, Satan, famous for his “non serviam,” was allowed to slip in little snippets of spiritual rebellion here and there, depending on the naiveté of his hearers. In Professor James Hitchcock’s The History ofthe Catholic Church, as the noted historian takes up twentieth- century modernism and the aftermath of the 1960s, he recounts the story of the unmaking of the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Los Angeles, whose program of aggiornamento was guided by the prestigious (now deceased) psychologist Carl Rogers, a one-time student for the Protestant ministry who had developed a negative attitude toward religion. Sadly, the Immaculate Heart “renewal” was a paradigm for many others that followed: many religious, having abandoned both traditional spiritualties and traditional ministries, created vacuums waiting to be filled by new absolutes—left-wing politics, environmentalism, and above all feminism, which produced a drastic decline in vocations to religious life.

Tragically, it was nuns dedicated to Mary, shedding their habits and often their vows, who were the innovators of developments quite removed from service of Mary’s Immaculate Heart. The surest weapon against the onslaughts of Satan, as many saints have taught us, is confidence in, imitation of, and devotion to the Queen of the Angels (see Genesis 3:15), who is far ahead of the strategies and nefarious designs of the fallen angels. This weapon still offers us the best hope for the defeat of the subtle moves of a supremely evil Mastermind.

Comments

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D: This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

The 21st Century Must Come Into the Church

Continued from September 14.... T hrough the Church’s teachings, God has also revealed his truth on how humanity can live happily. What is so little understood by Catholics and Christians is that doctrinal revelations that come through the Church come out of God’s very Self. They are not tied to culturally constructed norms! Read Vatican II’s Dei Verbum : “by divine revelation God wished to manifest and communicate both himself and the eternal decrees of his will concerning the salvation of humankind.” Our Lord’s Church derives its basic vision not from mere human speculation, which would be tentative and uncertain, but from God’s own testimony—from a historically given divine revelation. Thus Catholics believe that just as God himself is immutable, so, too, are His teachings as revealed through the Church because they come from him. As I discuss in my book, although the Church does not change its central teachings, we do see the theological principle of “devel...

Novus Motus Liturgicus

From The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God: In 1959, Pope John XXIII saw a true need for liturgical renewal within the Roman Rite in accordance with the metaphorical principle of organic development, the aim of the Liturgical Movement endorsed by Pope St. Pius X. In authentic organic development, the Church listens to what liturgical scholars deem necessary for the gradual improvement of liturgical tradition, and evaluate the need for such development, always with a careful eye on the preservation of the received liturgical tradition handed down from century to century. In this way, continuity of belief and liturgical practice is ensured. As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote at the time, the principle of organic development ensures that in the Mass, “only respect for the Liturgy’s fundamental unspontaneity and pre-existing identity can give us what we hope for: the feast in which the great reality comes to us that we ourselves do not manufacture , but receive as a gift. Organic de...

A Child's Right

O ver the years since the accession of Jose Bergoglio to the Chair of Peter, in perusing the Huffington Post blog, the National Catholic Reporter website and other “progressive” social media, one gets the impression that these folks believe Francis (“Who Am I to Judge?”) will revolutionize Catholic teaching on marriage. On these pages I have frequently noted many of Francis’ statements affirming traditional-Biblical-natural marriage, as well as his extremely strong remarks back in Argentina, where he declared same-sex “marriage” a diabolical effort of “the Father of Lies” to “destroy God’s plan … and deceive the children of God.” He said then—only four years ago—that gay “marriage” discriminates against children “in advance,” depriving them of “their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God.” At stake, said Cardinal Bergoglio, was “the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts” and the very survival of the human family, with Satan at work. I co...

Read My First Chapter for Free!

St. Michael the Archangel Kindle allows one to share quotes from books on Facebook. Here is an entire chapter...

Ode to Freddi: Be Careful When You Write Papa

Last fall, militant Italaian atheist Piergeorgio Oddifreddi wrote Dear Pope, I'm Writing to You. O difreddi later said he was particularly surprised that Benedict read his book from cover to cover and wanted to discuss it, as it had been billed as a “luciferian introduction to atheism.” He should not have been so surprised, had he known his man. Odifreddi's book was a critique of certain arguments and lines of thought found in Benedict’s theological writings, beginning with his 1967 volume Introduction to Christianity , and including his book Jesus of Nazareth , which he wrote as pope, both of which I have profited from enormously. “My opinion about your book is, as a whole, rather mixed,” B16 said. “I profited from some parts, which I read with enjoyment, but in other parts I was astonished at a certain aggressiveness and thoughtless argumentation.” He noted that, several times, Odifreddi refers to theology as science fiction, and he...

MTD and Thee?

Fr. Longenecker Father Longenecker has has observed a contemporary phenomenon which presents a target-rich environment for the New Evangelization-- M oralistic T herapeutic D eism: “MTD” is deadly because it eventually kills off true religion. Because “MTD” mimics true religion people think it is true religion, but then they draw the obvious conclusion: if religion is only about therapy and making the world a better place, then why do you need God? If the Deist God is sitting on the other side of a cloud doing nothing then why bother going to church to worship him?The reason why the Catholic faith is shutting down in so much of Europe and North America is because millions of Catholics are infected with “MTD.” They have had no direct experience of the living God in their lives and believe he is an old grandfather who resides in heaven never being involved in this world. They have assumed that religion is no more than just another self help method and that being a ...

Libido Redux: Gabriele Kuby

Gabriele Kuby’s The Global Sexual Revolution has been translated into English and published by Angelico Press. In it, Kuby persuasively argues that the freedom offered by the sexual revolutionaries is another and highly effective means of enslavement. Here are some highlights: · The Marquis de Sade, who lived and wrote violent pornography from his cell in the Bastille as the Ancien Régime fell and the French Revolution began. · Thomas Malthus, Margaret Sanger, Marx & Engels, Wilhelm Reich , Freud & Jung, behaviorist John Watson, Edward Bernays, Bernard Berelson, child abuser Alfred Kinsey, sex-change giant John Money ,--a gallery of evil men whose own immorality drove them to emasculate man’s morality. · The Yogyakarta Principles, a manifesto produced by a cabal of leftist homosexuals and “human rights” activists that purp...

Mic’d Up—Dancing with the Devil

Oh- seems someone picked up on my blog theme (taken from a Stones' song) Dancin' With Mr. D! Mic’d Up—Dancing with the Devil A comment on this: TomH Peter • 34 minutes ago According to your logic ( "Satan's great weapon is that he doesn't exis t") he would avoid all corporeal "contact"with the human race, i.e., possession, demonic influences, etc. It's true that he does not want us to know he exists, And not all haunted houses are demonically caused, but just because Satan has a superior intelligence does not mean that he is not also stupid. He is ruled by the passion of "pure" hatred and can't resist getting "involved" with God's, after the angels, highest creation, mankind. His superior spiritual intelligence, like his spiritual power, have been curtailed by Almighty God. You could say he can't resist the temptation. However, his intelligence is still vastly superior to ours except for the s...

Dancin' With Mr. D: Non-Binary?

A n LGBT activist has admitted that the battle over men accessing women’s bathrooms and vice versa has little do with transgenderism, and everything to do with re-working society and getting rid of the heterobinary structure—eliminating distinctions between “male” and “female” altogether. Male and female He made them. Riki Wilchins, who has undergone “sex change” surgery and is a far-left social change activist, has written that p eople should be able to enter whatever bathroom “fits their gender identity,” but the fact that we even have “male” and “female” bathrooms reflects something about society that needs to change. He added that there are many “genderqueer” or “non-binary” people, pointing to a student who recently “came out” to President Obama as “non-binary” at a London townhall as an example. “Non-binary” people don’t identify as male or female and they often want to be referred to as “they” or “hir” or “zer.” So the fact that there...

Search This Blog