I Shall Fear No Evil

 

To My Readers: This week TradWarrior discusses the problems Traditionalist Catholics face during the Great Apostasy from Satan. Please feel free to comment as usual. If anyone has any specific questions or comments for me, I will answer as always, but it may take me a bit longer to do so this week.

God bless you all, my dear readers---Introibo

I Shall Fear No Evil

By TradWarrior

 

Being a Catholic in today’s world has never been harder in many respects than it is today. For decades, the Catholic Church has had no visible pope to guide Her through these tumultuous times in which we are living. Each person on this planet is assaulted in different ways by the world, the flesh, and the devil. Catholics are no different. What we possess is that we are members of the One True Faith on Earth. We possess everything within the church to get us to heaven. But in these times, we are very much like the Jews of the Old Testament, wandering through the wilderness, trying to make our way as best we can. The focus of this post will be the assault by the last title mentioned – the devil.

Satan and his demons prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Like a lion, they seek to devour each and every one of us, so that when we die we are damned to hell to share in their misery. (1 Peter 5:8) Misery loves company. This post will serve to show the power that the demons possess. It will also demonstrate some powers that the demons do not possess.

One of the faulty beliefs today is that good and evil are opposite sides of the same coin, completely equal. They are like the yin yang in Taoism. We must remember that God is infinite. The demons, though powerful, are creatures and their power is only finite (strong though it is).  

There are different levels in which the demons can assault us and these will be briefly mentioned.

Temptation:

This includes ordinary attacks common to all humans. It involves internal enticements to sin. The demons provoke thoughts and emotions to influence free will, but cannot force a person to sin.

Oppression:

This is an extraordinary external attack that does not involve the loss of consciousness or bodily control. The demons target external circumstances, health, or emotions. It often presents as extreme melancholy, a heavy physical malaise, or persistent bad luck and physical suffering.

Obsession:

This is a severe psychological siege where a demon attacks a person’s interiority-specifically targeting their intellect and emotions. The subject experiences sudden irrational thoughts, intense neurosis, and possibly even frequent, persistent suicidal ideation. It makes it nearly impossible to focus on daily obligations or to sleep properly.

Possession: 

This is the most severe form of extraordinary diabolical influence where the demon takes full mastery over a person’s body. The demon acts through the physical body, rendering it non-responsive to the individual’s free will. The victim’s body may exhibit unnatural physical strength, they may levitate, speak in unknown languages (xenoglossy), display complete personality shifts while the demon acts as master, have an intense aversion to religious objects, and exhibit unnatural body and facial distortions, such as speaking in an inhuman voice, involuntary contortions, or moving in unnatural bodily movements e.g. slithering like a snake on the ground without using one’s arms and feet to propel them, which is physically impossible.   

The demons exercise a greater intellect and will then humans do. They are more powerful beings that we are. They do lack the intellect that the holy angels have, for by their fall their intellects were darkened.

For much of the remainder of this article, I will turn often to the angelic doctor himself – St. Thomas Aquinas.

In the Summa Theologica (I, Q. 41, A. 4), St. Thomas goes into the mode and order of the temptation.

St. Thomas says in his “Reply to Objection 3” that the devil was not satisfied with instigating a desire for riches and honors, but he went so far as to tempt Christ, for the sake of gaining possession of these things, to fall down and adore him, which is a great crime, and against God.

The temptations get worse. First, he wants Christ to work a miracle by turning the stones into bread. Christ replies, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Next, he tempts Christ to throw Himself off of the highest point of the temple. Christ replies, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” The last temptation is the worst of the three. He tells Christ that he will give Him all the kingdoms of the world if He bows down and worships him. Christ replies, “Begone, Satan: for it is written, The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and Him only shalt thou serve.” The devil in his initial fall wanted resemblance with God. He sought to have final beatitude by his own power (See ST, I, Q. 63, A. 3).

What was the purpose of the devil tempting God? In short, it was to make Christ fall, like he wants all to fall into sin and then eventually into hell itself. But this is what Satan did not understand. As Rufinus of Aquileia said, “The purpose of the Incarnation was that the divine virtue of the Son of God might be as it were a hook hidden beneath the form of human flesh…to lure on the prince of this age to a contest; that the Son might offer him his flesh as a bait and that then the divinity which lay beneath might catch him and hold him fast with its hook…Then, as a fish when it seizes a baited hook not only fails to drag off the bait but is itself dragged out of the water to serve as food for others; so he that had the power of death seized the body of Jesus in death, unaware of the hook of divinity concealed therein. Having swallowed it, he was caught straightway; the bars of hell were burst, and he was, as it were, drawn up from the pit, to become food for others.” What this means was that God’s overarching plan all along was for the redemption of mankind. 

We know this of course, but at that time, Satan and the demons did not understand this, even with their advanced intellects. God the Father allowed God the Son to take on flesh of the Virgin Mary and to walk among His creation as one of them, like them in all ways except for sin. The question must be asked, “Who did Satan think that he was tempting?” Likewise, when Christ was undergoing His barbarous Passion, with the agony in the garden, the scourging at the pillar, the crowning of thorns, the carrying of the cross, the crucifixion, all the way leading up to His death – the demons assailed Him to no end, yet fall He never did. 

He had the power to come down from the cross. He chose not to because this was His plan to redeem mankind before the world ever was. “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and He will at once send Me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Mt. 26:53) Who did they think that they were tempting? In their advanced (though fallen) intellects, they knew that He was a prophet. They had a high probability in their thinking that this was the Messiah who had entered the world, for no one ever spoke like this man before, nor did the things that He did. But what they didn’t know was that He was God Incarnate. 

In the “Summa Theologica” (see ST, I, Q. 64, A. 1), St. Thomas Aquinas goes into great detail on the demons darkened intellects. He said that the demons had three kinds of knowledge. The first was their natural knowledge. This knowledge was neither taken away nor lessened in the demons. The second form of knowledge was knowledge from grace and while this hadn’t been utterly taken away from them, nevertheless, it was lessened from their fall. Their third type of knowledge, explains Aquinas, is by long experience. 

Demons do not know the future with absolute certainty—that is reserved for God. However, because they have existed since the beginning of creation and possess acute intellects, they use long experience to recognize patterns. By observing natural causes, terrestrial events, and human habits over centuries, they are highly skilled at making deductions about present situations or predicting future outcomes that might not be obvious to humans. It is the second form of knowledge here that comes into play – knowledge lessened from the light of divine grace. The demons fell but the holy angels did not. The holy angels have knowledge from grace and understand divine matters in greater detail than the fallen angels do. 

According to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, when the devil was tempting Christ in the desert and saying, “If you are the Son of God…,” they are not saying this in a way that we understand it to mean. When we read it, it sounds like they are saying this in a mocking fashion such as, “If you are the Son of God, then you can obviously do this or that because after all, you are the Son of God.” It is a form of arrogance in their taunting him. While this may hold true to some extent, according to these two great theologians, when the demons say, “If you are the Son of God…,” they are asking Him this because they did NOT KNOW WITH FULL CERTAINTY (emphasis added) that He truly was the Son of God. Why? Because their intellects were darkened by their fall and knowledge from grace was lessened in them. They could miscalculate. They did not know with full certainty that this was the Son of God. As Aquinas states in his “Reply to Objection 4” in quoting St. Augustine, “For had they fully and certainly known that He was the Son of God and the effect of His Passion, they would never have procured the crucifixion of the Lord of glory.” 

In other words, they did not know truly that this was the Son of God because if they did, they never would have gone to so much trouble persecuting Him and executing Him because in the end, He was going to triumph despite their best efforts against Him. Why? Because HE IS GOD! “The ruler of this world is coming. He has no power over Me.” (Jn. 14:30) This is a huge weakness of theirs. While they are far superior in intellect over human beings, (although inferior in intellect to the holy angels), they are creatures and they can make mistakes in their thinking. They do not make mistakes in the way that humans make mistakes in their thinking, because their intellects operate at a much higher level than human beings, but they do calculate things incorrectly. Their intellect and their power are limited.

St. Thomas expounds on this even greater in his other monumental work “De Malo.” (On Evil) He asks the question, “Do Devils Know Future Things?” (see Q. 16, “On Devils”, A. 7). 

Due to the length of his answer, I will highlight some of his most poignant points in this section that he covers.

*Damascene says that God alone, not human beings or devils, knows future things. Everyone can know better the things that belong to oneself than the things that belong to others. And so 1 Cor. 2:11 says: "No one knows what belongs to a person save the person's spirit within the person." But devils did not foreknow their fall, as Augustine makes clear in his “Literal Commentary on Genesis.” Therefore, much less can devils know other future things.

*Devils sometime predict true things about the future and sometimes false things. And they predict true things when they foreknow them by the revelations of good spirits that originate from God or in their external causes, whose power they know, or in what causes propose to do, as when they predict the things they themselves are about to do. And they sometimes predict false things wishing to deceive human beings, since the devil is "a liar and the father of lies," as Jn. 8:44 says. And they sometimes predict false things because they themselves are deceived, as when God prevents them from doing what they intend to do, or when something happens by God's power beyond the ordinary course of natural causes, as Augustine says in his work “On the Divination of Devils.”

*Devils' substance and activities indeed transcend the time that numbers the movements of heavenly bodies, but time is connected with their activity insofar as they do not actually understand everything at the same time. And this time indeed involves change in their desires and thoughts about intelligible things. And so Augustine says in his “Literal Commentary on Genesis” that God causes the movements of spiritual creatures through time.

Aquinas goes on and delves into this matter in heavy fashion, but the overall point is that the demons do not know all future events. Only God does. They can error, again due to what Aquinas said in his “Summa Theologica”, because of the fact that their knowledge from grace was severely lessened due to their fall.

There are other areas where the demons are handicap and lacking too. One such area is the demons cannot know the interior thoughts of men. They cannot read their hearts, so to speak. The demons know some causes of our thoughts, but they do not know all of them. Only God knows the interior thoughts of men completely.

Evil is a void of good. The demons in their fall made a choice and this choice was irreversible. The will of the demons is obstinate in evil. The demons sin is greater than man’s sin. Consequently, the demons are much more punished than humans are. Since the demon has a perverse and obstinate will, he is not sorry for the evil of sin. Not only will the demons exist in misery forever, but they want human beings to join them in hell forever to suffer with them. Again, misery loves company.

The beatitude and the punishment of both the demons and human beings will be magnified after Judgement Day. When Christ returns to judge the world, it will greatly affect all of creation. When humans die, if their souls go to Heaven, they experience great joy. If they die and their souls go to Hell, they experience horrific pain. If their souls go to Purgatory, they suffer pain, but this pain will eventually become joy once the soul goes to Heaven and experiences the beatific vision. This is after all of a soul’s temporal punishment has been expiated. 

Some souls have very little expiation to make for the temporal punishment that remains on their souls after death and they are ushered into Heaven fairly quickly. Others have a very long stay in Purgatory, having much more temporal punishment to expiate after death. After Judgement Day, our souls will be reunited with our bodies. For the blessed, the joy will exponentially increase, in both soul and body. For the reprobate, the punishment will greatly intensify as both the soul and the body will suffer in Hell forever. The beatitude/joy is greatly magnified in the Elect, while the pain and punishment is greatly magnified in the Damned. Likewise, the demons will suffer even more after Judgement Day, when Christ judges the world.

In times of greater sanity, Catholics had an easier time following the Catholic Church. Now, the question is, “Where is the Catholic Church?” Simply put, the church exists in those faithful followers who have remained traditional Catholics in this godless age in which we are living. The Great Apostasy wreaked incalculable havoc on the world and the casualties cannot be counted. Authority is derived from the pope down through the bishops down through the priests and finally down through the people. What has transpired in the last few decades has been a removal of the institutional structure of the church. The Vatican II sect splintered off from the True Catholic Church and in doing so, most of the “Catholic” world went along with the false sect that parades itself as “The Catholic Church.” The “pope,” “bishops,”, and “priests,” are anything but. The true clergy exist in the faithful traditional remnant that exists in pockets scattered here and there throughout the world. 

The demons assault has grown and magnified unlike any other time, because now, the attack is coming from every angle imaginable. The number and prevalence of sins attacking mankind is out of control. Abortion, contraception, divorce, fornication, theft, murder, homosexual acts, pornography, and so many other sins run rampant everywhere now. In every age, whenever mankind was afflicted by sin, caused by the world, the flesh, and the devil, individual Christians sought the sacraments and stayed close to the church as their safe haven. But the church is not as easily found now, because the Conciliar Church has usurped the Traditional Church. It has eclipsed it. 

The pope is the guardian of the church. It was he and he alone, who Christ gave the keys to the kingdom of Heaven. (Mt. 16:18-19) Remove him from the equation, and evil runs amok everywhere! Not all sins are due to the demons, but many are, and the demons have had a field day with what has transpired to the Catholic Church in the last several decades. The demons know in the end that they lose, for they cannot defeat God, just like they cannot defeat His Church. They do not know exactly when their “reign of terror” comes to an end, but it does come to an end. They know this.

 

Conclusion

How do Catholics weather the storm that is currently engulfing the world (spiritually speaking)? It is not easy and it continues to get harder. It is not impossible though, for God never asks the impossible of us. We must make use of everything at our spiritual disposal that we have.

*The traditional Mass is our greatest weapon that we have. Those who are within driving distance of a traditional church should make use of the sacraments often, especially the Sacrament of Penance and the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Remaining in the state of grace is important to staying holy.

*The rosary needs to be prayed daily. 5 decades should be prayed minimally. For those who are able to pray the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries every day, it is a very good idea, for even more graces will flow through Our Lady to us.

*Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary are very powerful. Consecrations to the Two Hearts should be made frequently.

*The Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is helpful.

*Praying the Stations of the Cross is useful.

*Wearing sacramentals such as the Miraculous Medal, the St. Benedict Medal, the Brown Scapular, the Green Scapular, etc. are very helpful to ward off evil.

*Devotion to St. Joseph is strongly encouraged and sadly neglected. St. Joseph is the “terror of the demons.” His intercessory power with God is only second to Our Lady.

*Prayers to a person’s guardian angel are very important. God has given us an angel protector over the course of our entire life. We need to make use of this spiritual friend as much as possible. Don’t just pray to your angel, talk to your angel frequently too.

*The Chaplet of St. Michael is a great devotion to ask for the intercession of all of the holy angels in our combat again Satan and the demons. These are the holy angels who did not fall and remained faithful to God. Their intercession is especially powerful and collectively when praying this chaplet, the strength of their intercession is greatly magnified.

*Finally, we must pray for the grace of final perseverance. It is easy to “fall off the wagon” so to speak, especially in these times! We need to persevere to the end, so that we may save our souls.

We must stay close to the Catholic Church. Without a visible pope to guide it in these times, it is harder on everyone. There are going to be divisions among traditional Catholics and the demons take great delight in this. Still, the church exists until the end of the world and the church is victorious in the end. Christ will one day return to judge this world. He is always faithful to us and we must remain faithful to Him until He returns. 

Yes, the demons have much power over us, but there are things that they are limited by, as I have demonstrated in this article. Powerful as they are, they remain just creatures, not the Creator. Their influence over us will end once Christ puts an end to everything and subjects all of His enemies under His feet. (Ps. 110:1) No one knows that day or hour, only God alone. Human beings, the angels, and the demons alike, do not know when Christ will return. We must do all we can to remain faithful and vigilant. This is all Christ asks of us. We leave the rest to Him. It is in His Hands. “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (Jn. 16:33)