Rorate Caeli

The Council and the Eclipse of God by Don Pietro Leone- CHAPTER 10 - part 5: ‘The Principal Agents of the Council ’: 1. THE DEVIL

 


'The Devil Entering Through A Window In The Church'(Detail from St. Anthony the Hermit in the Isenheim Altarpiece)by Matthias Grünewald (late 15th early 16th century)

 

II    The Principal Agents of the Council

 


Here we consider:

 


1.    The Devil;

2.    The Bishops;

3.    The Freemasons;

4.    The Protestants;

5.    The Periti;

6.    The Press.

 

1.     The Devil

 

We proceed to examine:

 

      a)  The Devil’s Agency in General;

b    b)  Marks of the Devil’s Agency in the Council.

 

 

a    a)  The Devil’s Agency in General

 

We here consider:

 

i)   The Motive of the Devil’s Agency in General;

ii)  The Devil’s Target;

iii) The Devil’s Weapons;

 

 

i) The Motive of the Devil’s Agency in General

 


To understand more precisely the devil’s agency in the Council, we shall first attempt to identify its cause, or motivation, in general. To do so, we need do no more than reflect on his original act of rebellion against God. This act was motivated by pride: by the love and adoration of himself in the place of God. This act of pride, in its turn, made him fall and transformed him definitively into a devil.

 

Pride is then the devil’s original motivation, but it does not explain his agency entirely, representing only a part of it and only the first stage in its development. How then does his pride develop? His pride leads him to envy God, Whom he knows to possess the Infinity of all perfection which he attributes to himself; this envy in its turn leads to hatred; the hatred leads at last to an all-consuming desire to destroy the object of this hatred.

 


ii) The Devil’s Target

 


The devil’s primary target is God; his secondary target is man. Now God enjoys both internal and external glory. His internal glory consists of His Divinity which cannot be attacked, since God in His Divinity is immune to all evil; His external glory by contrast, which consists of His manifestation in creation, can be attacked:

 

-              - through the Most Sacred Humanity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the earthly life of Our Lord, and in the Holy Eucharist (by which we mean both the Holy Mass and the Blessed Sacrament);

-             - through heresy, blasphemy, or sacrilege;

-             - through attacking the rest of creation.

   

The Devil’s Target: The Most Sacred Humanity of Our Lord Jesus Christ

 

As to the devil’s attack on God through the rest of creation, we can readily see that the more intimately a creature is related to God, the more it will manifest His glory, and the more cherished a target it will become for the devil:

 


-         -A man, as made in the image and likeness of God, will be a more interesting target for the devil than any other creature such a horse, which is only a ‘vestige’ of God;

-        -A baptized man will be more interesting than a non-baptized man;

-        -A baptized man who is a saint will be more interesting than a baptized man who is not;

-         -The totality of all the baptized which is the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, will be more interesting than the rest of humanity.

 


We noted above that the devil is interested in attacking the Mystical Body of Christ in view of its intimate relation to Him. In fact what gives the greatest glory to God in creation, second to Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and His sacrificial death on the Cross on Mount Calvary and in the Holy Mass, is the perfection of the Church, that is the perfection of His rational creatures, angels and men: the sanctification of the elect. In order to obstruct and diminish this glory, the devil is intent on thwarting the perfection and sanctification of rational creatures. To this end he induced a great quantity of angels to join him in his rebellion against God at the beginning of time; and to this end he seeks to seduce into Hell all mankind, or at least to reduce the degree of glory that each individual man will render to God in Heaven for all eternity.

  

The Devil’s Target: ‘A man, as made in the image and likeness of God, will be a more interesting target for the devil than any other creature such a horse, which is only a ‘vestige’ of God[...]

 

The devil has a secondary intention in attacking the Church which is his hatred for man. This hatred, like his hatred for God, is also born of envy. For man, created like himself with a spiritual intellect and will after the image and likeness of God, is able to bring this image and likeness to its fulfilment and to be like God, not by pride, by unaided efforts, and by self-adoration, according to the devil’s program, but by the true knowledge and love of God, through humility, and with the assistance of Divine Grace. 

 

The devil hates man as we should love him. He hates him and desires to harm him by diverting him from his final end in Heaven. We should love him and desire to benefit him, above all by helping him to attain this same final end in Heaven. We love God in man, and man in God and in his orientation to God; the devil hates God in man, and man in God and in his orientation to God.

 

The devil envies, hates, and wishes to harm angels and men in themselves, but ultimately as images of God. In this he is like an evil man who conceives love for a woman, and consequently envy, hatred, and the desire to destroy the man whom she loves. He sees the image of his rival in her house and would like to destroy it, but he would prefer to destroy the man himself.

 

 

The Devil’s Target: Holy Mass and the Blessed Sacrament (The 1875 painting by Aloysius O’Kelly is titled Mass in a Connemara Cabin. )

 


           iii)          The Devil’s Weapons

 

The parable of the house blown by the wind and poured on by the rain is interpreted by the Fathers as the Church afflicted by persecution and heresy. St. Augustine understands in the same way the verse of Psalm 9.9: ‘He lieth in wait in secret, like a lion in his den. By the lion in his den the Psalmist means one who will use both violence and trickery. The first persecution of the Church was by violence, when the Christians were compelled to sacrifice by dint of proscriptions, torture, and bloodshed. The second persecution is by means of trickery, practiced these days by heretics of all sorts and false brethren… lion referring to violence, in his den to his evil ruses. This is now repeated in the reverse order. ‘He lieth in ambush’ declares the Psalmist, that he may catch the poor. Here you have the trickery. What follows: that he may catch the poor whilst he draweth him to him, indicates the violence.’

 

We may characterize the two forms of attack in the following way: violence is an attack on the body, trickery on the soul; the former is a physical evil for the person attacked, but a spiritual good for his eternal life and for others for whom his suffering will sow a seed of spiritual life; the latter, by contrast, is a spiritual evil for the following reasons:

 

 

-            it weakens Faith in a given doctrine,

-           -it weakens Faith in the Church Herself as Teacher of immutable Truth; and so

-         it makes the person affected progressively less certain of all other Truths;

-            if the trickery concerns morality, it fosters sin; 

-            if a person embraces it entirely, he loses the Faith entirely.

-          


b)   Marks of the Devil’s Agency in the Council

 

Reflecting on the last section, we may identify the devil’s agency in the Council in his attack on God and man, in trickery, and in various other fields which we shall now proceed to investigate:

 

i)     The Attack on God;

ii)    The Attack on Man;

iii)   Trickery;

iv)    Destruction;

v)     Mockery;

vi)    Antirealist Subjectivism;

vi)    Universal and Systematic Scope.

 

 

                

 

i)     The Attack on God

 

We have already explained that the devil’s primary target is God, and have enumerated the Council’s attack on the God-Man on twelve counts.

 

ii)    The Attack on Man

 

We have seen that the heresies that the Council teaches concern the nature of Faith, Salvation, the Church, and the Sacraments, in other words Salvation and the means of salvation. The choice of target reveals the devil’s intent to seduce man away from his final end: from the salvation of his soul.

 

iii)   Trickery

 

The devil’s attack on the Church in the Council consists in trickery; not precisely in heresy, as we have said above, since no formal heresy has yet been demonstrated in the Council, but rather in heterodoxy: in silencing dogmas or in doctrines that entail or favor heresy. Particular ways in which a doctrine may favour heresy we have described above in terms of changes of accents, of contradictions, and of the effacement of causality. We add to the devil’s doctrinal trickery the procedural trickery that we have noted in our historical sketches above.

 

“Rome is that way and this way.” 

The devil’s trickery is like a work of sabotage on a signpost pointing to Rome. If the signpost represents the means for attaining Heaven, the trickery consist in removing the sign, or concealing the sign, or twisting it in another direction, defacing it, altering its letters, standing in front of it and saying: “Rome is not that way, it is this way”, or saying: “Rome is that way and this way.” 

 

The subtlety of the trickery corresponds to a growing refinement in the devil’s attacks on the Church in the curse of the centuries, as Bishop Graber explains [1]. In the first centuries of the Church, he uses physical violence, then he turns to heresy; in the Reformation the heresy infects a whole half of the Catholic world who then separate themselves from the Church. The heresy is, however, so blatant at that time and the hierarchy so grounded in the Faith, that it can be extirpated and its proponents excommunicated.

 

In the 20th century, by contrast, the heresy is covert and the hierarchy weak or already infected by its false principles, so that it is not extirpated and there are no sanctions; its proponents remain in the Church, and offer the faithful a heretical agenda of life corresponding to Fallen Nature. A divide similar to that effected by Martin Luther is again effected in the Church, then, but this time the heretics remain in the Church and call themselves Catholics.

 

Under the Franciscan Pontificate we now witness ever more heretics entering the Hierarchy, usurping the mantle of orthodoxy in the place of the orthodox, and tending, as we have noted above, to ostracize true Catholics as ‘heretics’ and ‘schismatics’, on the basis that they have departed from the conciliar Church.

 

We conclude this subsection with the following quotation from St. Cyprian [2]: ‘And what can be more crafty or more subtle, than for the enemy… to devise a new fraud, and under the very title of the Christian name, to deceive the incautious? He has invented heresies and schisms, whereby he might subvert the faith, might corrupt the truth, might divide the unity. Those whom he cannot keep in the darkness of the old way, he circumvents and deceives by the error of a new way. He snatches men from the Church itself; and while they seem to themselves to have already approached the light, and to have escaped the night of the world, he pours over them again, in their unconsciousness, new darkness; so that, although they do not stand firm with the Gospel of Christ, and with the observation and law of Christ, they still call themselves Christians, and walking in darkness, they think that they have the light… who maintain night instead of day, death for salvation, despair under the offer of hope,  perfidy under the  pretext of faith, antichrist under the name of Christ; so that, while they feign things like the truth, they make void the truth by their subtelty….’

 


iv)    Destruction

 


Even if the devil preferred trickery to violence in his attack on the Church in the Council, destruction is the ultimate aim of this spirit whose name is also ‘the murderer from the beginning’: the destruction of man’s immortal soul by heresy and by the mortal sin to which it may lead. We have reason to fear that many souls have been lost to God by the heterodoxy of the Council.

 

 

The ‘spirit of mockery’ emerged from the Council. 

(Christ with mocking soldier (1880) Carl Henrich Bloch

 

 

v)  Mockery

 


When we subject the Council to the Remote Rule of Faith as we have undertaken to do in this book, we observe that spirit of mockery emerge with which the devil is pleased to treat God and the things of God, of which we proceed to give the following examples:

 

            1.    Our Lord Jesus Christ is mocked;

            2.    The Faith is mocked;

            3.    Truth is mocked;

            4.    Dogma is mocked;

            5.    The Chuch’s munera are mocked;

            6.    The most Glorious Mother of God is mocked;

            7.    The Church is mocked;

            8.    The Papacy is mocked;

            9.    The Priesthood is mocked;

           10.   The Religious Life is mocked;

           11.   Sacred Virginity is mocked;

           12.   The Sacraments in general are mocked;

           13.   The Holy Mass is mocked;

           14.   Marriage is mocked.

 

 

 



[1] translated into English as ‘Athanasius and the Church of Our Times’, London 1974

[2] de Unitate Ecclesiae, 3