In this episode Trent examines the case of a Catholic school that banned Harry Potter books as well as two Jesuit theologians who undermine belief in the Eucharist and the reality of the Devil.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Even though God is all-knowing, it turns out there are three things that God does not know. He doesn’t know what a Jesuit is going to say, he doesn’t know what a Dominican just said, and he doesn’t know how many Franciscan orders there are. Now, that’s an old joke, but the joke reveals a kernel of truth, both about the multiplicity of Franciscan orders, the sometimes abstract theological musings of the Dominicans, and the surprising, sometimes absurd things that certain Jesuits end up saying.
And so, that is one of the stories that I want to cover today here on the Counsel of Trent Podcast. Recent comments by two Jesuits, including the head of the Jesuit Order, on the devil being a symbolic reality rather than a personal one, and father Thomas Reese on the Eucharist. I want to break down their comments on the show today, but before that, I want to talk about a recent news item involving Harry Potter. Harry Potter. Harry Potter books being removed from a Catholic school in Tennessee. Getting to all that soon, right here on the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn.
Before we get to those stories, once again a big shout-out to our supporters at trenthornpodcast.com. Here are some updates. We’ve just uploaded some episodes for our Catechism studies series and church history studies series. More will be going up later here in the week. Eventually I want to take you through the entire Catechism in 100 easy lessons, and all of church history in 100 easy lessons. Just for you, if you are a subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com. Also, I am taking questions for open mailbag. If you are a gold or nth medal subscriber, nth medal being one of the most powerful, magical… And magic, we’re going to talk about later with Harry Potter… One of the most powerful medals in the multiverse, because it can even repel magic. Of course, that’s something the Thanagarians wield in the D.C. Comics universe. If you are a gold or nth medal subscriber, you can submit questions for the future open mailbag episode we’re going to do later on, here in the month of September. So if you’ve got a question you’d love for me to answer here on the podcast, and you are one of those subscribers, go to trenthornpodcast.com and check that out. Remember, your support is what allows the podcast to continue to grow, and reach oh so many new people.
Now, let us be on with our story for today. The first one, this was actually published a few hours ago on nbcnews.com. “Harry Potter books taken off shelves at Catholic school, over risk of conjuring evil spirits. Students at a Catholic school in Nashville, Tennessee can no longer check out Harry Potter books from the school library after a pastor there decided that reading the books risks conjuring evil spirits. Father Reehil, a pastor at St. Edward’s School, made the decision over the summer to remove the books from the library, according to NBC affiliate WSNV in Nashville. ‘These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception,’ Reehil wrote in an email, according to the Tennessean. ‘The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells, which when read by a human being, risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text.’ The Tennessean reports that Reehil said he discussed the issue with exorcists both in Rome and the United States. In an email to parents, the superintendent for Catholic schools in the diocese of Nashville said, ‘The Harry Potter books were never part of the curriculum. Students can still read them at the school, if they bring copies from home. The books just won’t be available in the library.'”
All right. So, what to make of this? When I hear this, you know, there’s always kind of a knee jerk reaction. Some people have the knee jerk reaction like, “Oh, typical Catholic schools, overreacting to things and banning books. You know, what other ignorant Dark Age thinking are you going to peddle?” That’s one extreme. The other extreme is to say, “There’s nothing wrong with these books. They’re just books. I mean, we should encourage kids to read, and use their imaginations. What’s the problem here?” Well, these are two extremes.
First, on the one hand, Catholic schools should ban certain books that are truly antithetical to Catholic values. So, you have books that promote homosexual behavior, for example, or so-called same sex marriage. I think there’s one… There’s so many books out there like this. There’s one, I think it’s called King and King, and so that supports so-called same sex marriage. There’s another one, and it does so in a more insidious way, which made me want to write my own children’s books in response, but it’s about a… I can’t remember the name of it. It’s about a bulldog who wants to be a rhinoceros. I think I’ve talked about it here on the podcast. It’s used as a way… It’s not meant to directly in the story, but it’s been co-opted to support transgender ideology. That this bulldog thinks he’s a rhinoceros. Then, well, he’s a rhinoceros. How can you argue with that?
Other books would be the Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. For example, that book includes I think magic, talking animals. It’s kind of like the anti-Chronicles of Narnia. It’s called His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. That book was written with an explicit antireligious bias in it. I mean, the bad guys I think are actually called the Magisterium in that book, where they’re based on the Catholic hierarchy. So there, it makes sense for me. Like, “Oh. Well, here’s a book that’s written with a clear antireligious purpose.” I mean, Philip Pullman has come out in interviews, clear that his book is meant to undermine religion.
So I would expect, of course, a Catholic high school to not have His Dark Materials, or a copy of The Da Vinci Code in the library, unless you have it in a special locked case that says, “For research purposes only.” There’s a great stamp they actually sell online you can stamp in your books. I thought about doing it here at the Catholic Answers library. The stamp says, you know, “Heretical garbage, to only be used for research purposes,” this stamp. Because we have a fair amount of [inaudible 00:05:57] here on my shelves. I would say about half the books here in my own personal library in my office at Catholic Answers are heretical, or they dissent from the faith in some important way. Now, I have to read this to understand what people are arguing, in order to argue against them, and I think in some cases you have mature high school and college students. You can introduce them to that. But in general, in a Catholic school library, the books that are there should not be antithetical to the faith.
Now, the problem comes with something like Harry Potter. Is that antithetical to the Catholic faith? There’s a lot of people who debate about this, and it’s hard for me to weigh in. I’m going to be straight up and honest with you. I’m not that big of a Harry Potter fan. I mean, I’m not anti-Harry Potter. I just never really got into it, because I’m not a big fantasy person. I mean, I have an appreciation for Lord of the Rings, for the Chronicles of Narnia, for fantasy fiction, but I myself, I never really got into it. I was always more, when it came to fiction, either a historical fiction person… So, I enjoy books that were set in historical settings here in the real world, because I’ve always enjoyed history… or I enjoyed science fiction. So, rather than fantasy, I’ve liked things like Star Trek, Star Wars, other spinoffs from those series. As a kid, that was what I always liked. Or adventure stories, things like that.
But when I tried watching the Harry Potter movies, I’m like, “Oh, this protagonist, I don’t really identify with him very well. Okay. He seems like a kid who always ends up in trouble, and somebody else has to save him.” And maybe that’s how it is in the earlier movies, and not in the later ones, but I didn’t stick around that long. But I’m not going to knock people who do support those things. I have really good friends who love C.S. Lewis, who love Tolkien. They can go on and on and on about Tolkien. And so, the argument here is if Harry Potter is not appropriate for Catholics, because it contains… Now, the main argument that the priest here gives… Let’s see. It’s Father Reehil, from St. Edward’s School, is that the book contains magic, and it contains people reciting incantations or spells, and this could conjure evil spirits. But the problem here is that when you read in Tolkien, for example, there’s people who use spells, who use magic. There’s magic that is found in different kinds of Catholic literature. So if magic is bad in Harry Potter, and it makes it disqualified for Catholic school children to read, why wouldn’t that also apply equally to Lord of the Rings?
Now, once again, I’m not an expert in these things. There could be a fine difference between that I’m not aware of. In fact, I’m open. If you say, “Trent, you’re totally wrong. Here’s why Harry Potter is bad.” Well, go to trenthornpodcast.com. Leave a comment under this episode, and I’m happy to be educated on it. But from what I’ve seen, in just the cursory research I’ve done, the so-called spells in Harry Potter are not occult magic. So, if you look at paragraph 2117 in the Catechism, it says this: “All practices of magic or sorcery by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one’s service and have a supernatural power over others, even if this were for the sake of restoring their health, are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned, when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons.”
So, when the Catechism is condemning magic, it’s not condemning… First of all, it’s not condemning anything that’s called magic. You know, my former colleague, Patrick Coffin, does stage magic. He’s a stage magician. So, you know. That is something that is not magic. It’s more illusions, things like this. That wouldn’t be condemned under that. But magic that tries to alter reality through some kind of supernatural control over reality, that’s where things become problematic, especially when it’s magic that calls upon demons or paranormal spirits to be able to manipulate reality.
Here is one commenter talking about the difference between Tolkien and Harry Potter, and about the nature of magic. He writes, “Magic is the ability to do things by will, rather than by physical construction. If you want to change the direction and flow of a river, you either cast a spell, or you start digging. If you want crops to fail, you either cast a curse, or you light a fire in the fields. In Tolkien’s fiction, all the characters work their magic by will. In Rowling’s fiction, all the characters who can do magic,” and there’s an important distinction we’ll talk about, “work their magic by will. Now, there are artifacts that seem to be produced by magic, which have unusual properties, such as the elvish robes, cloaks, and boats given to the Fellowship of the Ring by the Elves of Lothlorien, and such as Harry’s cloak of invisibility.”
So, the magic in Tolkien and Rowling seems to involve using words, incantations, spells, if you will, or artifacts that have some kind of supernatural control over reality. And so, the Catechism says we can’t do that here in the real world. Now, you can read stories about people doing all kinds of things that you ought not do in the real world, and that happens even in Tolkien and other kinds of fantasy novels. But for you to do those things to try to attempt to tame occult powers, to place them at one’s service and have a supernatural power over others, that would be problematic. But here, I don’t see the concern in Harry Potter, that these are spells that people would imitate, that would be able to quote/unquote “conjure up evil spirits.”
I have a list here of all the spells that are used in the Harry Potter books, and they’re not spells like, “I call upon the demon so and so, or the spirit of such and such, to do this to others.” They look just like Latin words, or garbled Latin words. So, it would be like saying that you can’t be a stage magician if you say, “Abracadabra,” and you pull a rabbit out of your hat. You can’t say “abracadabra” or “hocus pocus.” These spells, I don’t think that the spells in and of themselves, if kids were just playing around, could conjure up an evil spirit, because they’re mostly, they’re just Latin.
I mean, you have things like oberto means to open. I believe that is Latin for opening. I know when I go to my favorite Mexican restaurant, it’ll either say cerrado, closed, or abierto, open. Aguamente is a charm that shoots water from a wand, I guess. You know. So, agua. There’s water, right there. You go through more and more. I look at all of these. Calvario. That’s a spell that causes hair loss. Well, calvares is Latin for the head. I mean, I’m just scrolling through here on the list, and I’m not seeing that these are spells like I would find in like a witch’s coven, or an occult paranormal book. Expulso, make things explode. Expelloramus, to disarm. Means to expel, get rid of. I, personally, I don’t see the harm here.
Now, if you disagree with me, feel free to go to trenthornpodcast.com and correct me. I’m willing to be corrected. Because once again, I’m not an expert on these things. For example, I don’t know the fine differences here in this article between Tolkien and Rowling, about how in Rowling’s world, only the Muggles… Muggles, regular people, can’t use magic, but other people can. In Tolkien’s world, almost everybody can use magic. For example, Frodo sung a song that summoned a Bombadil. Mary was able to wield a sword that helped destroy the power of the Lord of the Nazgul. Pippin was able to use a palantir. Sam used Galadriel’s field to overcome Shelob.
I love this stuff. Don’t get me wrong. I love it, and what I enjoy in the Marvel cinematic universe, D.C., science fiction, would sound just as nonsensical to somebody else that wasn’t familiar with it. But when I hear this stuff, getting into the fine details of these particular literary worlds, I do have a temptation to want to shout, “Nerds,” just like from the episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to college. Which is a great bit, by the way. Here, I’ll play it for you now. This is where Homer has to go back to school, and he goes to college, and his idea of what college is like is basically formed by 1980’s movies like Revenge of the Nerds.
Nerd.
Homer. That isn’t very nice.
Marge, try to understand. There are two kinds of college students. Jocks and nerds. As a jock, it is my duty to give nerds a hard time. Hey, pal. Did you get a load of the nerd?
Pardon me?
I just wanted to play that. But no, if you enjoy fantasy novels, I’m not saying you’re a nerd. I’m saying I’m just like you. There are things that we enjoy other people may not understand from the outside, if they haven’t done the homework and the research to spend the hours of reading and understanding it. That’s why the thing that is concerning me the most, when a school does something like, “Well, we’re banning Harry Potter,” I worry that it makes the Catholic faith seem anti-intellectual, or overly fundamentalist in its leanings. Where, if we decry things… You know, it’s like the boy who cried wolf. If we say, “Hey, this book is bad. Don’t read it,” and it turns out it really isn’t, then people won’t believe us when we say, “Well, this book that kids are reading really is bad.” And people will say, “Oh, this is just like when you guys got worked up over Harry Potter for no good reason.”
So, as it stands now, I would disagree with this assessment. I think that any book, any fantasy series, that includes fantasy elements, kids can take too far. Even something like Lord of the Rings, you could take too far. But I think that if it’s read in a responsible and prudent way, I don’t see anything, at least right off the top of my head, that would be a cause for alarm. But I could be wrong, so if I’m wrong, feel free to go to trenthornpodcast.com, or email me at my website, and I’m happy to do another follow up episode to say, “Hey, maybe I was wrong about this.” But for now, that is the verdict that I make.
Moving on, though. I could move on to something that is definitely, definitely not good. Two comments from Jesuits, one on the Eucharist, and one on the nature of the devil, that went up recently, that really require a response. So, this is always hard. I told a joke earlier, “God doesn’t know what a Jesuit’s about to say.” And it is unfortunate that when I look at theologians who say wacky things, a lot of times they’re Jesuits. And, you know, but that’s not just to them. I found Dominicans and other priests and theologians of all stripes who have said all kinds of absurd things. But also, I know many Jesuits who are wonderful priests. I mean, two of my examples, right off the top of my head, are some of the smartest guys I know. Are Father Robert Spitzer, and Father Mitch Pacwa, from EWTN.
I think here’s the common thread with the Jesuits. I mean, they’re God’s marines, is what they’re called. They were founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who himself saw combat. He was at least injured in a battle. And, you know, they’re the front lines, the theological shock troops you send in, that you evangelize the world with in the toughest areas. You send them out. And to become a Jesuit, you have to go through years and years and years of schooling. I think the most schooling of any order. I don’t know. If you’re a Dominican listening, or someone else who’s gone through more education than a Jesuit, feel free to email me to correct me. But Jesuits, I do know, go through schooling for a long time. They’re smart guys. I mean, they know a lot. Even the ones who reach these absurd conclusions, they are smart.
And that’s where I think the downfall is, is that you have people who almost become too smart for their own good. There’s nothing wrong with being intelligent. Nothing wrong with that at all. But there’s always a great temptation that when you amass knowledge, when you learn more and more about something, it’s easy to become prideful. I mean, even in your own life. You may not be as knowledgeable as a Jesuit when it comes to theology, but you may know something really well. You may know something about raising children. You may know something about a particular illness. You may know something about your work, or your trade, or whatever it is you do. There may be something you are a particular expert in. A hobby, a book you’ve read. You know it inside and out. And so, when other people try to comment on it who aren’t as knowledgeable, you can get kind of haughty and prideful. “Well, actually, it’s like this,” and you kind of look down your nose at other people that have a simpler understanding of the subject matter. You think you really get it.
But then you get so full of your own hype, you by everything that you’re selling, that you can’t see the own blind spots in your thinking. Or our thinking. I can do this, too. It’s easy to become prideful when you have a lot of knowledge, because then, “Look, I’m so smart. I know so much more about this than anybody else. I don’t need these other simpletons at church to tell me I am wrong. I can read the Greek. I can read the Hebrew. I know what the church fathers say on this.” And, you know, pride goeth before the fall, as the proverbs say. That’s why it saddens me when I see very intellectual and learned theologians and laypeople, who reach conclusions that are so far at variance with the faith.
So, here’s Father Thomas Reese. He was writing, this is August 19th, in the National Catholic Reporter. “The Eucharist is about more than Christ becoming present… ” And it’s a response to the Pew Research Center’s survey, saying that only one-third of Catholics believe the Eucharist was the body and blood of Christ. Though if you listen to the podcast we did a week or so ago on that, you’ll see that the majority of Catholics who deny the Eucharist was the body and blood of Christ are the Catholics who go to church rarely, if ever, at all. So, that’s going to be understandable. They don’t understand the faith. It’s a failure of catechesis. They don’t see the importance of it. They don’t know the teaching. And so, they don’t believe it.
But Reese, Father Reese’s response to it is to say, “Well, yeah. It’s a failure of catechesis, but I think the church faces a greater problem. Catholics have an impoverished idea of what the Eucharist is really about.” Then he goes on to say that, “What the Eucharist is really about, it’s about us being nourished by the Eucharist to become more like Christ, not about the Eucharist actually being Jesus. We don’t want to be caught up in that.” So, this is what he writes. He says, “In ancient Greece, Aristotle described reality using concepts of prime matter, substantial forms, substance, and accidents. This allowed Catholic theologians, using Aristotelian philosophy, to explain that the substance of the bread was changed into the Body of Christ, while the accidents remained the same. Thus, transubstantiation, using Aristotelian concepts,” he says, “to explain Catholic mysteries in the 21st century is a fool’s errand. When was the last time you met an Aristotelian, outside a Catholic seminary?”
You know, frankly, when’s the last time you met a Catholic outside of some so-called Catholic seminaries? There are a lot of great ones, don’t get me wrong. But once again, you have people… You’ll have theologians teaching in these seminaries, who actually don’t even believe in God. They publish all kinds of absurd things. That’s why both at the university level, down to the parochial school level, the key to getting good Catholics is having good teachers. You’ve got teachers that are bad, either morally or doctrinally? Give them the boot, because otherwise they will poison the minds of everyone else. I do not care how many monographs they have at Oxford University Press. I don’t care they graduated magna cum laude from wherever. If they’re not faithful… If they’re not full of faith, they’re full of something else, and I don’t want that in my university. Whee. Getting a little feisty for you all.
So, I mean, when I hear this, I say, well, why would you disparage this kind of thinking that we have, that has been so helpful, just because it’s old? Like, “Oh, it’s Aristotelian.” Okay, so is virtue theory. Like, the virtues. The first virtue theorist, the idea that we should focus on doing good by becoming good people, who practice virtues like prudence, temperance, justice, courage, comes from Aristotle. Are we going to throw that away now? Are we going to throw away ancient Greek ideas about democracy, and basic rights and governance? So, this is what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery. Saying, “Oh, this was something that Aristotle believed 2,500 years ago. How is it relevant today?”
And Father Reese doesn’t really explain why it’s not relevant. He says, “I personally find the theology of transubstantiation unintelligible, not because I don’t believe that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, but because I do not believe in prime matter, substantial forms, substance, and accidents. I don’t think we have a clue what Jesus meant when He said, ‘This is my body.’ I think we should humbly accept it as a mystery, and not pretend we understand it.”
All right, here’s some problems with this. Number one, this idea that the essence of the bread and wine change, while the appearances remain the same, is not something that was purely derived from medieval thinking about Aristotle. You can find it much further back in church history. In the fourth century, Saint Gregory of Nyssa described the bread and wine changing at the consecration with the Greek word [metastoichaosis 00:23:08]. That roughly translates to the English word transelementation. So, in the medieval western church, they use the term transubstantiation, the substance changes, but the bread and wine still remain the same, and that they appear to be bread and wine. But the eastern church fathers used words like transelementation.
So, this is not just some thing that was cooked up by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. The Body of Christ… I was trying to avoid a pun here… The Body of Christ has always wrestled with what the Body of Christ is, receiving of the Eucharist. How do we understand this is really Jesus, but it still looks, touch, feels, tastes, smells, like bread and wine? How can that be? Much the same way we would try to figure out the incarnation itself. How can Jesus be God, when I look at Him, and I see Him and touch Him, and I give Him a DNA test, and all of these empirical scientists say that He’s man? So, how can He be God and man? Well, we use theological concepts derived from ancient Greek language, like the hypostatic union, for example. We’ll talk about the [prosopan 00:24:18], the [oupasteces 00:24:18]. You know, and we’ll use these particular words that are specific and technical, to communicate the knowledge that we have about a mystery. Just because something is a mystery in our faith doesn’t mean that we know nothing about it. It just means that the meaning behind it is something we will never exhaust in this lifetime.
But there are some things we can definitively know. For example, the Counsel of Trent, in the 16th century clearly said that, “If anyone denies that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance… ” Notice the counsel uses the word substance… “of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the species only of the bread and wine remaining, which conversion indeed the Catholic church most aptly calls transubstantiation. Anyone who denies this,” the counsel says, “let him be anathema.” You know, “That’s heresy. Stay away from it.”
Father Reese goes on. Here’s the most egregious part of the article. “The mass is not about adoring Jesus, or even praying to Jesus. In the Eucharistic prayers said by the priest at mass, we pray to the Father, through, with, and in Christ. We give thanks and praise to God for His wondrous deeds, especially for raising up Jesus as our savior. The Eucharistic prayer asks that the Spirit transform us so that we can become like Christ, or as St. Augustine said, ‘We become what we receive.’ Ultimately, the mass is more about us becoming the Body of Christ, than it is about the bread becoming the Body of Christ.”
Here’s the problem with this. That you have theology, that where it starts to wear down, you have the problems with it, is that it makes everything into an earthly focus. That the point of our faith is to become good people, to become like Christ. That the greatest mystery is the transformation within us. So that you have homilies that say things like, “The miracle, the feeding of the 5,000, was really just a miracle of sharing. Jesus didn’t really multiply bread. That’s not the miracle. The real miracle is that people learned how to share.” That’s not a miracle. that’s just a successful kindergarten class, when you teach people how to share.
A real miracle is when you can make bread from nothing to feed 5,000 people, as a sign you’re the incarnate Lord who will feed all people with spiritual food that will never perish, because they will never perish, and they will have eternal life. And you’ll vindicate that by rising from the dead and becoming that very bread and wine, the very body and blood of Christ, becoming that which they will receive. I mean, look to what the Catechism says. Paragraph 1374 says, “The mode of Christ’s presence under the Eucharistic species is unique. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments, as the perfection of the spiritual life, and the end to which all the sacraments tend. And the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist, the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore the whole Christ, is truly, really, and substantially contained.”
Paragraph 1378 says, “In the liturgy of the mass, we express our faith in the real presence of Christ, under the species of bread and wine, by, among other ways, genuflecting or bowing deeply, as a sign of adoration of the Lord.” So, to say the mass is not about adoring Jesus, even though paragraph 1378 says that’s clearly what we do in the liturgy of the mass, is just completely off-base here.
All right. Time for one more. Father Arturo Sosa, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, said recently that the devil is a symbol, but not a person. “The devil,” quote, “exists as the personification of evil in different structures, but not in persons. Because the devil is not a person, is a way of acting evil. He is not a person like a human person. It is a way of evil, to be present in human life.” He went on to say, “Good and evil are in a permanent war in the human conscience, and we have ways to point them out. We recognize God as good, fully good. Symbols are part of reality, and the devil exists as a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality.”
Once again, this is about trying to take the wonder of our faith… And sometimes I think theologians do this because they’re embarrassed. Like, “Oh, we can’t believe in the devil or spirits. We can’t believe in these things.” Even though there are exorcists who have written a lot of replies to what Father Sosa said, saying, “Nope, the devil is a real personal reality. We have encountered him in doing exorcisms with people. It’s not a symbol that lashes out at people in exorcisms. It’s really the devil himself.” You know, this idea that, like, “Well, people are going to look down on us.” And theologians, one of the greatest mistakes we make is when we think, “Well, we’ve got to make the faith palatable. We’ve got to make the faith something that people… ” We’re like, “Oh, this is great. Something they’re not ashamed of. So, we’ve got to get rid of all the things that are unpopular. Get rid of the teaching on the devil. Get rid of the teaching on hell. Get rid of the teaching on homosexuality.” But when you leave “Love your neighbor as yourself… ” “Oh, look, people. We’ve got this great faith.” No, you don’t. You’ve got secular human morality, dressed up in vestments, dressed up with liturgy and ritual.
But you don’t have the faith anymore when you throw away the parts that are embarrassing to you, because those parts are the most important parts. Of understanding we live in a world where we struggle against not just sin, but against demonic powers, those who would want to consign us to an eternity apart from God. That is why we need the grace of the sacraments and the grace of God, to repel this real threat to our lives. The Catechism says, in paragraph 391… You know, contra to what Father Sosa says about the devil not being a person… The Catechism, quoting the Fourth Lateran Council in the 13th century, clearly says, “Behind the disobedient choice of our first parents lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God, which makes them fall into death out of envy. Scripture and the church’s traditions see in this being a fallen angel called Satan, or the devil. The church teaches that Satan was at first a good angel, made by God. The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing.”
So, let’s end here with words of advice from Saint Peter. First Peter five, eight through 11, to show the devil is not a symbol. He’s a personal reality we have to be wary of, but that we should not nervously always worry about, as if the devil is going to snatch us away from God against our will. First Peter five, eight through 11, says this: “Be sober. Be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experience of suffering is required of your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself restore, establish, and strengthen you. To Him be the dominion forever and ever, Amen.” Couldn’t think of better words to end our time together today. Thank you all so much for listening. Pray for me. I’ll pray for you as well, to give glory to Jesus Christ, who will restore, establish, and strengthen you in the coming week. Take care, everyone, and I hope you have a blessed day.