Speak of the Devil!

Well, we don’t, do we! We try and ignore him – and that’s a mistake. We underestimate his power and subtly, we pretend we can outwit him. Like so many over the centuries before us we forget that the devil “has a smiling face.”

At our spiritual peril we have ceased to publicly invoke the Prince of the Heavenly Hosts - the Archangel Michael as our safeguard. Some of our readers will remember when – right up until 1964 – that powerful invocation to the Archangel Michael – was recited at the conclusion of every Mass. It was no accident that this happened. It was at the direction of that great Pope Leo XIII who had experienced a terrifying mystical insight of the aggressive power Satan was to exercise in coming decades. Power that he didn’t shrink from using through the unmitigated horrors of Nazism and Stalinism; power that fuelled the moral evils that began to sweep through the western world in the “sexual revolution” of the sixties; power that has closed hearts and minds to the “culture of death’ that permeates our society through and through.

In 1964 the first wave of post-Vatican II changes were mooted. By 1968, the prayer to St Michael was eliminated. Perhaps in humility we might suggest that a touch of human arrogance was at work here rather than the Holy Spirit. For it was not long, only four years later, in 1972, that Pope Paul VI was to say: “the smoke of Satan has entered by some crack into the temple of God”.

What has happened since that time? It is depressing to recite the litany of evils of which we are all aware, culminating in the recent sickening revelations exposed in Michael Rose’s book “Goodbye, Good Men” detailing the corruption and homosexual perversion that had literally taken over a number of US seminaries beginning as far back as 30 years ago. The fruits of this perversion are bitter in the mouths of faithful Catholics throughout the Western world.

If ever it was the time it is now to remember St Michael the Archangel who once before cast Satan down to Hell - to publicly call for his protection Here is a small suggestion: perhaps those few of the faithful who remain behind after Sunday Mass to say their Thanksgiving, could group together and recite the invocation to St. Michael aloud or even do so individually.

It only takes one or two and others will follow. It is proclaiming Christ to denounce Satan.