The Battle For Souls . . . A Battle Unto Death And Eternal Life

By JAMES MONTI

Recently, a young seminarian from Nigeria commented to me that the most crucial moment in our lives is the moment of our death, for it is the moment upon which our eternal fate hangs. Each and every time we recite the Hail Mary, we refer to it, and beg our Lady to intervene when that moment comes: “. . . pray for us sinners…at the hour of our death.” One’s entire life can be seen as an epic spiritual battle that climaxes in that critical point of departure from time into eternity. It is a battle that unfolds on multiple scales from the inner terrain of one’s own soul to warfare venues stretching across continents.
Anyone who has ever spent time at the bedside of a dying hospital patient knows well how as death nears the drama of eternal salvation and the mystery of human suffering become more acute than ever. Prayers for a hoped-for last-minute miraculous recovery intermingle with the struggle to accept the will of God and prepare for the coming of death if there is to be no such miracle.
In the face of this drama, the Church rises to the occasion, offering to the soul preparing to stand before the judgment seat of God three mighty sacraments — Confession, Extreme Unction, and the Holy Eucharist. And for centuries, the Church has accompanied the dying on their final steps toward the portal of eternity with rich prayers of solace, encouragement, and fortification, recited at one’s deathbed by her ordained ministers:
“May Christ, the Son of the living God, set you in the ever green loveliness of his paradise, and may he, the true Shepherd, recognize you as one of his own. May you see your Redeemer face to face and, standing in his presence forever, may you see with joyful eyes Truth revealed in all its fullness” (“Recommendation of the Departing Soul,” Rituale Romanum, in Collectio Rituum: Ritual Approved by the National Conference of Bishops of the United States of America, New York, Benziger Brothers, 1964, p. 205 — copyright National Catholic Welfare Conference, 1964).
“. . . Lead him into the lovely places of paradise that are forever green, so that he may live with you in undivided love, never to be separated from you and from those whom you chose” (ibid., pp. 211-212).
And when death at last comes, the Church does not simply walk away, as if she would leave the departed soul to face what follows alone and abandoned by her. Other religions may think their task is done, that nothing more can or should be done for the departed soul, but not the Catholic Church. Her priests arm themselves in solemn vestments to do battle for the eternal bliss of the faithful departed, offering for the dead her most powerful and precious asset, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, not only on the day when she will accompany the departed one to his or her final resting place, but likewise for years to come.
What other religion shows such deep compassion and solicitude for the dead both at their parting and long afterward as does the Catholic Church?
Yet we know all too well from current events just how much our Holy Catholic Church is viciously hated by those who would see her wiped out from the face of the Earth, who would, if they could, stop her from assisting not only the dying, but the living as well. This hatred is the offspring of the Father of Lies.
Having been expelled from Heaven, Satan seeks vengeance against God by insanely striving to expel God from the material universe. And enraged by the Incarnation, the Devil seeks to make his hatred “incarnate” as it were, to put flesh and bones on his diabolical and jealousy-driven plot against the human race by recruiting men and women to be his hirelings in desacralizing, desecrating, and profaning everything that God has sanctified and made holy in our world.
Often enough this has meant campaigns to eradicate every trace of God and the Catholic faith from the world. It was just this sort of “ideological cleansing” that became one of the defining features of the horrific era of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939). Secularist radicals made their plans for Spain quite clear from the outset: On April 14, 1931, in Seville, a city steeped in centuries of deep Eucharistic and Marian piety, a flash mob gathered in the city’s Plaza del Triunfo to stone and behead a statue of the Immaculate Conception.
In Purchil, that same day, the right of Catholics to worship God in their own homes was immediately assailed by militants who went from house to house confiscating pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Over the years that followed, Sacred Heart images became a prime target of the atheists’ iconoclastic agenda, seeing this image as a particular threat to their de-Christianization campaign.
Disruption and profanation of the Church’s rites for the faithful departed emerged as a particularly odious manifestation of the Spanish secularists’ hatred for the Church. It began with disruptions of Catholic funeral processions and the secularization of cemeteries. In Pechina priests were banned from officiating at Catholic burials.
This all culminated in a barbaric, revolting, and macabre wave of grossly sacrilegious exhumations of the bodies of the Catholic dead, especially those of priests, religious and nuns, which were then put on public display under the ludicrous premise that their state of decomposition, a natural phenomenon the Church has never denied, somehow disproved the efficacy of the Church’s sacraments and prayers.
The secularists sought nothing short of the expulsion of God from Spain. To this end, often enough, entire churches were destroyed. But in many cases a more pragmatic approach to the “problem” of Spain’s innumerable Catholic churches and shrines was implemented; instead of demolishing the church building itself, which could prove “useful” when retrofitted for profane purposes and functions, secularists systematically stripped out of churches everything that made them the House of God — religious images, altars and altars furnishings, vestments, liturgical books, confessionals, pews, etc.
Fire was the weapon of choice for disposing of these sacred objects — it has the perverse advantage of eviscerating whatever is consigned to it, a key step toward achievement of a totally Godless new world order.
As the false messiah of this Godless culture, Satan has had his own “liturgies.” On September 29, 1936, leftists in the Spanish village of Hoyo de Pinares celebrated a mock religious procession, dragging through the streets a granite crucifix from the parish church to the town hall, where a man vested as an altar boy hurled the crucifix down from a balcony, reducing it to rubble.

A False Narrative

There have been those who have sought to justify the monstrous acts of anti-Catholic persecution in Second Republic Spain with all too familiar excuses. We are told that the Spanish people were fighting to rid themselves of centuries of oppression by the Catholic Church; that all her apostolates to educate the poor and to care for the sick, her schools and her hospitals, were little more than sinister schemes to control and manipulate the minds of Spaniards; that her sacred art and architecture are nothing more than riches stolen from the poor.
The promulgators of this false narrative are confronted with the embarrassing reality that shortly after the Spanish secularists rose to power in the early 1930s an enormous backlash against their Godless tyranny quickly arose as the country’s Catholic laity mobilized by the thousands to resist.
In the end, faithful Catholics were to pay dearly for their fidelity. The Secularists of the Second Republic would ultimately murder thousands of Catholic priests and religious as their attempted “Final Solution” to the problem of a country largely unwilling to renounce the faith of its fathers.
Individual cases of Catholic misconduct, such as that of prelates all too friendly with the rich and mighty, are a very lame excuse for the persecution of the Church. An intrinsically evil action, such as the torching of a Catholic place of worship, must ultimately be judged on its own terms, and not by pointing to previous events or grievances as justifications.
This is brought out memorably in an exchange between St. Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey that the dramatist Robert Bolt created for his play that became a classic film, A Man for All Seasons. Wolsey is explaining how “certain actions, perhaps regrettable,” i.e., pressuring the Pope into granting King Henry VIII an annulment, were necessary to satisfy the monarch’s desire for a male heir. Pausing to offer a justification for this “pressure,” the cardinal raises his finger and interjects in a moralizing tone, “Perhaps not regrettable. You know, Thomas, there’s much in the Church that needs reform,” to which More replies simply with a silent stare. Totally unnerved by More’s reaction, Wolsey concedes, “All right, regrettable” (A Man for All Seasons, Fred Zinnemann, director, Columbia Pictures/Highland Films, Ltd., 1966).

The Ultimate Victory

On November 3, 1918, a young Bohemian writer named Franta Sauer incited a mob to join him in destroying a famed seventeenth-century memorial to the Immaculate Conception, the city of Prague’s “Marian Column,” a large gilded statue of the Blessed Virgin mounted upon a pillar over fifty feet high, at the base of which stood four sculpted angels representing the cardinal virtues in battle against Satan.
Twenty-nine years later, as Sauer was dying from tuberculosis, he made a general Confession to a priest at Prague’s Franciscan friary, expressing his profound remorse for his attack upon the Marian Column. Not long afterward, he died at the city’s Pod Petrinem Hospital, having received the Last Rites. On August 15, 2020, a reconstruction of the Marian Column in its original location was completed.
This is the only sort of victory the Church ultimately desires over her persecutors — that they may come to share her joy in Christ, and pass from death to eternal life “in the ever green loveliness of His Paradise.”