By JAMES MONTI
After coming out of church one Sunday following Mass, upon pausing to pray before a statue of Our Lady of Grace, I spotted a detail of this particular sculpture that I had failed to notice previously. Like other depictions of Our Lady of Grace, in this one she treads beneath her feet the infernal serpent.
But what struck me this time about this particular statue is the head of the serpent — his jaws are gaping wide open, gasping as our Lady crushes him with her lovely foot. It serves as a powerful reminder of the epic battle between the Prince of Darkness and the Great Army of Heaven that fights in the closest alliance with all the faithful on the face of the Earth.
It is by a “happy fault” in the original text of the Latin Vulgate Bible that we have the precious artistic tradition of depicting our Lady as crushing Satan underfoot. For it was only after many centuries that it was finally determined that the Genesis verse rendered in the Vulgate as “she shall crush thy head. . . .” (Gen. 3:15, Douay-Rheims translation), should actually be translated, “he shall crush thy head. . . .”
It seems to me that this innocent error was permitted to go unchecked for such a long time by the Providence of Almighty God to communicate the truth that our Lord’s all-out battle against Satan is very much Mary’s battle as well. And it is this battle, their battle, that is one of the dominant motifs of Lent.
For centuries, the Church has set before her children at the outset of their annual Lenten journey to Jerusalem and the events of Holy Week, on the First Sunday of Lent, our Lord’s own personal confrontation with the Devil on the threshold of His public ministry. In reading the accounts of Satan’s futile attempts to tempt Christ, one cannot help thinking that the Devil was crazy even to try such a thing. Indeed he was crazy, crazed by his own monstrous arrogance.
In the account of this episode that St. Luke gives in his Gospel, we are told, “And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). These words certainly seem to imply that Satan fully intended to return at some later time to attack our Lord again in some manner. The “opportune time” referred to could very well be the moment when three years later Christ was arrested by His enemies in Gethsemane.
In our lives too, for as long as we live, the Devil is never quite finished with us, no matter how many times he is thwarted. I think we all realize that Satan “never misses a trick.”
He is ever on the prowl, watching us undercover to choose an opportune moment to attack and take down his prey. In the course of our lives, in the course of the day, he lies in wait for us, and like a serpent, will look for the moment when he can begin to wrap his coils round about our feet with this or that temptation to pride, anger, lust, greed, despair, envy, malice, or some other horrible sin. He varies his tactics to make the most of our moments of greatest vulnerability.
Knowing that our dear Lord whispers His sacred inspirations to us in the depth of our hearts, Satan perversely mimics this by whispering also, communicating his vile invitations to achieve the ruination of our souls. And like a serpent, the bite of his fangs can bring spiritual death and damnation.
When we are attempting to do something good, the Devil’s “weapon of choice” against us is the temptation to pride. For pride ruins our motivation for carrying out a good work. Indeed, it is on the very first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, that the Church sets before us the Gospel account of Christ’s warning about doing the right thing for a very wrong reason (Matt. 6:1-6, 16-18).
It is the spiritual “reality check” of humility, real humility, that stops pride dead in its tracks. Just pausing to consider that every single good thing in our lives, and indeed every molecule of the world that surrounds us, is a gratuitous gift from God can go a long way toward curing us of the delusion that we are the authors of our own “success” or “achievements.”
There’s a passage from the Old Testament that brings this home quite well: Through His servant Joshua the Lord declared to the people of Israel, “I gave you a land on which you had not laboured, and cities which you had not built . . . you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards which you did not plant” (Joshua 24:13).
One of the worst absurdities that swept through all too many academic circles and beyond during the theological madness of the 1960s and 1970s was the notion that Satan isn’t for real, an idea that is nothing short of a denial of faith in the Gospels. For right at the very outset of Christ’s public ministry the battle line is drawn in our Lord’s confrontation with the Devil in the desert; this battle continues with Christ’s many expulsions of demons, and climaxes in His Passion, at the beginning of which He describes His enemies’ seizure of Him as not only their “hour” but also that of “the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53), yet at the same time having assured His disciples, “. . . now shall the ruler of this world be cast out” (John 12:31).
These words of our Lord about casting out Satan by His suffering and death on the cross reveal a key reason why Lent begins with and is drawn from Christ’s “desert skirmish” with Satan. For if the purpose of Lent is to prepare us for the commemoration of Christ’s Passion in Holy Week, and if the Passion is Christ’s ultimate “fight to the death” with Satan, as indeed it is, then Lent must train us to join Christ in this battle. It means going on the offensive against him whom Christ warns us has been “a murderer from the beginning…a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).
He is a murderer, because by tempting Eve he has had a hand in every man and woman’s death since the fall of Adam. And by tempting man to mortal sin, he is a murderer not only of the body but of the soul as well: “…fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28).
It is on the “far end” of Lent, in the events of Holy Week, that we find our Lord’s crucial advice for standing our ground against the encroachments of Satan: “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation” (Matt. 26:41), the warning that Christ gave the apostles in Gethsemane, a warning they failed to heed. We need to see daily Mass and daily Holy Communion as the very best way to do this, the best thing to begin doing during Lent and to continue doing afterward.
Knowing that we must keep our consciences clean all day and all night in order to receive our Lord worthily in Holy Communion the next day goes a long way toward bolstering our determination “to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin.”
Going to Confession is integral to our Lenten journey, not only for raising the soul from the dead after mortal sin, but also as a preventative measure, a course correction that stunts the growth of our venial sins before they make us vulnerable to sins far worse.
Needless to say, Satan hates the Sacrament of Confession and will do all he can to dissuade us from resorting to it; the catastrophic decline in Confessions over the past five decades surely has his fingerprints all over it. Going to Confession as frequently as we can is one of the best ways to defeat Satan for our own good and the good of the entire Church.
Making the Sign of the Cross and keeping a crucifix near us, whether on the wall or on a desk or table, are centuries-old defenses against the attacks of Satan. And when the Devil ambushes us with a sudden temptation, invocation of the Blessed Virgin, even by simply exclaiming her name, Mary, will drive the Devil back, for he is terrified by her purity, her innocence, and her humility.
As Pope St. John Paul II observed in his 1987 encyclical, Redemptoris Mater, “…Mary, present in the Church as the Mother of the Redeemer, takes part, as a mother, in that monumental struggle against the powers of darkness” (Redemptoris Mater, March 25, 1987, n. 47 — Vatican website translation — ©Libreria Editrice Vaticana).
Stand Firm
Standing beside her Divine Bridegroom, Holy Mother Church is bold and even defiant in challenging Satan, as we can see in these words of exorcism from the baptismal rite in a 1501 ritual of Barcelona (likewise found in the Extraordinary Form Baptism rite for adults):
“Hear, O reviled Satan, adjured by the name of the eternal God and His Son our Savior: depart with thy hatred, conquered, trembling and groaning. May there be nothing in common to thee with this servant of God, now pondering heavenly things, about to renounce thee and thy world and to attain blessed immortality” (text in Amadeu-J. Soberanas, ed., Ordinarium Sacramentorum Barchinonense, 1501, facsimile edition, Biblioteca Liturgica Catalana, n. 1, Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1991, fol. 16r).
In all our battles with the infernal enemy, having entrusted ourselves to our Lord and our Lady, let us take courage from the words that God addressed to the children of Israel through His servant Moses when Pharaoh and his warriors threatened them at the Red Sea: “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. . . . The Lord will fight for you” (Exodus 14:13-14).
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