The Church Cannot “Dialogue” With Satan
By JAMES MONTI
Recently, I was looking through a biography of St. Patrick (+461) penned by the nineteenth-century American prelate Bishop Michael O’Farrell (+1894) when I came across the following remarkable passage regarding what is considered to be the one and only likely encounter between Patrick and Ireland’s most illustrious woman saint, Brigid of Kildare (ca. 525). Brigid was still a child when Patrick died, so this incident would have transpired close to the end of his life. At the time, Brigid was a girl of about ten.
As she was attending an instruction given by the bishop, she fell asleep and had a strange dream. When she awoke, Patrick, who by some inner light knew that she had just experienced something out of the ordinary, called upon her to reveal her dream:
“Patrick, I say, enjoined Bridget [Brigid] to make known what she had heard or seen in her vision. She, obeying the command of the saint, replied: ‘I beheld an assembly of persons clothed in white raiment; and I beheld ploughs, and oxen, and standing corn, all white, and immediately they became all spotted, and afterward they became all black; and in the end, I beheld sheep and swine, dogs and wolves, all fighting and contending together.’ Then St. Patrick expounded the vision, and said that the whiteness pertained to the state of Ireland, as it then was; for all the prelates and servants of the Church were then fruitful and diligent in faith and in good works, according to the doctrine of the gospel.
“The things which were spotted, belonged to the succeeding generation, which would be pure in faith, but stained by evil works. The blackness, he said, was the season of following generations, when the world would be profaned, not only with evil works, but with the renunciation of the Christian faith. The contest of the sheep and the swine, of the dogs and the wolves, he pronounced to be the controversy of the pure and impure prelates, of good and of bad men, which, after the lapse of many years, would at length come to pass” (Bishop Michael O’Farrell, The Life of Saint Patrick, New York, P.J. Kenedy and Sons, 1901, pp. 289-290).
Brigid’s dream as interpreted by Patrick spoke of something that for many generations of Irishmen must have seemed unthinkable — that Ireland, Catholic Ireland, would someday descend into a “renunciation of the Christian faith.” Yet in our own age this mysterious dream of Brigid is no longer just a frightening vision, for contemporary Ireland is largely dominated by just such a wholesale renunciation of Christianity.
Moreover, this “blackness” of unbelief is by no means confined to Ireland; much of what used to be called “Christendom” — Christian Europe and the Americas — has suffered a similar fate.
But there is one further aspect of Brigid’s dream that strikes us as uncannily familiar, especially right now in 2022: “…the controversy of the pure and impure prelates, of good and of bad men, which, after the lapse of many years, would at length come to pass.” In America as in Europe, and elsewhere too, we see bishops taking starkly different positions in addressing the key moral and ecclesiastical issues of our time.
Now more than ever, faithful Catholics are looking to, depending upon, and rallying around faithful bishops who are willing to uphold and defend the timeless beliefs and observances of the Church at a time when some of their brother bishops are talking and acting as if they want to reinvent the Church and what it means to be a Catholic. Moreover, some of these “progressive” prelates are even resorting to harsh tactics to impose their ideas upon the faithful. So much of what is at stake comes down to whether the Church should conform to the spirit of the world or not. The Apostle St. John teaches us the answer:
“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides for ever” (1 John 2:15-17).
Intrinsic Evils
There have always been and there will always be integral parts of this handed-down faith of ours that the world will hate and aggressively oppose. In the face of such opposition, our Lord did not back down or seek to reach a compromise with His foes. He went to the Cross rather than make such compromises. The Church cannot make deals with the secular world that jeopardize the integrity and credibility of her teachings. The Church cannot signs peace treaties with the Devil or his disciples.
The Church must unabashedly speak the truth to power; she must be a prophetic voice ready to confront the high and mighty whenever and wherever they attempt to impose intrinsic evils upon those they govern. And abortion is among the very worst of those intrinsic evils, akin to the monstrosities and war crimes of Nazi Germany.
When the high and mighty do these things and then dare to call themselves “good Catholics” and present themselves for the reception of Holy Communion, the Church must oppose them to their faces until they cease doing such things. We hear it said that we mustn’t “weaponize” or “instrumentalize” the Holy Eucharist by refusing to give it even to rabidly pro-abortion politicians.
The truth is quite the opposite. Can the Church be seen as implicitly condoning high and mighty politicians who avidly and aggressively promote the deliberate slaying of untold thousands upon thousands of unborn children? Would the prophets have condoned such men? Would St. John the Baptist have condoned such men? Would our Lord have condoned such men? Is it that we mustn’t make these individuals “feel bad” about themselves “or “look bad” in the sight of others? If the Church shrinks from delivering a clear, coherent, and consistent message about the gravity of the evil of abortion for fear of making anyone “feel bad” about themselves or others, how will she ever bring anyone to a genuine and lasting change of heart, to conversion, to repentance and salvation?
When such evil is not confronted, when there is a refusal to challenge it in any tangible way, we ourselves run the risk of becoming desensitized and indifferent to such evils. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, we begin to half-believe the lie that these evils aren’t so evil after all. We run the risk of losing our own moral sense. We run the risk of losing our Catholic identity.
We live in a time that sorely lacks clarity, or rather, a time that deems clarity a social vice devoutly to be eradicated. The world tells us that we are no longer to make black and white, absolutist distinctions between good and evil, between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood, or even between male and female.
Within the Church too, we hear it said that making sharp black and white distinctions between what is moral and what is immoral, between what is true and what is false, between what is holy and what is unholy, is formalistic, judgmental, and pastorally insensitive. Yet it was Our Lord Himself who said, “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil” (Matt. 5:37).
Linked to this relativism is a “now versus then” narrative which pits the present against the past, with the great traditions of the past and even the doctrinal formulations of the past seen as time-bound and no longer relevant, as if the present has essentially canceled the past.
Our Catholic faith has not come to us as some sort of spontaneous newly minted revelation given to us by the present age. It has been handed down, from generation to generation, across the centuries, its doctrines and its practices, its professions of faith and its forms of sacred worship, the revealed Word of God and the corpus of tradition, handed down in its purity and integrity, in its unity and integrity, in its immutability and its timelessness.
At a time when Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass are being marginalized and treated as outcasts whose very presence on parish grounds is being circumscribed lest they “contaminate” their fellow Catholics, those who openly reject the most fundamental moral values of our faith are being invited to have a say in discussions as to what the future of the Church ought to be. Is this by any definition of the word “communion”?
No, the purveyors of heresy and moral depravity should not have any say in the formulation of Church doctrine. Abortion advocates and same-sex marriage propagandists do not deserve a place at the table in deciding what we as Catholics ought to believe. When our Lord dined with sinners, it was not for the purpose of making a compromise with them, of cutting a deal with them that would legitimize their life of sin and pass it off as just a different form of discipleship.
Both Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI taught us that there are immutable dogmas that are non-negotiable, that heresy must be called out for what it is and refuted, and that the Church’s engagement with the world will often require challenging and confronting the world.
It cannot be otherwise. The blood of the martyrs testifies to this. By the grace of God and the intercession of our Lady, let us all stay the course and persevere in fidelity to our Lord, to His teachings and to His Church.