By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM
What are the powers of the Devil? What can that creep do to us? Because of the general ignorance of Church teaching on the Devil that is commonplace in our days, people tend to fall into two opposite extremes: either to belittle or deny the Devil’s action or to be overanxious about it, fearing him more than he deserves. In either way they fall into the Devil’s traps.
The Devil and his minions were blasted by the anger of God and flung down from Heaven into Hell, good and proper, but they did not lose their natural faculties. Such powers they received at their creation and they place them vastly above us in knowledge and power, making them most dangerous adversaries.
If you try to argue with the Devil, you will lose, however clever you may think yourself to be. You will lose, period.
But fortunately the Holy Spirit shows us how we may defend ourselves. He calls on us to use the means that God has given us: “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil” (Eph. 6:11). May I pause here for a moment and encourage you, Wanderer readers, to do a meditation on chapter six, verses ten to seventeen, of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians? Here is the text I refer to:
“Brethren, be strengthened in the Lord, and in the might of his power. Put you on the armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.
“Therefore take unto you the armor of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace: In all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one. And take unto you the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”
Even though the Devil is a master of deceit, and he succeeds in deceiving many folks who like to be deceived, there are many things the old creep cannot do. For instance:
1) Produce any kind of truly supernatural phenomenon. 2) Create a substance, since only God can create. 3) Bring a dead person back to life, although he could produce the illusion of doing so. 4) Make truly prophetic predictions, since only God knows the future absolutely, and those to whom He chooses to reveal a portion of it. However, the Devil’s power of intelligent conjecture about the future might appear to mere mortals a prophecy. 5) Know the secrets of a person’s mind and heart. However, the Devil’s shrewd intelligence and observation may enable him to deduce many things about a person.
But there are important things the creep can indeed do, and we should beware of them! For instance:
1) Produce corporeal or imaginative visions. 2) Falsify ecstasy. 3) Instantaneously cure sicknesses that have been caused by diabolical influence. 4) Produce the stigmata. 5) Simulate miracles and the phenomena of levitation and bilocation. 6) Make people or objects seem to disappear by interfering with a person’s sight or line of vision. 7) Cause a person to hear sounds or voices. 8) Cause a person to speak in tongues. 9) Declare a fact which is hidden or distant.
In spite of all these things, Satan and his minions, for all their power, are but finite creatures of God, and can act only as God permits. God checks their craft and ever-watchful hatred through the armor which, for the sake of His divine Son, He has given us. Those who refuse that armor are defenseless against the assaults of the legions of Hell. “The devil is like a mad dog, but he is chained. . . . He can, therefore, only seize and devour his prey if you venture too near him, and that is why his usual tactics are to make himself appear as a lamb” (see The Way of Divine Love by Sr. Josefa Menendez).
One thing is certain about the miserable life of these creeps: Wherever they are, or are acting, the demons are always enduring the pains of Hell.
I have been asked several times in my talks on the Devil about the so-called Spiritualism, or Spiritism, that is, the belief and practices of those who profess to hold communication with spirits or with the souls of the dead. By the way, of the two words, “Spiritualism” and “Spiritism,” the latter is the more correct, but the former may be said to have the sanction of a wider usage. They say that the communication with the spirits usually takes place through a person called a medium; but the spirits themselves, it is claimed, sometimes appear under a corporal form, or manifest their presence by sounds, and in various other ways.
Do those séances really have any truth in them? A very unlikely person provided much information about them. The great magician Harry Houdini (1874-1926) attended over 300 séances in order to contact his deceased mother, but detected fraud at every one. After this he conducted a crusade against mediums as charlatans. Some of these mediums had fooled scientists who examined them. Fraud has been proven in so many cases, that one might be tempted to dismiss the entire subject as unworthy of attention.
But it is not so. It must, however, be admitted that in some cases of necromancy (summoning up the dead) the evidence points very strongly to the interference of a hidden, often frightening, intellectual being. Instances of this kind have been vouched for by witnesses whose word we cannot reject, unless we are prepared to deny the value of all human testimony.
Among them are men of high standing in physical science, who are accustomed by lifelong training to the rigorous examination of phenomena, and who should be qualified to decide whether a given manifestation can be accounted for on purely natural grounds or not.
In the Ephesians text I quoted above, St. Paul mentions “the rulers of the world of this darkness, the spirits of wickedness in the high places.” The Douay-Rheims Bible has a footnote about such “spirits in the high places”: that is to say, in the air, the lowest of the celestial regions; in which God permits these wicked spirits or fallen angels to wander.
In any event, the Holy Spirit is clear on this topic: The Bible condemns necromancy (summoning up the dead), spiritualism, astrology, witchcraft, and sorcery on numerous occasions: “Do not turn to mediums or wizards; do not seek them out to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 19:31). And God took the communication with spirits so seriously that He commanded that “a man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death” (Lev. 20:27). Wow. No nonsense here.
Next article: More on the angels.
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(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
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