While novels are fantasy, often times they
do contain salient truths, social commentary; along with the occasional insight
that bespeaks wisdom.
Such as this from Clancy’s novel THE BEAR
AND THE DRAGON: “There are those who say
what evil we see in the world is just the absence of good. But we know better
than that. There is a devil in creation, and that devil has agents among us,
and some of those agents run countries! Some of those agents start wars. Some
of those agents take innocent people from their homes and put them in camps and
murder them there like cattle in a slaughter house. Those are the agents of
Satan! Those are the devotees of the Prince of Darkness. They are those among
us who take the lives of the innocent, even the lives of innocent little babies….”
[p. 482]
Too often when we are confronted with
obvious evil there is a tendency to explain it, if not outright pretend it is
something else, by using terms rooted in pseudo-psychological or social
conditions catch-all phrases.
The inability or unwillingness to call evil
that which is evil actually weakens our ability to discern and choose the
authentic good.
As a result we find ourselves enmeshed in a
relativistic, nihilist, ego-centric culture exhausted by the twin weights of
fear and hopelessness.
The cultural, in particular media, assault
on Christianity/Christians has led to a protracted period of two extremes
wherein some Christians are so radically intolerant they obsessively see satan
and evil everywhere and others have gone turtle.
When Pope Francis speaks with compassion
many, again in the media in particular, truncate his statement thereby creating
the erroneous impression he is about to water down truth and when the Holy
Father articulates truth unequivocally, such as about the evil of euthanasia,
the very same people become angry and hypercritical.
Love and truth are inseparable.
There is no authentic compassion without
love rooted in truth.
Love without truth becomes emotional
indulgence of the disorder, the evil, all around us.
Truth without love is not only blinkered
but often becomes a sledgehammer with which to bash those not yet fully on the
road from darkness into light, error into truth, complicity in evil to
unabashed joy in holiness.
It is easy enough to list what is disordered
in our world.
Truth demands we list those by what they
are: evils.
Kidnapping and selling off women and girls
in Nigeria, for example, is first and foremost NOT some disordered act of
terrorists.
It is evil perpetrated by agents of the
Prince of Darkness.
We need to look at things with eyes
enlightened by truth.
We need pray and fast for the fullness of
Christ and His Gospel to penetrate and change every human heart.
We
must pray that the cold, violent, hateful darkness of evil in all its guises be
banished from the earth, along with all agents of evil.
In His merciful love for us God gives us
all the help, indeed all the weapons we need to both name and overcome evil.
Besides Christ our Victor, Mary Our Mother,
there is also the Prince of the Heavenly
Host to help and protect us and thanks to Pope Leo XXII we have this powerful
prayer:
Saint Michael the
Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray;
and do Thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host -
by the Divine Power of God -
cast into hell, satan and all the evil spirits,
who roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.
defend us in battle.
Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray;
and do Thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host -
by the Divine Power of God -
cast into hell, satan and all the evil spirits,
who roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.
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