WE have had good priests at Rockwell. We have a new one. He is marvelous. He has gone back to bedrock Christian belief without which you cannot call yourself a Christian. He spoke of two things mostly forgotten by Christians. The first is that fervor need not be noisy. At one of the noisiest parts of the Mass, he silenced the choir and enjoined communion in silence with God. Silence is the only language we share with Him; none of us speaks Aramaic—the only language God spoke aside from maybe Hebrew on Sinai. But there were no witnesses except Moses himself. Well, who knows? Even Brian Williams made up that story of being in a chopper crash.
The second is a reality insistently denied by the West: Satan, Lucifer the Prince of Light and now the Lord
of Darkness.
True, Satan—it is pretentious to say, The Satan, so I will not—was decisively defeated in the battle of Calvary, where Jesus defeated Satan’s principal weaponry: lies about his guilt of blasphemy—it isn’t blasphemy when You are talking about Yourself; when You are God claiming the things that pertain only to God. And murder. You know the jig: Satan is the father of lies and a murderer.
But Satan, like some people in the south, won’t admit he has been conquered. Following his defeat, he was gone into low-intensity warfare and waged insurgencies. The best way to lose a war is not to believe in the enemy. In the Vietnam War, the US did not take the Khmer Rouge seriously. It didn’t have Soviet and Chinese support; it was a completely homegrown affair. The result: Cambodia fell ahead of Saigon. The war in heaven is over, but it continues on earth. The battlefields are the bodies and souls of men and the devil is more real than a Republican antipoverty program.
And, yet, in his seven years studying theology in the US or, for that matter, in Rome, our new priest said he had never been assigned any readings on Satan nor was the Lord of Darkness ever talked about. The War in Heaven, aside from being the title of the best novel written by Charles Williams—is found in Persian mythology but Satan is not a myth, our new priest insisted, but a reality.
It was as if the leading theologians in the US didn’t believe Satan existed; possibly Satan was just a literary device to encapsulate the evil of men and the misfortunes inflicted by nature. Not surprisingly, he said, the two places where Satanism is most widely practiced is San Francisco and New York. Well, I am not so sure about that, because those are my favorite places on earth. And I have never been so fervent at Mass than in New York, in a large mostly empty cathedral where the extras in Broadway musicals volunteer their voices in the choir. It is a gay congregation and much the better for that.
Indeed, sightings of Satan everywhere else in the world number far more than those of Elvis leaving a building in the US. The most recent sightings of Satan and his cohorts are in Syria, where he emerged as a sexual predator of children in the guise of freedom fighters supported by the West in its desire to topple Assad so a pipeline can be built across what would then be the Israeli protectorate of Syria to the Mediterranean, and thereby end Europe’s dependence on Russian oil.
Satan was earlier sighted in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia. He opened a front under Boko Haram in Africa and another in southern Philippines—with regard to which the priest asked us to pray for the widows and orphans of the SAF 44, who gave their lives so that we may worship our Lord in a church and not on our knees upon a carpet with a knife at our throats as we say our last prayers. But only Deles and Ferrer know more about that than anyone else.
1 comment
Mr. Locsin, please refrain from using the capital letter “L”, when you meant the lord of darkness. It confuses readers like me because the title lord with a capital “L” rightfully belongs to our Lord Jesus Christ only (e.g., Lord of Hosts, Lord of lords, Lord Almighty), and not to Satan, the lord (or prince) of darkness. Thank you.