Saying “Yes” to Satan

We are called to be the leaven in the world, to spread the Kingdom of God to all men. The World hates us as a result. Will we stand firm, or say "yes" to the Enemy?

From Crisis

By Sean Fitzpatrick

The world, now being unveiled, stands or falls on the faith and fortitude of Catholics willing to follow Christ as the persecution intensifies.

Lent remembers and mirrors Jesus fasting and praying in the desert for 40 days, when one of the most dramatic moments in the Gospel takes place: Christ’s temptation by the devil. Christ was not the only one to be tempted with these offerings of miracle, mystery, and authority. They have been Satan’s calling cards for millennia; and, in case you missed it, the ruling elites of secular society have fully accepted them in making the weird world of today—a world built on saying “yes” to Satan, a world in which the hatred of Catholicism is consequently central.

These are days of disturbing disclosure, when the mask is being plucked from the overlords of politics, economics, and entertainment. Their cabal is one clearly structured by unadulterated pride: power-mongering and pressure, money and manipulation, bribes and blackmail, using people for self-service, trafficking and corruption. 

It can hardly be denied that the elites form a pathocracy as rulers who don’t have a normal sense of empathy, morals, or conscience, allowing their pathologies to sanction deeds that everyday, decent people would refrain from—namely: lying, cheating, and stealing (or murdering) all the way to the top without compunction. 

These are the few who are willing to rise by revolting against the spiritual standards of Western civilization and the restraints of natural law. History shows their pattern in Nazism and Stalinism. They are inheritors of a satanic pride, infused with the same hatred for God and His Church as the devil himself because they have chosen the proverbial deal with Mephistopheles, exchanging the Christian doctrines of intellectual and moral restriction (in which true freedom lies) for unbridled empowerment (which comprises slavery), becoming the wretch of Sir Walter Scott’s Lay:

High though his titles, proud his name,

Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;—
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

These are the men and women who have assented to the temptations of miracle, mystery, and authority and brought them into unmistakable being before our eyes. 

It can hardly be denied that the elites form a pathocracy as rulers who don’t have a normal sense of empathy, morals, or conscience, allowing their pathologies to sanction deeds that everyday, decent people would refrain from.Miracle, Mystery, and Authority

In the context of our age, the temptation of turning stones into bread can be applied to the ability to provide everything, both the necessary and the desirable, instantaneously. The miracles of technology and industry and commerce can satisfy human hungers faster and easier than ever before. This also shifts into the realm of comfort and pleasure—and the dopamine hits of content aptly named “feeds.” The culture we have created turns silence into noise, ennui into locked-in distraction, and Church rituals into sentimental megachurch circuses. 

The infinity of Netflix is a rush of excess to the point of surfeit. Even politics and world affairs are viewed through a filter of fleeting entertainment value. The news must be “new” or it is immaterial, living a bubble life of passing fancy. Our every want is met to the point of desensitization and ignorance.

Anyone can count the ways in which mankind has given in to the temptation to throw themselves from the pinnacle of the temple to be caught by “angels” to proclaim a pseudo divinity, to be a wielder of wonder. The signs of overt power and control speak for themselves through the habits of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart. Apple’s logo is an ironic icon of man’s submission to the first temptation. 

Faith is reduced to performance. Truth is tested by emotional highs and social media saints. Throw yourself down and be supported by AI. Pay no attention to the Neuralink creep of transhumanism (it’s all gloriously relative anyway, as defined and sanctioned by the transgender movement). Man and machine have come together to give us a god for the age, a god made in man’s image and likeness, the perfection of idolatry. All trust has been placed in princes and toward the discovery of a reality worthy of worship.

The kingdoms of the world have been surrendered with civilized systems of safety and security. But for these systems to be effective, they require a spineless, servile spirit in the citizenry which will not interrupt the policies of manufactured, thought-controlled peace. Through government reliance, all can be copacetic and even comatose. Pervasive propaganda, the military-industrial complex, police states, surveillance, mind conditioning—these are the armies that conquer the kingdoms of the world and place them at our feet now that the elites have fallen down in worship before Satan. The elites have accepted the authority he can bestow, and it marches with the drive for dominance and control.

Clear Catholic Hatred

The high and mighty ones who have committed to these temptations hate Catholics. The central cause for the hatred the ruling elites bear toward the Catholic Church is because they are the wayward children of the Catholic Church. Secularists to their core, they are, nevertheless, people endowed with the spiritual heritage of Western culture. Catholicism is part of who they are, despite their denials. 

Though they strain with every fiber of their being and every argument in their arsenal and every noise in their cacophonic culture to sever themselves from this history and inheritance, they cannot deny that they have departed from something inherent to human fulfillment in order to embrace self-gratification. As disturbing as it is, it is that simple; and evil is simple. 

All the elitist values which are hyped to the heavens—such as tolerance, equality, diversity, inclusion, love of the victim and the downtrodden minorities, and such purported universal human rights—derive from the faith of their fathers which they have rejected and rebelled against. All has been repurposed and reframed to glorify man instead of God. And they must know that, to some extent, and make allowance for the disparagement of the Catholic Church. This is the reason why—with only the allowance of the powers that be—anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable form of bigotry, as Halloween costumes, movies, curse words, and open concerns about Catholic numbers in public councils and courts manifest. This prejudice is so clear, especially when contrasted to the regard for every other religion or belief. 

The elites will never allow themselves to acknowledge any of this, however, no matter how much they seem to hunger for or be obsessed with religion, whether in their worship of sex, money, influence, or perhaps even Satan himself (if the unverified vampiric rumors of Epstein underbellies are true). To do so would only expose their own unoriginality and their absolute dependency on something that they rightfully hold as antithetical to their aspirations and schemes. 

And from that refusal comes their hatred. In other words, their desire to deny who they truly are and hide from themselves and their origin spawns a hatred for those who have not relinquished man’s original identity and purpose. Despite being clothed in immense power, so many people are still hiding naked in the bushes from God like Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve wanted to be free according to the Serpent’s presentation of freedom, which is to have everything that God gave him but not on God’s terms. The elites who hate the one true Faith want to have the world in the way they want to have it, denying even that it ever came from God.

All the elitist values which are hyped to the heavens—such as tolerance, equality, diversity, inclusion, love of the victim and downtrodden minorities…derive from the faith of their fathers which they have rejected and rebelled against.A Church that Rejects Christ

Towering above this psychological (and spiritual) asphyxiation, the Catholic Church is the only historical competitor to the authority and power of the elites—and they want to diminish her more than anything else. No matter how great and grand their scope and sway may be or become, if the Catholic Church is true, then they are false. Threatened as they are—given their heritage and the instinctive mystical sense that every human being has—these controlitarians do everything in their strength to neuter the Catholic Faith or turn the Church into a mirror of themselves. 

Their hubris knows no bounds, and so they are set with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to convert the Catholic Church to their own secular values, derived though they are from Catholic virtues. Space is not the final frontier for these Muskian magnates. It is the Catholic Church. She is the last enemy, the one entity that can overthrow their empires. If she could be taken over, the war would be won.

This is precisely the horror that Dostoevsky explores with the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov.That tale tells of a time where the elites have conquered not only the world but also the Church by intentionally giving in to the temptations the devil uttered to Christ in the desert. It is bread and pride and power that make people immediately happy and free from suffering, blissful in their ignorance as they are drawn along to death and destruction. When Christ Himself comes again with miracles and wonders, He is quickly imprisoned and sentenced to death because the elites that govern church and state have concluded that the devil’s way is wiser in the control and contentment of mankind. 

Thus, the Inquisitor judges the Judge, saying Christ’s way was too difficult and only promised failure for the majority of people. But by aligning themselves with Satan and his promises, the Church has found that they have the power to satisfy, to seduce, to silence. By using the mantle of the Church, the elites—which the Inquisitor represents as he lectures Our Lord on how He misjudged human nature—have found a way to harness the Church itself for their own agenda of human regulation, having successfully removed from it all that is problematic in the course of secular success—namely, the teachings, example, and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Begone, Satan

Like the Grand Inquisitor, the elites of our day have not only accepted the temptations of Satan, they have also created an ersatz version of the Church in their rejection of Christ’s Church. Contempt for Catholics is the natural result, who live not by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Catholics are free because they have the truth, and the freedom of truth is the very thing the elites seek to withhold from the masses, having lost it themselves by their enslavement to the lies that give them power on earth. As Lucifer lowered in Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven,” and so, too, do the elites live a life of wrested temporal power while hating those who have untouchable spiritual power. 

The Catholic religion is not considered as the Marxist opium any longer. Instead of a sedative—or the “soma” of Huxley’s dystopian nightmare—Christianity is considered too dangerous to have a place in the postmodern polis. The call for resistance, however, is not one of force but of fortitude. The example of Christ stands immovably, and Catholics must never cease renouncing Satan and all his works and all his pomps. If we stand fast, the angels will minister to us as they did to Our Lord, and the Church will prevail despite hateful attack.