GOOD VS. EVIL

A SERMON FOR THE 8TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

The ultimate nostalgia trip must surely be that, since the greatest and most beautiful of all angels, Lucifer, said those fateful words “I will not serve,” things just haven’t been the same anymore.  The great peace, which comes from God, which isGod, was shattered that day, and ever since, there has been a great battle between Good and Evil. It was waged first in heaven, between the good angels, led by St. Michael, and the bad angels who followed Lucifer.  No longer great or beautiful, Lucifer was banished from heaven, and from the stench of his infernal pit, he appointed other angels to roam the earth, seeking whom they may devour by temptation and other means.  The men these demons try to destroy are loved by God, and so Lucifer hates them.  He and his demons try to destroy our souls partly because of this hatred they have for us, the beloved of God, but even more so, because they know that our damnation is a gross offense against that God they hate more than anything else.  They attack us chiefly in order to hurt God.

So the battle that began in heaven has continued to this day.  We must remember that it is not a battle of equals. There is no doubt who will eventually win, and even Lucifer knows he’s going to lose, although he’ll do his best to do the most damage possible before it happens.  Lucifer made his first mistake in imagining he was so great, so beautiful, that he was on the level of God.  But as St. Michael exclaimed with such resounding simplicity, “Who is like unto God!”  It wasn’t a question.  It was a declaration made by an archangel who knew his own place as God’s creature. Lucifer didn’t know his place.  He will never be on the same level as God.  The creature can never be equal to the Creator. And that brings me to the main point today, that Evil will never be on the same level as Good.

There have been several heresies during the course of history that have made the same mistake as Lucifer, putting Good and Evil on the same level—equals who are constantly at war, with Good winning a battle here and there, and sometimes Evil triumphing.  Who will win in the end is anybody’s guess, if indeed there ever will be an end.  But we who have the faith know better.  We believe our Lady of Fatima, who was sent by God to tell us that “in the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”  For God, who is so infinitely superior to Lucifer, has decreed that it will not be he, Almighty God, who will directly destroy the Devil. It will not be St. Michael, a great angel like Lucifer.  It will not even be a man.  The devil will have his head crushed beneath the heel of a mere woman.  This is what God promised to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and the devil has ever since been bitterly aware that this would be his humiliating fate.

Such an end will be perfectly fitting for the proud and arrogant Lucifer who thought he was like unto God.  He completely failed to realize that the light of his beauty compared with that of God was like the light of a candle against that of the sun in the heavens.  And that was before his expulsion from heaven. Since then, even that pale light has been extinguished and he has become dark.  He is indeed the Prince of Darkness.  He is nothing but the absence of light, the absence of all goodness. How can something’s absence ever be compared to the thing itself.  Evil is, and can never be, on the same level as Good, when it’s nothing but what’s left over when all the Good is taken away.

And yet there are heresies that claim there are two Gods, one good, one evil, equal in strength, constantly at war.  One of these heresies sprung up in thirteenth-century France around the town of Albi.  For this reason the adherents of this heretical sect were known as Albigensians. Condemned by Pope Innocent III as “worse than the Muslims”, the Albigensians, also known as Cathars, developed their heresies from the Bogomil reforms of Dalmatia and Bulgaria, which called for a return to the Christian principles of perfection, poverty, and preaching.  

That sounds good, you might think.  But the Albigensians had a completely different approach to these ideals, stemming from an ancient heretical belief of the Manicheans, that there are two equal and opposed principles of Good and Evil.  The spirit, the soul, is good.  The body, all material things, are evil.  Even Christ himself was partially evil as he had a physical body.  They thought of him as imperfect, a sinful creature. Similarly, they denied the Resurrection of the Body, as the human physical body, being evil, could not possibly ever be admitted into heaven.  Instead, the Albigensians were obsessed with the idea of doing everything they could to separate the soul from the body.  This led, logically enough, to suicide, which was considered to be not only morally good, but something to be encouraged.  Even the process for the propagation of the human race was considered evil and every attempt was made to prevent it.  Thus, marriage was forbidden, while other unnatural vices were preferred. Perfection consisted in subjugating the body with all manner of unnatural penances and even violence.

There were two types of Albigensian heretics.  The so-called “perfecti” who would abstain from marriage and perform prolonged and severe penances, and the “believers”, who were permitted to indulge in marriage and not be so hard on themselves.  Naturally, there were a lot more “believers” than “perfecti”, and most of the believers preferred to put off “perfection” to their death bed. However, the ones who did so but then survived their illness were often starved to death or poisoned by the “perfecti”.

These Albigensians were like modern-day Mormons.  They sent out preachers all over the south of France, who would travel in twos, corrupting the faith of good Catholics by frightening them into this false religion.  If left to spread uncontrolled, this doctrinal virus of Albigensianism threatened not only the Catholic Church but indeed, because of their perverted beliefs, the whole human race.

All this made a lot of good Catholics back then very worried.  The Pope decided to tackle the problem first of all by diplomatic means.  However, when his ambassador arrived to reason with them, the Albigensians murdered him. The Pope then launched a crusade against the Albigensians, which lasted twenty years.  

In spite of the terrible slaughter, it is a man of peace who receives the most credit for helping to stamp out the Albigensian heresy.  It was in fact none other than St. Dominic, whose feast day we celebrate today.   In the year of Our Lord 1204, Pope Innocent III sent Dominic to France to join forces with the Cistercian monks who were supposed to be fighting the Albigensian heresy.  But what Dominic found, on his arrival, was that the Cistercians had used their influence in the region to grow very worldly.  Their luxurious lifestyle offended and scandalized the local people. Instead of persuading the people to avoid the heretics, they ended up repelling them with their own worldliness, and the people found the false austerity of the Albigensians far more attractive.  So the first task of St. Dominic was to persuade the Cistercians to renounce their indulgent habits, and their life of pomp and worldliness.  Through his preaching, but more successfully, by the example of his own frugal lifestyle, he was successful in persuading vast numbers of Cistercians to reform their worldly ways.  We see now the first fruit of St. Dominic’s approach.  He was not angry with the Cistercians, he didn’t antagonize them by chastising and shaming them.  He simply led by good example.  

Do we want to end the apostasy in the Church today?  Follow the example of St. Dominic.  Lead by example.  We must make sure our own lifestyle is sinless and holy, rooted in traditional values, and above all filled with the charity by which the children of God may be known.  Being angry at the modernists is actually just plain old self-indulgence, letting off steam, venting.  It’s natural, it’s justified even, but let’s not make it our habitual reaction to the latest news from the Vatican.  Rather, let’s try and be as holy as we can be ourselves.  We may not be able to change the Vatican, but within our own sphere of influence, within our own family and circle of friends, there is no telling how effective our own godly behavior may be in persuading others of the righteousness of our cause.

St. Paul warns us in today’s Epistle that if we live after the flesh, we shall die.  The Albigensians, as we have shown, took this to an extreme St. Paul never intended.  The Apostle did not mean that the flesh is intrinsically evil.  We are creatures of flesh and bone, material beings, and that’s how God made us.  His creation cannot be evil in itself.  But we can abuse the physical and material in order to commit evil deeds.  We shouldn’t reject the physical but rather we should subjugate the physical to the spiritual. The body is not evil because we are hungry or tired.  But if we indulge the body with gluttony and sloth then sin enters in.  We must do as St. Paul says, “if [we] through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, [we] shall live.”  

St. Dominic was the founder of the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans. He and his followers used the talent of preaching given them by God to draw vast crowds to the truth of the Catholic Faith.  St. Dominic preached the truth in the towns and villages where the Albigensian heresy was prevalent.   He did not preach with anger.  What good would that have done when a violent crusade was already being waged against them? He preached with charity, taking the arguments of the Albigensians and showing just where they went wrong.  He explained how it is not physical human nature that is evil, but that the consequence of original sin is a fallen nature and therefore an inclination towards evil.  He showed how we must fight this inclination by subjugating the body to the laws of God, not by outlandish penances, but simply by moderation and the virtue of temperance.  He preached the Resurrection of the Body, showing how Christ’s body rose from the dead and how this glorious body later ascended into heaven, leading the way for us to follow.  Most importantly, he preached the Rosary, the great weapon that Our Lady had entrusted to him, for of course without the help of God and his Blessed Mother, not even the great St. Dominic could convert these stubborn and wicked men.  But slowly, drawn by the truth of his arguments and by their renewed discovery of God’s love for them, and of course, by the power of the Rosary, the people of the South of France began to reject the Albigensian heresy once and for all.

Today we need to follow St. Dominic’s example, so that in our own little sphere of influence we can help stem the tide of ignorance and iniquity that surrounds us.  One step at a time, one Hail Mary at a time.  St. Dominic is known more than anything else for the Rosary and it’s the Rosary that should be our chief weapon.  Last week we spoke about the chains that bound St. Peter in prison, the chains that bind Rome in modernism.  This week, let’s turn to that other chain, the one that holds together the beads of our Rosary.  The Devil knows that he will be vanquished by our Lady and the Rosary.  He’s afraid of them, and there’s no better way to drive him away.