Posted on 02/26/2014 3:55:30 PM PST by franky8
Satan, Sin, and Sociology
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In his first homily, given on March 14th, Pope Francis cautioned the faithful that he who does not pray to the Lord, prays to the devil. When we do not profess Jesus Christ, he further insisted, we profess the worldliness of the devil, a demonic worldliness. Since that day, he has spoken often of the one he has called the prince of this world, and the father of lies. And, in the book, On Heaven and Earth, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio devoted an entire chapter to The Devil, warning that Satans fruits are destruction, division, hatred and calumny.
For many Catholicsespecially post-Vatican II Catholicsspeaking aloud of evil, sin, and Satan is something they may never have experienced, even in Church. Some may have to resort to the internet (or dictionary) to look up a definition of calumny. It seems that after a long hiatus, evil and sin have been rediscovered by some. More than sixty years ago, T. S. Eliot wrote about the sense of alienation that occurs when social regulators begin to splinter and the controlling moral authority of a society is no longer effective. He suggested that a sense of sin was beginning to disappear. In his play, The Cocktail Party, a troubled young protagonist visits a psychiatrist and confides that she feels sinful because of her relationship with a married man. She is distressed not so much by the illicit relationship, but rather, by the strange sense of sin. Eliot writes, Having a sense of sin seems abnormal to hershe had never noticed before that such behavior might be seen in those terms. She believed that she had become ill.
In our age of relativism the preceding paragraph fits the bill, especially when Psychiatry rationalizes away sin as just a bad habit. When was the last time you heard the word sin?
As the Fathers of the Church said: Saint Theodore, Saint Basil, Saint Ephrem, Saint John Chrysostom Saint Gregory, "Many attain to faith, but few to the heavenly kingdom." Saint Anselm declares, "There are few who are saved."
Saint Augustine states even more clearly, "Therefore, few are saved in comparison to those who are damned." Saint Jerome. At the end of his life, in the presence of his disciples, he spoke these dreadful words: "Out of one hundred thousand people whose lives have always been bad, you will find barely one who is worthy of indulgence." Catholics beware!!!
We are living in an age where everything is permitted.
We are also living in an age where questioning sinful behavior is FAR worse then the behavior itself.
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