Leo

Lucifer

Rev dear Rev: I read somewhere, I don't think it was in a book or anything, but somewhere that Pope Leo XIII once had a spiritual experience in which he overheard Satan asking God for Dominion over the human race for 75-100 years, and that Satan was then unchained for a hundred years when God eventually acceded to this demand and request. That produced the dreadful 20th Century in which we suffered terribly in Britain from Two World Wars and countless other wars too. Is there any truth to this rumour?        

Shocking. Personally, I remain somewhat surprised that this story has surfaced with the larger community of believing Christians, since for a long time, throughout the 1980s and 1990s it was embargoed by the authorities in Rome and largely silenced by the liberal elites of the churches most of whom had a different apercu of that century, as one of mankind coming of age and triumphing over the primitivisms of the previous centuries, a different schema indeed. Pol Pot theologians dominated the anglican and lutheran communities and even the Catholic Church in those years. Only with the book by Dietrich in St Louis did something of that liberal edifice begin to crack, and then eventually this story of Leo XIII began to surface more and more outside prayer groups and even charismatic circles of cenacles of prayer. Even then it was so pooh-poohed that people simply put it down to an apocryphal Tale of dubious confection, since after all, nobody in the modern world of the Woke then did really believe anymore in a personal spirit called Lucifer. Liberal theologians waxed and waned on the mystery of the old theologies and older spiritualities of "a mythic personification of evil", since evil, they all said, pointing and citing away to Aquinas, does not have metaphysical being. It all seemed to be a right wing plot to unseat everything that the council and the liberal take-over of that council and of the theology faculties around Europe had worked so hard to achieve in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s - in sum a world without its master and its princeps, namely the Lucifer.

So when this story came to light and it has only become popular in spiritual circles and among spiritual prayer groups in the last 2 or 3 years, then it was only a matter of time before somebody would be astute enough and acute enough as an observer of all things churchy to propose this precise subject as a theological question, even if this question is more suited to the pages of the surly and churlish Mr D'Arcy over there on the pages of the Manchester Universe. Still am now pleased that it has finally surfaced on the printed page, because the Churches one and all have laboured long and heard and in an atmosphere of great tension and hardship to try to find an answer to all the bright promises of the 20 the Century but then also the harsh and bitter realities of that selfsame Century. Even the philosopher pope from Poland way back when in the 1990s had occasion to begin the long process of unseating the optimism of the liberal hegemonies in the period of conclusion of the 20th Century when he asked theologians not to be so heady but rather to turn their urgent attentions to the great scandal for non believers from that Century, namely how could a Century of Pride and Glorying in Human Achievement yet produce the Shoah Holocaust of so many families and little children in Germany in that time frame of the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s?

To be or not to be, that was the question. so eventually, top down, the pope himself had to get involved in the foolish optimism of the theologians of European faculties and the theologians of South American faculties who had resolutely refused to counsel this huge shocking statistical fact in their systems. A prophet among missionaries from the China circles, one young priest called James Martin, has for long asserted that the demons of Hell never accepted the oft touted human blame game, blaming them and the evil spirits for the shocking devastation of the Chosen People in the Holocaust in Germany, since they had always asserted since the 1930s that that evil event was produced by the science circles of the detached human race, detached from their emotions, fixed on the bayonets of their cold disregarding evil system, in sum that the human race being more evil than the demons, as Jesus himself says in the Christian gospels, was more than capable of carrying out that murderous evil scheme on the poor women and children of the Chosen Race. Shocking shocking disgraces in that Century. So although for the philosopher pope from Poland this event was a sign of the end of the era of foolish and absurd optimism of the liberal Croft drinking elites of liberal theology faculties all across an absurdly blind and deaf Europa, still for the demons, according to the young prophet from California, they wished to be exonerated even of this heinous crime against humanity, perforce one reason why that pope often called out the issue and spoke of mankind's inhumanity to man, he did not say a plot of the evil spirits of the underworld. It was cold, clinical, and scientific, and he had suffered from that brutal and barbarous but supercilious regime himself as the flowers dropped down all around him and his father in those unhappy years, fleeing German troops. Shocking business, but on to the question, obviously there are many assumptions in the question of the reader, known for his very able and astute questions to this desk, but we should spend a bit of time at the end of this query, just saying what those assumptions do not say. They assume:

- God and Lucifer are not equal characters in a dystopian novel;

- God has some control over the homeworld of Lucifer;

- God does not altogether see the evil side of Lucifer, wandering the world, but uses him sometimes for punishment of the human race, when the crimes of humans have risen up all over;

- Lucifer is a wilful spirit but he has some sense of the evil of the human race needing punishment;

- Sometimes Lucifer gets his way to unleash his own brand of punishment on humans;

- Especially where humanity has shown it is not open to reason or even the sacrifices of faith;

- Lucifer in this qualified sense can sometimes perform a useful ministry of humbling earthly pride, as the Exultet puts it so beautifully, and he is thus unleashed when the crimes of the human race become intolerable even for the wicked angels who themselves have been scandalised by the humans and these cry out for some economy of justice through punishment of the blind leading the blind, or as the wise old birds of the Church of England used to put it before those Synodal feminine ordinations of 92, conduct unbecoming to the clerical state, or here to the exalted state of the human race;

And so on, I could continue on, but am not allowed to reveal too much of this subject, since it is largely confidential and internal to the inner workings of holy mother Church, all churches, and she is a mother to her children, not willing to reveal too much of the ancient Wars of the Millennials and Eternals.

So altogether, whether true or false, the spiritual cenacles of prayer and the charismatic prayer groups especially to whom we are particularly grateful in the answering of this Question are to be congratulated for pointing out some features of the schemas of the underworld and the results on this homeworld of the ancient millennial wars between the spirits that pre-date the rise in evolution of the human race on the planet surface. For them, the charismatic prayer groups, humanity was supposed to be a fleshly composite antidote to the presence of evil on this world, and a source of blessing to the angels who had to fight in those wars on the bright side, but as Jesus says in the gospels, "men have shown they preferred darkness to light", so helas helas 20th Century old style hubris laden science and the wicked underside of science has proved too much for the spiritual sons of Adam at times. Another Helm's Deep for the human race. But the story is a salutary and timely reminder that our optimism of those years was largely misplaced and altogether absurd, whatever Cardinal Ratzinger used to say on the subject. The philosopher pope from Poland was far far more realistic. An altogether better pope. Period.