In the late 19th century Pope Leo XIII reported a highly disturbing vision. He was apparently told that the Devil, after much pleading with God, was to be allowed a century in which to focus his activities on Earth. If you remember the Book of Job, God and Satan, although enemies, do converse - and the Devil, also called the Tempter, can exercise great power over mankind.
The Devil, in fact, is often called the Lord of this world, and in Christ's temptations in the wilderness Satan offered Him power over all the kingdoms of the Earth, if Jesus would bow down and worship him.
The original rebellion of Satan, or Lucifer, against God took place near the beginning of creation, when God created mankind and told the angels to serve this creature. Insulted at having to help a mere man or woman, Satan refused to serve. He was cast out from heaven "like lightning", and took with him a third of angels, about 30,000, who all serve Satan as demonic powers.
Satan now rules the world, and works in us through our mechanicalness. We Christians know that in the end, God and those who serve Him will be victorious, but each one of us has a part to play in this spiritual war; according to our particular weaknesses we will each be tempted through a multiplicity of little I's in conflict with our better nature, and our task is to overcome these temptations so that ultimately we may enter the Presence of God as saints.
All this is traditional Christian teaching, and in every respect the Work backs it up. We are here on Earth because of a particular, individual mission we need to carry out, the overcoming of our mechanicalness. If we carry out this task, then with the help of God and His angels we will be assisting the cosmic work of maintaining and creating order and defeating the forces of evil, the tendencies towards mechanicalness and entropy which threaten to destroy the work of creation.
Pope Leo XIII's vision emphasized that in the future this struggle would become even more intense. He added special prayers to St Michael in the Mass, encouraged Christians to prayer the Rosay and to offer other devotions, and to resist the wiles of Satan in their daily lives.
It seemed at the time that the "devil's century" must refer to 20th Century, which began in 1900.
Now, however, some scholars take the view that we are living in a state of even greater evil, greater mechanicalness, greater threats to organic life and to the souls of human beings in particular, than prevailed even during World War I.
I agree with those who locate the hypothetical beginning of this intensified onslaught of evil in the 1930's.
I believe that this period - when the occult practicioner Adolf Hitler, who specifically sought demonic help in his rise to power - began around 1934, give or take a year.
Hitler carried out acts of unprecedented wickedness, as we all know. He evoked the occult himself, and built Wewelsburg Castle as an occult headquarters for the SS, the elite forces of the Third Reich. Rituals involving occultic invocations and sacrifices were carried out there.
Members of his armed forces were encouraged to participate in such rituals themselves, including the orders that they should have sexual intercourse with pure-blooded women in cemeteries where fallen German soldiers were buried, so that the souls of those conceived there would be recincarnations of former warriors. The resulting children were sent to be born and raised in special homes, where they would be indoctrinated from birth with Aryan, occult teachings. All this is a matter of record; just search for "lebensborn" homes and you'll see the terrible truth that resulted from this policy.
What's more, it was during the mid 1930s that Hitler's persecution of the Jews began. At first there were what seemed like fairly mild prohibitions, forbidding Jews from entering or continuing in certain professions. Then came marriage prohibitions, with the notorious Nuremberg laws. Pogroms quickly followed; in 1938, Krystallnacht brought destruction and devastation to the Jewish people as their homes and businesses were smashed to pieces.
We all know the horrifying sequel to this persecution.
The Holocaust killed more than six million Jews.
Other groups were also targeted, for utilitarian reasons; handicapped people wasted food, so they were killed; Catholics and other Christians were sentenced to death for speaking out against Hitler; gypsies and homosexuals were killed because they were considered decadent.
But it was the Jews who suffered the greatest losses. And they were the target of Hitler's hatred because they embodied all he and his demonic master, Satan, most hated - they were the Chosen People, chosen to bring the message of God to the world, and implacably opposed to the Nazis' cult and their aims.
When Jews are specifically targeted, we are safe in assuming that Satan is at work.
We see his actions now in radical Islam, when Jews are sought out for extermination both in the West and in Israel, their homeland. Iran, which finances many terrorist groups including Hamas, is continuing Hitler's work. Iran's primary, stated aim is the extermination of the Jewish people in their homeland, and then the destruction of the Christian, democratic West.
In World War II, Hitler and the mufti of Jerusalem were friends and helped each other in their common aim of killing Jews.
Today, the many Marxist-motivated political parties in the Arab world collude in their own aims of destroying Jews and Christians, and they are unfortunately abetted by naive, Christian Westerners who fail to see the larger picture and therefore back the wrong side, the Satanic side, in this great, spiritual war.
In the terrorist attack of 9/11, whose anniversary has just passed, more than 3,000 innocent civilians were killed in New York by Islamic terrorists.
Throughout the West, attacks are continually carried out by radical Islamists bent on destroying our Judeo-Christian culture.
And in Israel, attacks have been unrelenting, and alway target the civilian population, from Jewish kindergartens to restaurants to shopping malls. Israel is in the front line of the West's war on terror, and what happens there is of critical importance to the survival of Judaism and Christianity.
To this observer, we are definitely living in the "devil's century" today, and if this time-frame is accurate we may expect attacks on our civilization to continue and even to intensify at least until the mid-2030s.
It's not only a war waged with explosives, however. The family, marriage and education are all suffering as a result of this relentless onslaught. We are descending into a new barbarism.
In my next post I will outline some of the consequences of allowing Satan full reign in the West, where we are running blindly into the hands of our would-be destroyers.
This war, the war of the devil's century, is the crisis for which the Work was given to us in the 20th century.
We are to create an Ark that will carry us through the flood of destruction and provide the seeds of new understanding when the devil's century is finally over.
When Hitler killed six million Jews he opened a portal to the underworld that had remained closed since the beginning of time. This act has enabled the demonic powers to leash unprecedented evils on the world. In these dark days, all Christians, Jews, men and women of good will in Islam, and those of us in the Work need to focus our aims on our spiritual tasks and to make our lives into prayers by our efforts.
With the approach of the autumn equinox the time is right for us to seek spiritual renewal in the full awareness of all that is at stake.
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