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Why Some Fall into False Devotions
DIR By: Pearlh
Date: October 11, 2014, 11:01 am
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Why Some Fall Into False Devotions
by Fr. Hugh S. Thwaites, S.J.
There is something which has been puzzling me for years: Why it
is that so many good and holy Catholics, including priests who
in every other respect are completely sound, are totally hooked
on Medjugorje? Or Vassula. Or Patricia. Or Montichiari. And so
on.
A partial reason could be this.
God gave us various appetites, which make for health of mind and
body and guide us toward our eternal salvation. Appetites such
as for food and drink, for marriage, and for God. We all have
this ineradicable hunger for God, a hunger, which we need to
awaken in souls that seem closed to Him.
If we satisfy these appetites licitly, by eating ordinary food,
by Christian marriage lived in a Christian way, and by seeking
closer union with God through His Church and her sacraments,
then indeed these appetites can lead us safely toward salvation.
But if we try to satisfy them illicitly, they can become an
addiction and then we can find ourselves hooked. Here, I extend
the meaning of addiction to cover the strange fact that if the
will is bound the intellect can become blind. Our minds, given
us by God to discern the truth, can instead be used merely to
justify the choices of our wills. Dazzled by an inordinate love,
our judgment can be blind to self-evident facts.
There was an old fish who understood well the importance of
making a well-informed choice, and he was trying to give some
fatherly advice to a young fish. "Listen, son, there are worms
and worms. Some worms are floating free, and they are meant to
be our dinner. Other worms have a hook in them, and they are
meant to turn us into someone else's dinner. The worms come from
God. The hooks come from an enemy. If you gulp down a worm that
has a hook in it, before you know what's happening, you'll be
hauled out into the fresh air, dropped into a frying pan, and
sizzling over a fire."
The young fish laughed. "Ha, ha, ha. Who has ever heard of fresh
air or frying pans or fire? Ha, ha, ha!" Just then a worm with a
hook in it floated past and the young fish gulped it down. And
as it was hauled out of the water it cited, "Och, I dinna ken."
("I didn't know." They were in Scottish waters.) And the old
fish called back, "Well, ye ken the noo." ("You know now.")
Now just as there are worms and hooks, there are appetites and
addictions. Our appetites, as we have seen, come from God and
help us toward self-fulfillment and salvation. Our addictions
are one of the many sad effects left in us by original sin. Like
the young fish, we can ignore advice and turn toward those
things that appeal to us and attract our fallen nature. And we
may find ourselves unexpectedly hooked.
Also, just as there are worms and worms, so there are seers and
seers. Within a few years of our Lady appearing to Bernadette
Soubirous in Lourdes, there were dozens of people in France who
claimed that our Lady had appeared to them in each case, after
appropriate investigation, the bishop concerned stated that it
was not supernatural in each case it must have been either
demonic or hallucination.
Just as in Old Testament times, so too under the New Covenant,
God does indeed send His humble messengers to His Church in
times of need. There was Blessed Juan in Mexico, who saw our
Lady at the place we now call Guadalupe. There were St. Margaret
Mary, St. Catherine Laboure, and St. Bernadette in France. There
were Blessed Jacinta and her brother Blessed Francisco in
Portugal. There was St. Faustina in Poland.
But (and this is the key question) how do we know that they were
true seers, true prophets? We know, because the Church has told
us so. And how did the Church know? Because the local bishop,
after due investigation, had decided so.
If you go into the Upper Basilica in Lourdes, above the altar on
the right as you go in, there are two large marble plaques which
tell the visitor that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to
Bernadette Soubirous eighteen times in the grotto down by the
river. I forget what else it tells us. But I do remember the
name at the bottom of the second plaque. It is that of the then
bishop of Tarbes, who had jurisdiction over the then small
country town of Lourdes.
In the world of spirits, the Church knows her way around.
Demons, who after all are angels, can outwit any human being. If
they outwitted, albeit briefly, St. Catherine of Siena and Padre
Pio, they could outwit anyone. But they cannot outwit the
Church. In every country and district, the Church gives her
God-given authority to govern and to judge in spiritual matters
to one man, that is to the ordinary, as he is called, the local
bishop or archbishop.
How the Devil envies God's power! How he hates God and hates our
Lady and hates us! He cannot overcome God. But he knows we all
have a flawed nature, we all suffer from the effects of original
sin. He knows how curious we are. That tree of the knowledge of
good and evil still holds a fascination for us. We still want to
know more — more, perhaps, than we should. And we flock to hear
what the seers have to tell us. Clearly, Satan would not be
running true to form if he did not try to break into that market
himself. And so even though the Church, speaking through the
local bishop, may warn us not to go somewhere, we poor children
of Eve still feel that we must. These self-proclaimed seers —
and of course Mohammed is the outstanding example — are so much
bait with hooks inside them. And the people who give credence to
them are hooked.
In a book I once read about Cardinal Manning there was a sad
example of this. When he was an Anglican rector, he converted a
Catholic to being a Protestant. When he had become a Catholic,
this naturally weighed on his conscience and he tried to convert
him back, but he could not. The poor man was now an "addicted"
Protestant.
God made us to satisfy our bodies with good food and drink and
with observance of the natural law, our minds with truth, and
our souls with Him. Seeking illicit satisfactions can end up
with our being hooked on an addiction.
A practicing homosexual is hooked. Sometimes he may wish he
could break with his lifestyle. But without extraordinary help
from God he cannot. He's hooked. People who flock to a place
where they think our Lady is appearing, even though the local
bishop keeps telling them that it's not our Lady, are hooked. No
amount of reasoning, no amount of evidence, can shake their
certainty that it is our Lady who comes there. They are well and
truly hooked.
How do people get that way, at least as regards false
apparitions? Maybe it is that they have not paid enough
attention to our Lord's warning that unless we make ourselves as
little children, we shall not have the right approach to
salvation. Little children ask their mother if something is all
right. Catholics should ask Holy Mother Church. It is our
chronic and unconscious pride that leads us to choose
independently of the Church.
There was nothing wrong with Satan's intellect. His pride was
his downfall. Pride is the sin that most of all we should fear.
And when it comes to the teaching of the Church or, as in this
case, the authenticity of a seer, it is to the ordinary we
should turn. Failure to do this and relying on one's own
judgment in such matter, can lead, and indeed has led, to many
people being hooked. Hooked by an addiction.
Maybe I am pushing it too far, but it seems to me that there is
a demonic factor in this area of addictions. Just as in fishing
there is a human being at the other end of the line, controlling
the hook, so in addictions it could be Satan or one of his
demons who is the active and aggressive agent.
The demons know that we have been made in the image and likeness
of the God whom they hate, and so they take an evil pleasure in
seeing us degrade ourselves. They take an evil pleasure in
seeing a creature, so beloved by God, groveling in a drunken
stupor. Especially, I think, is this demonic influence seen in
the addiction to homosexual actions. Hating human beings as they
do, they seek to frustrate God's plans by preventing our very
existence. Contraception and homosexual lifestyles play into
their hands — that is why they are such an abomination to God.
Perhaps the role of demons in all that damages marriage and the
producing of more souls for Heaven explains the success of St.
Dominic in fighting the Albigenses with the rosary. They
followed a Manichaean heresy, which in the 12th century came
into the south of France from Bulgaria. It encouraged abstention
from marriage, which led to homosexual lifestyles, and it
praised suicide. It was a culture of death. Our Lady told St.
Dominic to preach the rosary, and although there was necessarily
the military side to the conquest it was the rosary that ensured
the destruction of the heresy. Which suggests of course that
today's fight against the culture of death will avail nothing
without the widespread saying of the rosary.
Satan hates and fears the rosary today as much as he did in the
12th century. Anything that reminds him of all that God has done
for us poor, sinful human beings by the Incarnation and
redemption makes him seethe with rage. That was why, in the old
days, priests would sometimes exorcise people simply by reciting
the first 14 verses of St. John's Gospel, starting with "In the
beginning was the Word . . . " and ending with "the Word was
made flesh" — words which the priest would know by heart since
they came into his daily Mass. And of course Satan and all the
demons are terrified of our Lady. They know they have lost the
battle once they see the Immaculate Mother of God come to our
aid.
Perhaps this explains the hatred you sometimes see in the faces
of the poor people who shout abuse at us when we are at Catholic
rallies or doing pro-life work. Perhaps that hatred of chastity
and innocence and of the true faith is fueled by the same
frustrated envy that burns the poor souls in Hell.
They say that in time of war you should find out what annoys the
enemy most and then do it as often as you can. So in fighting
all these negative addictions that are hostile to the faith and
to true Christian marriage, the rosary is an indispensable
weapon. The rosary and the Miraculous Medal.
Because of the unsleeping hostility of the Devil and his demons,
because of the frailty of our fallen human nature, we do need to
be on our guard lest we become addicted to anything untrue or
harmful. If we allow our minds to accept something that is
according to our fancy but untrue, that untruth can become an
addiction. If we welcome into our bodies something that is
pleasing but also damaging to health, then it can become for us
an addiction. In something the same way an untruth can become an
addiction.
And, as I have said, addictions can blind our judgment and
weaken our wills. Both our minds and our bodies can have their
addictions. But how addicts love their addictions! How they love
their slavery and kiss their chains!
There's the sad story of the man who had the habit, every day,
of smoking 70 to 80 cigarettes. One day his wife came across a
magazine article, which described the effects of heavy smoking.
It explains that the lungs gradually become coated with tar, and
the large color photographs showed first occasional flecks of
black, then more black, until finally you could see hardly any
lung at all — it was almost all black. Then it described the
onset of lung cancer, and this part was really gruesome. There
were the occasional sharp stabbing pains. These grew more and
more frequent, until they were almost continuous. These led to
choking fits, until finally the poor victim died in agony,
choked to death. Delighted, thinking this story could cure her
husband, she gave the article to him to read. He read it slowly,
with growing horror. Finally, he put the magazine down. He had
made a firm resolution. On no account would he ever read
magazine articles again.
It seems that addictions can quite blind our reason. If we are
held bound by an addiction we need to exert our will. After all,
it is with our will that we approach God or withdraw from Him.
There was nothing wrong with Satan's intellect. His intellect
was not weak; it was his will that was perverse. I think it was
St. Ambrose who said "Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum
facere populum suum": Not through reasoned argument did it
please God to save His People.
The attraction of some of those silly serial TV programs lies in
their showing us a way of life that panders to our lower nature
and satisfies the sinful desires left in us by original sin. But
the TV programs do not have God as their goal. There is
something inordinate about the pleasure we have in watching
them. And before we know what has happened we have acquired
another addiction. So weak we are!
This explains, perhaps, how seemingly impossible it is to talk
people out of their going to Medjugorje or some other such
unauthorized places of pilgrimage. The Devil knows of our
God-given hunger for all that comes from God. He knows that all
that is deepest in us longs to see and enjoy Him. So he exploits
this hunger with his counterfeits in the hope that we will
accept them as the real thing. And we all know how successful he
has been,
We must thank God for this hunger for Himself that He has placed
in our hearts. But we should be suspicious if anyone offers us
shortcuts. The only shortcut to God is the way of the cross. And
as for wanting to see things! How very dangerous! We are meant
to spend our time here in the darkness of faith. St. Augustine
tells us that during this life we are in the womb of the Blessed
Mother. Then, when we die, she delivers us into the light of
eternity. But, in this life, the dark way of faith is the safe
sure way the saints have trod. And we know that, if we stay
faithful, God will eventually give us the reward of our faith:
the sight of Him in whom we believe.
So the bottom line must be: If we really want an addiction, we
should become addicted to God. It is the only addiction we can
satisfy all our life, here and in eternity.
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