14. Night has fallen upon the world
August 28, 1973
“Night has now fallen upon the world, my son: this is the time of darkness, Satan’s hour; this is the time of his greatest triumph.
How I have accepted with great appreciation your prayer and your suffering offered in reparation for the great outrage, the most horrible blasphemy that has been directed against my Son….Neither during his public life, nor during his trial and the horrible carrying out of its sentence was my son Jesus ever so denigrated.Even before the Sanhedrin no accusers were found, so limpid and pure had his whole life been.
But . now they are attempting to attack his purity, they are spreading such a horrible and satanic blasphemy that all Heaven is, as it were, dismayed and incredulous! How is it possible that they could have reached such a point? What a tremendous and now Inevitable storm is about to break upon poor humanity!
The Pope suffers and prays: he is on a cross which is consuming and killing him. This time he has again spoken but his voice falls on a desert. My Church has become more barren than a desert.
You Priests, whom I am now gathering into my Movement to check this advance of Satan, you must, with the Pope, form a strong barrier. You must propagate his word, you must defend him, because he will have to carry the Cross in the midst of the greatest storm in history. Yours is the duty to defend the honour of my Son which is being trampled upon: with your life, with your words, with your blood. Yours is the duty to judge and to condemn the world, because more than ever this world is in the power of the Evil One. (…)
Some Thoughts:
There are some who don’t believe in sin or the devil, but somehow proclaim belief in Jesus. The thing is that if sin didn’t exist, then Jesus’ great sacrifice on the Cross was for nothing. He didn’t die so that we could all be tolerant and ‘loving’. He died to take away our sin… so that we could become holy and become united to God the Father with Him. Many in the hierarchy of the church do a great dis-service to the Body of Christ, by preaching a watered down, fake gospel that although may be more appealing to the worldly, it fails to feed them. Love and Truth don’t always appear very loving to a decaying world.
A parent who screams out to their small child as they release their hand and run off to cross the street by themselves, does not sound very loving at that moment. The child may even cry and throw a tantrum. But honestly, would it be more loving to let the child go? This may seem ridiculous to us, but we fail to apply the same principles to what is happening in the world around us. We fail to speak up in the name of ‘love’ although the one we love the most is likely our selves and our own reputation. We want to be loved at all costs. By doing this we are succumbing to the ‘world’s ways’ instead of battling against it and working to expand the Kingdom of God.
A hard battle. . . (Catechism of the Catholic Church)
407 The doctrine of original sin, closely connected with that of redemption by Christ, provides lucid discernment of man’s situation and activity in the world. By our first parents’ sin, the devil has acquired a certain domination over man, even though man remains free. Original sin entails “captivity under the power of him who thenceforth had the power of death, that is, the devil”.298 Ignorance of the fact that man has a wounded nature inclined to evil gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education, politics, social action299 and morals.
408 The consequences of original sin and of all men’s personal sins put the world as a whole in the sinful condition aptly described in St. John’s expression, “the sin of the world”.300 This expression can also refer to the negative influence exerted on people by communal situations and social structures that are the fruit of men’s sins.301
409 This dramatic situation of “the whole world [which] is in the power of the evil one”302 makes man’s life a battle:
- The whole of man’s history has been the story of dour combat with the powers of evil, stretching, so our Lord tells us, from the very dawn of history until the last day. Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God’s grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity.303