Bergoglio's Incalculable Ego Cedes More Power to the Demonic: Part II

Shutting the door to grace will make everything worse

Demons are fallen angels, and they retain all of their faculties after the fall just as man retains all of his faculties when he loses faith or lives in unrepentant sin. The only difference after a fall is our nearness to the glory of God and the graces that proximity bestows upon us.

Demons rebelled against their Creator because of His plan for salvation of man. In so doing, the fallen angels were forever separated from God’s presence, just as Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, the place where man could live in God’s presence. For man, God provided a path to return to the Garden and sent His only Son, our Lord, to draw us a map.

Satan and the demons who followed him to hell rebelled in large part because of their superiority to man. Pure spirits are exponentially superior humans in mind and movement. They move freely at the speed of thought. To them, the idea of God the Son becoming a flesh-bound man was an unforgivable insult to their spiritual hubris.

Vengeful over their eternal exile, they seek to disrupt God’s plan for man’s salvation. The demons’ sabotage includes torment and temptation of man by the fallen angels. For this purpose, God has given Satan a degree of power over this world in which we live out our exile until, we pray, God calls us to return, body and soul, to the Garden He has prepared for us.

Thus, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the fallen angels who exist, at this moment, to keep man out of the Garden, to drag us down, one by one, into the pit of misery and hatred that the demons experience for eternity. Misery loves company.

Demons Reveal What Man Cannot Discern

While God can do whatever He wants, whenever He wants, He created this eternal video game in which we find ourselves. He alone makes the rules. He alone provides the weapons. He alone determines which walls the players can walk through and which ones they cannot. He alone hid the treasures for us to find—or blithely pass by on our way to some other goal.

Like all good video-game makers, God also gave us the clues on how to play. He told us what it takes to level up and what special powers we might obtain from various pieces of loot. He controls who is “respawned” after death. And He alone can enter “god mode.”

This game in which we exist has formal rules. It is a formal system. We know this, in part, from science and mathematics, which teach us that some things simply are: two plus two makes four, and so-on. We also know this from Scripture and sacred tradition. But we also know this thanks to the work of exorcists.

During a solemn exorcism, the priest commands demons with the authority of God through the conduit of the Church. When the exorcist achieves a certain degree of control over the invading demons, the demons must obey his commands because they are God’s commands transmitted through the exorcist. From this power situation, exorcists learn many secrets from the demons.

Exorcists through the centuries have learned that demons are liars, but they’ve also learned that demons, when weakened through the rite of exorcism, lose their ability to lie. They begin telling the truth. Through this process, exorcists have learned of verifiable facts that they could not have learned any other way. For instance, exorcists have learned precisely what people were doing hundreds of miles away even before the telegraph.

This is also how we know that demons possess knowledge man does not. Traveling at the speed of thought, demons can effectively be in many places at once. And, cooperating with each other, one demon can know instantly what all other demons are witnessing. Demons cannot see the future, but, because of their access to so much information and their ability to process it immediately, they can appear to know the future. This is why some occultists are amazingly good predicting future events: they cooperate with demons in exchange for demonic forecasts.

In short, we know things about this game and about the spiritual world because demons, under duress, have told us through exorcists. Perhaps God ordained this method of communicating to man through the fallen angels. Perhaps this is part of His salvific plan. Perhaps one reason demons torment us is so that, in our fight against their wickedness, we can better read the map the Lord charted when He dwelt amongst us.

Our Only Weapon Against Demons Is Grace

Speaking to Dr. Taylor Marshall in 2020, Fr. Chad Ripperger, a theological writer and exorcist, spoke about the degrees of grace that enter the world and how that flow of grace is determined, in part, by the way we ask for them.

In this section, Fr. Ripperger refers theological agreement of scholars just prior to the Second Vatican Council regarding the merits of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass:

“[T]he application of the merits of Christ's sacrifice actually come through our actions—the devotion of the people at the mass, the devotion the priest at the mass, the actual mass itself (what it's asking for)—is going to determine its effects what um you know and uh you know the sacrality of it as I just mentioned, all of that determines the actual application of the Calvary sacrifice in the concrete.

And we know this to be true just by virtue of the fact that if Christ's Calvary sacrifice, if the merits [of that sacrifice] were not restricted in their application, [then] everything would be perfect already . . . Everyone would be saved. Everyone would be perfect. There would be no sin. There'd be no evils, no nothing . . . and this is why they actually talk about that the full effects or the full merits of Christ's passion.”

To summarize, while Christ’s sacrifice was perfect, our application of that sacrifice is imperfect. And it is our duty to make it more perfect.

He goes on to discuss how the imperfection of our application of the sacrifice determines how much grace comes into the world through the application. For this, I think it prudent to let Fr. Ripperger speak to you through miracle of modern technology:

“I think it’s very important for people to realize that our actions, . . . how the priest says mass etc. etc., determines the grace, the effects, the spiritual benefits that the people get from it”. — Fr. Chad Ripperger

Again, because man’s application of the merits of Christ’s sacrifice Calvary are imperfect, the graces received from the Mass are limited.