Christians must acknowledge the reality of the devil acting around them and remain steadfast in resisting his temptations, Pope Francis said yesterday. Source: OSV News.
“Never dialogue with the devil,” the Pope told visitors at his general audience. “When he comes with temptation – ‘this would be nice, that would be nice’ – stop yourself. Lift your heart to the Lord, pray to Our Lady and send him away.”
After cancelling his scheduled appointments on Monday due to what the Vatican described as a “mild flu-like condition,” Pope Francis held his general audience outdoors as planned.
Despite some coughing, he delivered his remarks largely without issue and included several off-the-cuff comments. He is scheduled to depart for a four-day trip to Luxembourg and Belgium this morning.
Reflecting on the Gospel reading from St Matthew in which Jesus is led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be tempted by the devil, Pope Francis noted that modern technology, in addition to its positive elements, provides “countless means to give an opportunity to the devil” to enter people’s lives, “and many fall in the trap”.
“Think of online pornography, behind which there is a flourishing market: this is a very widespread phenomenon which Christians should beware of and strongly reject,” he said. “Any cell phone has access to this brutality, to this language of the devil – online pornography.”
The Pope said contemporary society is “witnessing a strange phenomenon regarding the devil,” since “at a cultural level, it is held that he simply does not exist.”
Rather than be understood as a real agent of diabolic activity, the devil today is often viewed as a “metaphor” and enters people’s lives through “superstition”, as reflected in the secularised world “teeming with magicians, occultism, spiritualism, astrologers, sellers of spells and amulets, and unfortunately with real satanic sects”.
Yet “the strongest proof of the existence of Satan is found not in sinners or the possessed, but in the saints,” he said. “It is in the lives of the saints that the devil is forced to come out into the open, to cast himself ‘against the light’”.
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Pope: ‘Never dialogue with the devil’ (By Justin McLellan, OSV News)
