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Paradise Lost Satan Found in the Modern
The guardian prince Saint Michael, spiritual warrior, leader of the Army of God, cast into Hell Satan. And there it is. Yet, Satan is not content to lay about in the pit of Hell, prideful busybody that he is. No, Satan goes about the world, and who knows where else, causing havoc, ugliness, breaking things, ruining people and challenging the Father’s Goodness, Beauty, and Truth.
Might be helpful to know: the name “Michael” translates to “Who is like God?” The name “Satan” translates to “Adversary, the one who resists.” And again, there it is, the difference between beautifully ordered Heaven and disgustingly chaotic Hell, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, truth and deception. In resistance Satan admits that he would rather “reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” You might picture Satan in Pandemonium, the disgusting city of Satan (Hell) after boasting to his fellow demons that he infected man with ugliness, evil and deception … the moment when Satan’s formerly beautiful outer form manifests his hideous inner form is described by Milton:
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So having said, a while he stood, expecting
Their universal shout, and high applause,
To fill his ear; when, contrary, he hears
On all sides, from innumerable tongues,
A dismal universal hiss, the sound
Of public scorn; he wondered, but not long
Had leisure, wondering at himself now more,
His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare;
His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining
Each other, till supplanted down he fell,
A monstrous serpent, on his belly prone,
Reluctant, but in vain; a greater power
Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned,
According to his doom. He would have spoke,
But hiss for hiss returned with forkèd tongue
To forkèd tongue; for now were all transformed
Alike to serpents, all as accessories
To his bold riot. Dreadful was the din
Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now
With complicated monsters, head and tail,
Scorpion, and Asp, and Amphisbæna dire,
Cerastes horned, Hydrus and Ellops drear
And Dipsas—not so thick swarmed once the soil
Bedropt with blood of Gorgon, or the isle
Ophiusa—but still greatest he the midst,
Now Dragon grown, larger than whom the Sun
Ingendered in the Pythian vale on slime,
Huge Python; and his power no less he seemed
Above the rest still to retain.
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When next you witness San Francisco, Detroit and other Progressive cities you will recognize Pandemonium and the demons who infect beauty with ugliness, you will see the gargantuan serpent who makes a nest of New York. Remember, our great cities were built by good and faithful people; our great cities are being destroyed by evil and faithless people. “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell,” Milton hears Satan say, and we too hear Satan in the works of his demons, in the songs, poems, buildings, arts and worldly depravity of the Modern.
Satan, “A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,” whose greatest fault is Pride. As you will have noticed, Pride flies everywhere that Satan is, on every flagpole, flowerpot, bicycle and tricycle, on every pole that sticks itself into places it should not be. The LGBTQ flag is Satan’s boasting success against man; hear Satan’s demons hiss in applause, see our people transformed into serpents who hypnotize then strike with poisonous fangs rose-cheeked children.
Saint Michael (Archangel ordered by the Father to defend naïve man from conniving Satan) appeared in 1886 to Pope Leo XIII. In the apparition, Leo witnessed the corruptions of Modernism, its atheism, its envy, its wars and degradations, the progressive corruptions of pornography, lust and lasciviousness, the destruction of souls, the supremacy of evil and degradation of the Catholic Church. Leo understood that only by Saint Michael might Satan again be subdued, and he composed the following prayer, requiring that it be recited after Mass. The current pope excuses Catholics from reciting the prayer in the same spirit that he denies the Traditional Latin Mass. Even so, Pope Leo XIII’s prayer to Saint Michael is not yet forbidden, and can be spoken without excommunication:
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Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him we humbly pray;
and do Thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host,
by the Power of God, cast into hell Satan
and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen. *
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* Here given in the abridged, simplified form. The fuller, earlier form was composed in 1888. In 1893 Pope Pius X succeeded Pope Leo XIII. Pope Pius X required that “all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries” recite the (his) Oath Against Modernism (1910). The Oath remained in effect until Vatican II schema were mandated (1967). This month (July 2023), Pope Francis elevates 31 bishops to cardinals, one of whom is likely to complete the worldly work, some say “wicked work” of Vatican II.
Oath Against Modernism = https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/oath-against-modernism-8935
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Michael Curtis is an architect, sculptor, painter, historian, and poet, who is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Common Sense Society. He has for more than 40 years contributed to the revival of the classical arts. He has taught and lectured at universities, colleges, and museums, including The Institute of Classical Architecture, The National Gallery of Art, et cetera; his pictures and statues are housed in over four hundred private and public collections, including The Library of Congress, The Supreme Court, et alibi; his verse has been published in over twenty journals; his work in the visual arts can be found at TheClassicalArtist.com, and his literary work can be found at TheStudioBooks.com.
This is an excellent essay on what has happened to us. A great deal of what is taking place right now in the West is purely diabolical in its cause and its nature. It is not simply ordinary human sin, but demonic perversion of the sickest kind.
Pope Leo XIII was warned in 1886 of what was in store for Christendom. How ironic that today the papal throne is occupied by an antipope who celebrates and promotes all of the filth and degradation that Michael revealed to Pope Leo. And with those 31 new “cardinals” polluting the next conclave, things are unlikely to get better.
Agreed, Mr. Curtis–and the most visible example may be the decay of America’s cities, which in some cases seems to get worse from one day to the next.
But it’s worth noting that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”: Satan will corrupt and twist human thought and endeavor (worthy or worthless) if given the chance through agnosticism or indifference. So with the perhaps imminent demise of European cities, with their great churches now all but empty near-relics.
This admirably written, powerful essay should be read by all. It pins down the evils of today’s society with passion, precision, and literary aplomb. I will be sharing this. Thank you, Michael.
A powerful polemic Michael – appropriately named it seems! The core position of evil is anti-life and anti-creation, which is logical once you recall that in the beginning God created and called creation ‘good’ some six times and on the seventh, ‘very good’ after all life had been established. Thus, the Adversary will always be an anti-life principle which we personify as ‘Satan’. It is no coincidence that the ‘progressive’ (=regressive) agenda is abortion-orientated, anti-birth orientated, euthanasia-orientated, anti-family orientated, anti-sex definition orientated, and generally pro stirring up racial and gender conflict orientated. Are you ‘pale, male and stale’? That of course – we are to understand from the tiny minds that formulate this claptrap – is not a racist statement. We have to call it out when we can and seek at least to reclaim the weak-minded who have not really understood the moral, historical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of this enormous con that is being foisted on the free world – sadly, sometimes, through its own capitalistic greed.
Fine work, Michael, especially by putting the whole in the context of Milton’s literary description of Satan. You are correct to say that modernist degradation encompasses everything that should be true, good, and beautiful in human culture, but literature is a principal “gate of hell” at which the Church should be doing battle at present. Let me instance the Franciscan University of Steubenville, saved from the worst of the fire in the 1970s by an excellent president. In 1989 the University renewed the old requirement of an oath in its theology department. I believe the wording is different from the Pius X Oath, but substance and intent are similar. The devil does not give up easily, and in 2019 a storm broke out over required reading of pornographic material clearly opposed to Catholic moral values in the English department. The University planned to extend the oath to all faculty. I didn’t follow what happened, but you can imagine the battle over academic freedom of professors to subject students to moral filth, and to make their grades dependent on it. As we are now aware, this happens in schools at every level. So does banning or devaluing of good literature, the Bible above all.
I hope you are using ironic exaggeration by even implying that Church authority (even fully legitimate authority) could forbid the Saint Michael prayer or excommunicate Catholics for saying it. But you are not at all wrong to suppose that stupidly servile Catholics might think so. Our immediate danger is not recently appointed cardinals whose authority is dubious, but whatever comes down from Rome in October as the supposed result of the worldwide synod conducted for the last two years. It will be a trial of faith for the world.
Let’s keep saying the Saint Michael prayer, along with the Marian antiphons traditionally recited or sung at the end of each Mass. Our Lady, the crusher of the serpent’s head, is “terrible as an army set in battle array.”
Their authority is not “dubious” if they can elect the next occupant of the Roman See.
That danger, Joseph, will be deferred until the current occupant dies or resigns. The synodal acts are likely to be upon us more immediately. And I think you believe as much as I do that the authority of recently appointed cardinals is dubious because the papal authority appointing them is dubious. The power is there, but the legitimacy of it remains a matter for doubt and suspicion.
So if these dubious cardinals, appointed by a dubious Pope, help to elect a Bergoglio clone, will that person then be another dubious claimant to the Papal chair? And will that dubious claimant do anything to oppose or rescind whatever acts are going to come out of the dubious Synod?
Thank you all for your insights and comments. FYI: many cardinals have forbidden recitation of the Saint Michael Prayer, including Cardinal Cupich, Chicago; the new Pontifical International Marian Academy (15 April 2023) officially denies all apparitions of Marian reprimand, including Fatima. The hour is later than most can comprehend, later than most admit.