For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.—Col 3:3
I don’t like to give hell too much credit, but it’s good to know the mind of the enemy. Salvation of souls is what I think of all day. What are the two main enemies of the salvation of souls? Sin (which often has nothing to do with demons, according to the Desert Fathers) and preternatural influence (which obviously has everything to do with demons.)
I’m not an exorcist, so I really don’t know how demons think. But since I know they are evil and smart (and maybe lazy) they probably see winning individuals through the easiest strategy of reaching the most people using the least amount of work. The amount of people one fallen person can affect will be called “influence” in this blog post, as in how much reach a person has to influence others. That will be the y axis.
The x-axis will be called “protection” as in spiritual protection a person might have. That would be inversely proportionate to how hard a demon has to work to make a human on earth fall into deceit or fornication or treachery or anything that is a sin. Obviously, we know as Catholics that it is harder (as in x-axis “spiritual protection” here) for a demon to make a person fall who is in sanctifying grace. On top of sanctifying grace, there are dozens of other aspects of spiritual protection such as mental-prayer, Rosary, fasting and of course a holy life. All of these things make it harder (but not impossible) for a demon to get a human on earth to turn his back on God.
Again, in the above graph, the x-axis is spiritual protection. The y-axis is influence on others. Demons are obviously going to want to aim to people found at the top-left of the graph. That way, for a minimal amount of work, the demons can influence a larger amount of people if they can get their target to fall into scandal or sin or heresy.
The top left dot might be someone like Justin Beiber or Kanye West (above) who both apparently had a conversion to some form of “evangelical Protestantism.” (God bless the men, I truly hope for their best!) But they have obviously been sitting-ducks with a level of minimal spiritual protection (notice low on the x-axis) but a high-level of global influence (y-axis.)
On the other hand, the bottom right dot in my above graph might be someone like the late Sr. Mary Wilhelmina of the Benedictines (recently found incorrupt, but seen above before falling asleep in the Lord.) Before her passing, she had a very high level of spiritual-protection with an intense prayer life of several hours a day (hence, high on the x-axis) but a very low influence (low on the y-axis) as nobody knew who she was before she was found incorrupt. (Of course, after her death, her influence sky-rocketed as God chose her life to reach millions of people. That is obviously God’s prerogative to decide post-mortem how to bring His saints into others’ lives.)
Notice again the opening line of this blog post: For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.—Col 3:3
Protection is inversely-proportionate to the effort required of a demon to make an individual human fall on earth. Who has the least spiritual protection and the greatest reach of influence? Celebrities. This includes Hollywood stars, American politicians and of course the modernist members of the hierarchy in Rome in red and white.
How do we know such people have such minimal spiritual protection? Although we can not judge peoples’ hearts, we can see they live bad lives. This is compounded by the fact that they are always caught in lies. Living an immoral life and then lying about it makes a person an extremely easy target for demons. When a liberal cleric speaks heresy, thousands of peoples’ faith is affected. (This has always been the case in Church history, but the great scandal now is the silence of the so-called conservative-bishops and Cardinals.)
Of course demons want to take everyone down—be he Catholic or non-Catholic. That should be a “given” to anyone before reading this blog post. But demons must have a strategy to reach as many people as possible as soon as possible (the diabolical inverse of how St. Maximilian Kolbe wanted to bring as many people as soon as possible to Jesus through Mary.)
Regarding this strategy of our infernal enemies, I believe demons must aim for the top-left of the graph where they can find high-influencers with such minimal work. This includes sins of commission and omission. Thus, celebrities (including those lazy “conservative Cardinals” who say nothing about the current open-apostasy in Rome) are easy pickin for lazy demons with a great harvest behind them. Think also of how many celebrities have had surface-level conversions to some form of Protestantism. They nearly always regress or backslide within the year. Why? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s because demons know they have them exactly where they want them: Celebrities are there for them to bring many others to hell through their social media reach, partly because they are living with nearly no spiritual protection (often blocked by fame and money.)
This is also the great danger in being a priest or bishop or Cardinal: If the cleric’s interior life does not match his exterior influence, he is low-hanging fruit for the demons in his life. This is especially true in such days of fast-moving news and doctrine on social media where they can take down a high-reach influencer with no interior life. In fact, traditional Catholic influencers online (including myself—small as I may be) must heed this warning with great vigilance.
The solution is then not to necessarily avoiding being a high-profile person in life. Rather, the solution is to give exponentially more time and effort to the interior life than to the exterior life. Of course, this is what all the saints have been saying for 20 centuries. The only new thing about this blog is that we must realize in this new digital global-village, the stakes of your interior life are higher than ever.