The devil is like a dog on a chain. He can only harm us if we get close to him. Pope Francis explains the Gospel of Matthew that speaks of Jesus’ temptations in the desert and focuses on the fact that the Lord “does not fall into a trap of the enemy, no no. Once He had overcome the test, He – it is written – returned to Galilee “with the power of the Holy Spirit””. In the desert, and here the initiative is God’s, not the devil’s, Jesus “freed himself from Satan and now he can free from Satan. He freed himself and frees from Satan. This is what the Evangelists highlight with the numerous stories of liberation of the possessed. Jesus says to his opponents: “If I cast out demons by the power of the Spirit of God, the kingdom of God has come upon you””. Today, however, “we are witnessing a strange phenomenon regarding the devil”, says the Pontiff. Because, especially at a certain cultural level, “it is believed that he simply does not exist. It would be a symbol of the collective unconscious, or of alienation, in short a metaphor. But “the devil’s greatest trick is to make us believe that he does not exist”, as Baudelaire wrote. The devil, explains Francis, “is cunning, he makes us believe that he does not exist and thus dominates everything, he is cunning. And yet our technological and secularized world is full of magicians, occultism, spiritualism, astrologers, sellers of spells and amulets, and unfortunately of real satanic sects. Chased out the door, the devil came back, one might say, through the window. Chased out of faith, he comes back with superstition. And if you are superstitious, you are unconsciously dialoguing with the devil, you cannot dialogue with the devil”.
The strongest proof of the existence of the devil is given to us by the saints who had to fight with him. “It is true that the devil is present and active in certain extreme and “inhuman” forms of evil and wickedness that we see around us. In this way, however, it is practically impossible to arrive, in individual cases, at the certainty that it is really him, since we cannot know precisely where his action ends and our own evil begins. For this reason the Church is very prudent and rigorous in the exercise of exorcism, unlike what happens, unfortunately, in certain films! It is in the lives of the saints, precisely there, that the devil is forced to come out into the open, to place himself “against the light””. All the saints, “some more than others”, in fact, “all the great believers testify to their struggle with this dark reality, and one cannot honestly suppose that they were all deluded or simple victims of the prejudices of their time.
The battle against the devil, against the spirit of evil is won as Jesus won it in the desert: with the words of God. You see that Jesus does not dialogue with the devil, he never dialogued with the devil, he either chases him away or condemns him and in the desert he responds to his word, but with the Word of God”. The Pope therefore urges us not to dialogue with the devil and to also follow the example of St. Peter, that is, to be vigilant. “Your enemy, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour”, for this reason we need to be careful and, as St. Paul warns, on our part “Do not give the devil an opportunity”. The Pope recalls that, after Jesus defeated “the prince of this world”, he became, as a Father of the Church said, like “a dog on a chain; he cannot bite anyone, except those who, defying danger, come near him… He can bark, he can urge, but he cannot bite, except those who want to”. And then, “if you are an idiot and you go to the devil, you talk to him, you go near him, he ruins you. Distance, you cannot dialogue with the devil and we all have experience, dialogue comes close with some temptation, how much we feel this distance, do not go near the dog tied with a chain”.
And he gives the example of pornography that travels on cell phones and “behind which there is a flourishing market, we all know it, it is the devil who works there. This is a very widespread phenomenon, which Christians must however be wary of and must forcefully reject, any cell phone has access to this brutality, to this language of the devil: pornography on the Internet”. But we must not be discouraged: “The final thought must be, also in this case, of trust and security: I am with the Lord, go away. Christ has defeated the devil and has given us the Holy Spirit to make his victory our own. The same action of the enemy can turn to our advantage, if with the help of God we make it serve our purification”. Finally Francis warns: “Be careful. The devil is cunning, but we Christians, with the grace of God are more cunning than he is”.
Finally, the Pope expresses his closeness to the Lebanese people and defines what is happening in Lebanon as “unacceptable”. He calls for rapid action by international institutions to stop the escalation and continues to pray for Ukraine and other war zones.