Angels and Demons

FROM THE PASTOR

by Fr. George W. Rutler
May 31, 2009

On the fiftieth day after the Resurrection, God filled his Church with the Holy Spirit. Jesus kept his promise: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). Pentecost is the start of Christian life rather than the end of the story, rather as Churchill said after the battle of El Alamein: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The power the Holy Spirit gives the Church is the truth. Truth is the ultimate power because it is reality. “Men may all lie, but God is always true” (Romans 3:4). Truth always wins, in the long run. In the short run it may seem that lies win. But truth sustains life while falsehood destroys it. Jesus said that Satan “was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature; for he is a liar, and the father of lies” (John 8:44). Lies do have power, but it is a fatal power and eventually self-destructs. In our society there are lies that an unborn baby is not human, and that marriage is not naturally the union of male and female, and that truth is only opinion. When a society accepts these lies, it eventually clashes with inescapable reality and crumbles. Even Satan is forced to tell the truth in the presence of Christ: “I know who you are, the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24).

A recent film, Angels and Demons, is the latest embarrassing attempt to lie about Christ and his Church. It is filled with amateurish technical mistakes, not to mention the historical and archeological ones. The script says the Church opposes scientific truth, when in fact, as the recently deceased Benedictine priest Stanley Jaki explained in dozens of books, the Church provides the philosophical matrix for the motive and method of physical science. The Church attends to the truths of Heaven, but she does not neglect physical science, because God made the world as a blessing. Galileo, whom the film mentions as a member of an esoteric secularist sect known as the “Illuminati” (which in fact was founded two centuries after Galileo), became the leading member of the original Pontifical Academy of Sciences founded under the patronage of Pope Clement VIII. Major discoveries in mathematics, astronomy, physics, genetics, botany, zoology, and medicine have taken place in universities established by the Church and they continue to be the work of Catholics from John XXI and Sylvester II, through Hermann of Reichenau, Robert Grosseteste, Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Buridan, Descartes, Copernicus, Schyrleus, Pascal, Lobkowitz, Secchi, Pasteur, Carrel, Marconi, Fleming, up to Father Georges Lemaître who proposed the Big Bang theory.

On Pentecost, we rejoice that “God cannot lie” (Titus 1:1-2). The same cannot be said of Hollywood.