We are heading towards a clash in which the obviousness of angelic and diabolic actions will become increasingly clear.
Newsdesk (25/12/2022 10:47, Gaudium Press) At Holy Christmas we celebrate this sublime fact: the Word became flesh in the purest womb of the Virgin Mary and dwelt among us.
God created all beings in a perfect hierarchy: angels, men, animals, plants, and minerals.
And He decided from all eternity to unite himself with one of His creatures – in a union that theology calls ‘hypostatic‘ – in order to elevate that nature to His own divinity.
Thus, in Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity united with humanity, forming one Divine Person with two natures, the divine and the human.
In the immense variety of created beings, God did not choose the highest creature for this union, but rather the one who in a certain sense participated in all natures, in order thereby to honour the whole of creation.
With the Incarnation, it can be admitted that on Holy Night everyone and everything grew enormously more brilliant because “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14).
However, God honoured the human race especially, not only for having chosen a Man to establish the hypostatic union, but for raising a mere human creature to the dignity of Mother from whom He was to be born. Our Lady thus appears as the upholder of humanity’s honour.
The Field of Battle
The entire plan of Creation, therefore, has a specific meaning for mankind, whereby the struggle for mankind’s salvation, so that they may give glory to God, correspond to His designs, and ensure that His will be done on earth as it is in Heaven, takes on an importance that involves the whole of Creation.
The centre of this war is the Holy Roman Catholic Church and the very finest of the forces, both good and evil, fight on the battlefield — the battlefield being constituted by us human beings, the battlefield being our souls.
At the end of another year, the panorama of this struggle looks like this: a huge confusion spread on all sides by the children of darkness. Confusion within and outside the Church, confusion on the ecclesiastical, civil, political, social, economic levels; everything is no less than uncertainty and chaos.
Seeing so much confusion among the fighters from one side and the other, one would think that the true leaders of the fight, that is, the Angels and the demons, have surrendered control of events and that men, being left to their limitations, do nothing but blunder. But angelic spirits never surrender the reins of the battle.
Therefore, it is the demons who cause the confusion and the angels fight it.
On the other hand, although this is a war for the salvation of mankind, and therefore fought mainly by men, the disproportion between the sons of light and the sons of darkness speaks in favour of the angelic nature of the struggle. Thus we move towards a clash in which the obviousness of angelic and diabolic actions will become increasingly clear.
The future is in God’s hands and in Mary’s prayers, since whatever she asks, she gets. Let us pray to Her whom the Church invokes as “Cause of our joy” and “Queen of Angels”, so that She may pour upon the world a rain of graces that will wash the face of the Earth, dispel the darkness and make the Sun of Justice shine in a blue sky for a renewed humanity.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Text extracted, with adaptations, from the Conference of 5/12/1981.
Compiled by Roberta MacEwan