HALLOWEEN OR THE ADORATION OF BAD SPIRITS (I)

October, 31st 2007. It is on the eve of All Saints’ Day. It is also Halloween according to a European pagan feast. During this day, many kids around the world are trying to act as the devil. It is also a best time for them to imitate, call, adore and celebrate the bad spirits.

On October 31st, we will see several kids dressing themselves up as a ghost with the bizarre clothes, going around the city, knocking on a door and asking small gifts. And people do not have to refuse. If so, our kids will curse them.

Moreover, the industries’ disguises are doing good deal: 5 billion dollars of turnover in USA in 1999 according to the National Retail Federation.

Should we stay in silence before these facts? How can we give way to the bad spirits in our world? We must not deal with the devil. He is there and every day, he wants to increase his power over Human Beings. John Paul II has spoken about him in his general audience in 1986. Here are some pieces:

“(…) As the evangelist Luke testifies, when the disciples returned to the Master full of joy at the fruits they had gathered in their first missionary attempt, Jesus utters a sentence that is highly evocative: "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning" (Lk 10:18). With these words, the Lord affirms that the proclamation of the Kingdom of God is always a victory over the devil, but at the same time he also reveals that the building up of the Kingdom is continuously exposed to the attacks of the spirit of evil.

(…) In the Old Testament, the narrative of the fail of man as related in the Book of Genesis, contains a reference to an attitude of antagonism which Satan wishes to communicate to man in order to lead him to sin (Gen 3:5). In the Book of Job too, we read that Satan seeks to generate rebellion in the person who is suffering (cf. Job 1:11; 2:5-7). In the Book of Wisdom (cf. Wis 2:24), Satan is presented as the artisan of death, which has entered man's history along with sin.

(…) In the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Church teaches that the devil (or Satan) and the other demons "were created good by God but have become evil by their own will".
It is clear that if God "does not forgive" the sin of the angels, this is because they remain in their sin, because they are eternally "in the chains" of the choice that they made at the beginning, rejecting God, against the truth of the supreme and definitive Good that is God himself...