The Only Real Evil

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

Per signum crucis de inimícis nostris líbera nos, Deus noster. In nómine Patris, et Fílii, et Spíritus Sancti. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

We are told in the First Reading of today that “the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made” (Gen. 3:1).

Genesis doesn't waste any time before speaking about the serpent, the devil. We may have a great faith in God; we also are called to have a great “faith” in the devil.

It's spoken very clearly in Scripture and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It's good if we develop a certain presence of the devil, an awareness of the devil, of evil in the world.

The Scripture describes the devil as a serpent, subtle, sly, clever, furtive. You can be unaware of his presence initially. It's like an invitation to be a little bit on the alert.

Later in Scripture we're going to hear the importance of being aware, being alert, being on guard (Mark 13:33; Gen. 4:7; 2 Cor. 2:11).

These sorts of phrases come frequently because the devil is “like a lion ready to pounce” (1 Pet. 5:8).

Of course, the last thing the devil wants is that we would try to lead a holy life.

He will do his level best to lead us away from the plan of life, or to find 101 reasons why we shouldn't do our prayer, or our reading, or our Rosary, or live presence of God, or practice the virtues of charity, of patience, of kindness, of purity, of industriousness.

He's there on every battlefront, and the last thing he wants is that we would be faithful to our vocation.

The devil works through temptations. He tempts us to this or to that. It's good that we are aware of temptation, that subtle voice of the devil that may be prompting us in all sorts of ways. “Don't bother with this,” or “Don't do that,” or “Don't give importance to something else.”

That's one of the reasons why our Father emphasizes so much the virtue of sincerity in the chat and in Confession; to talk about the temptations we may receive.

There's a point in the Furrow where our Father says, “The day you hide a temptation from your director is the day you've made a secret with the devil” (Josemaría Escrivá, Furrow, Point 323). Rather strong words: “the day you hide a temptation.”

The battlefronts have to be very clear. Our Father says we have to fight the battles “far away from the walls of the fortress,” in the subtle little skirmishes far away from the key points (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 307).

You just see the devil coming, and the sense of the devil, a sense of evil in the world, a sense of things that are wrong.

The world may present certain things to us as evils: sickness, cancer, not having certain material possessions, not succeeding in various areas. But we know with our formation that all these things are not really evils.

All these things can be a means to achieve our eternal salvation. We sanctify them, we offer them, we unite them with Christ on the Cross. They become valuable.

The only real evil is sin. The only real evil is the devil. That's the only real evil we have to be afraid of. Nothing else really matters.

“He's more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made” (Gen. 3:1). If God was giving out prizes for who was the cleverest, or most subtle or effective in some ways, the devil might win that prize. That's how he acts.

We might be initially unaware that this is the devil. He might come at us through our pride, our vanity, interior criticisms or judgments of other people, our comparisons, our complaints.

Our Lord has told us that “out of the heart of man come all sorts of evil things” (Matt. 15:19). That's why we have to keep looking at our heart: what's going on in my heart?

Our examination of conscience is like an examination of our heart, so that we become more aware of all those evil things that are there inside—not just to be aware of them, but to do something about them, to get out the hidden pride or self-love or egoism that may be there, and to recognize it for what it is.

This is my self-love speaking. This is my comfort-loving. This is my something else, my imagination. The devil can work through our imagination. He can imagine all sorts of scenarios that have nothing to do with reality.

We're called to live in the real world. It's much more beautiful.

Part of the battle with the devil is to bring him out from his subtle nature, from his hidden presence. Expose him a little bit. You want to fight an enemy—you’ve got to know where he is. You've got to bring him out into the open, then you can have a good fight.

Part of the devil's effectiveness is that he's very effective in hiding behind things. We may not know the extent of our pride or its expressions in various ways.

“He said to the woman, ‘Did God say you shall not eat of any tree of the garden?’” (Gen. 3: 1).

Eve was told to keep away from this particular tree. But she thought to herself, maybe the tree is not all that bad. I don't see anything wrong with this tree. I think I'll just go and check for myself.

She goes to where that tree is, although she's been told to stay away from it. She begins to walk around the tree, convincing herself that this tree is the same as all the other trees.

What was she doing there in the first place? Curiosity killed the cat.

Then the devil appears to her, but she doesn't realize too much that it's the devil, and begins a dialogue. He begins to ask her questions. This is how the devil works. He begins to ask questions, and now she's caught in a dialogue with the devil.

Nothing really bad has happened so far, but there's a dialogue going on. There comes a moment in our temptations when we have to try and realize that there's already a dialogue with the devil.

She could still flee at this particular instance, get away from there, cop on to herself.

There are three stages of sin. There's suggestion, there's coherence (we're going along a little bit with it), and there's consent.

There's only really sin at the level of consent. Before that we can still flee. There's no co-commutation with sin.

“He said to her, ‘Did God say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?’” (Gen. 3:1). Of course, this is not what God had said. He twists God's word (Gen. 2:16-17).

The Garden of Eden was an enormous place full of all sorts of trees, and God only asked them not to eat the fruit of that particular tree. It's no big deal.

But the devil says, “Did God say you shall not eat the fruit of any tree?” He tries to make God out to be a killjoy. ‘He places you here in this wonderful garden with all these trees, and you can't touch a single tree. It is torture.’

The devil paints God as an evil God, a bad God who doesn't treat you well. Totally the opposite of reality. ‘Some sort of wicked dictator who wants to see you suffer.’

“The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but God said, You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden; neither shall you touch it lest you die’” (Gen. 3:2).

Eve corrects the devil and says, ‘No, that's not the reality. There's just one tree.’

Often the world tries to distort the teaching of the Catholic Church. It tries to suggest that the Church is trying to take the fun out of marriage and family or take the fun out of sex.

The reality is that the Church is preserving the truth, the beauty, and the meaning of human sexuality for all generations. But the devil likes to attack the Church in that way.

But with our formation, we know the truth, and we have to try and spread the truth everywhere.

“But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die.’” Now he contradicts what God had said. He says the very opposite.

“For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5).

This is the third part of his three-pronged temptation. He deals the cruel blow: “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened.” God doesn't want your eyes to be opened. He wants to keep you in your blindness. He wants to control you, to keep you down, whereas if you do this thing “you will be like God.”

This is the temptation that Eve cannot handle, the temptation to pry, to build ourselves up, to think we're much better than we are, full of self-love.

St. Josemaría used to say, tha one of the best businesses in the world would be to buy men for what they're really worth and to sell them for what they think they're worth, because we all think we're much greater, more valuable, more important than we really are.

Pride is the temptation to be like God. We think we are great, the creators of the world.

All sins are sins of pride. St. Josemaría used to say based on popular wisdom: our pride will die one hour after we do.

A very good thing to try and achieve in the course of our spiritual life is to grow, to know our pride a little more, and the expressions of our pride.

What way do I love me, looking for my comfort, my easygoing life, not making demands on myself, or in my judgments or criticisms of other people, or complaints?

All disunity comes from the devil, all unity comes from God. Any little frictions, miscommunications, misunderstandings with people—often the devil is behind those things, trying all the time to create disunity.

The answer to this is humility, to recognize our own nothingness. “Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19).

The Church reminds us every year with that powerful ceremony, that we are nothing. God has brought us together, He's given us all of our talents, our abilities, given us our vocation, our Christian vocation, and a concretization of that Christian vocation.

He's showered us with graces. When we go to the sacraments, we get a Niagara Falls or a Victoria Falls of graces flowing into our soul, a superabundance, so that we can wash away all the evil, all the sin, with the blood of Christ.

“Without the shedding of blood,” we're told in Scripture, “there is no remission of sin” (Heb. 9:22). Christ on the Cross won all of the graces that are necessary for all time, to wash away all the sins of mankind.

That's why some of the Scripture writers call the sight of Christ a fountain of life (Ps. 36:9), a fountain of grace (Zech. 13:1).

When we talk about the devil, it may all be bad news, but when we talk about the Redemption, it's all good news. Great things are possible, and therefore we can have a great superiority complex.

Somebody said once that a venial sin is like a fly. If you have one fly that's bothering you, you can swat the fly away, or a mosquito. But if there are twenty flies, then it's not so easy to work or to think or to do anything.

A venial sin is like a speck on our windscreen in the car as you drive around the place. But even on a dry, sunny day, you get plenty of specks just from driving around the place. We need to wash them away.

That's why the Church has always recommended frequent sacramental Confession, frequent reception of the sacraments, to grow spiritually, to wash away those venial sins, and to have a hatred for venial sins, because with those sins we hurt Our Lord.

Sometimes with little children, they get a little bit of formation, they come, and the big question is, Father, is it a mortal sin? —the sort of inference being, if it's only a venial sin, then it's okay.

But of course, it's the wrong question. It's not a matter of whether it's mortal or venial. It's a matter of whether it's a sin. Does this offend God?

A lady flew across the Atlantic in the early 1960s. She wanted to go to Confession to Padre Pio.

She landed in Rome early in the morning on a Sunday. She was feeling tired. She lay down for a while. She decided to take a nap. She'd catch a late morning Mass. There were no evening Masses in those days.

She fell asleep, and she slept the sleep of the just, and she woke up at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and she missed Mass.

She went to Confession the following day. She realized she hadn't committed a mortal sin because she didn't mean to miss Mass.

She went to Confession to Padre Pio, and he asked her when she finished confessing her sins, “Is that everything?”

And she said, “Yes.” He said, “Are you sure?” She said, “Yes.”

He said, “What about yesterday, when you flew across the Atlantic, and you landed in Rome, and you went to your hotel, and you were feeling tired, and you lay down, and you fell asleep, and you slept the sleep of the just, and you woke up at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and you missed Mass?”

He could read souls. He said, “Your negligence hurt Our Lord.” In a life of love, the little negligence is so important.

These days coming up to the 14th of February, we see all over the world the beautiful hearts of Valentines. It has become almost an industry as big as Christmas, and everybody is very aware of it.

But if somebody misses out a little bit, some little detail of affection, the person that they love, that negligence can go a long way.

We try to fight the battle in our negligences, avoiding those negligences, taking care of little things. Love is in the details. Perfection is in the details.

Eve goes for this temptation. She wants to be “like God, knowing good and evil.”

Now you will decide what is right and what is wrong. Throw the Ten Commandments out the window.

This is the world that we live in. I decide for myself what is right and what is wrong. Something may be wrong for you, but it's not wrong for me. From my perspective and my situation, it's okay. There is no objective evil or no objective sin. It all depends.

Our faith gives us very clear information. We know what is right and what is wrong. We know there is a natural law. We know that God has ordained certain things to be wrong

“When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband, and he ate” (Gen. 3:6).

She found all sorts of reasons why it was good to eat. Delight to the eyes. Desire to make one wise. Whoever heard that apples make you wise?

We can tell ourselves that certain things are true when we want them to be true. It can be influenced by personal factors.

It's very important to know the objective moral truth. Moral truth is a great liberating factor. “The truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gen. 3:7).

Their eyes were opened okay, but they were opened in a very different way to the way in which they had imagined.

When we consent to sin, we are not happy. We have been fooled by the devil. And God wants us to be happy. He wants us to live every day of our life in the state of grace, and to lead many other people to lead a similar life, so they can discover where real happiness lies: in being in the state of grace, in doing good things, in living the truth.

“They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Gen. 3:7-8).

Before, they had a very amicable relationship with God. He spoke to them; they spoke to Him. It was an intimate relationship.

But now, after sin, that has been ruptured. It's not so easy to talk to God. In fact, they want to hide from him. It's the opposite. They have bought into the idea that God is a bad God, and they are afraid. They are ashamed.

John Paul II in his Theology of the Body talks a lot about “naked without shame.” Initially, in the whole panorama of ordered reality, they are naked without shame.

But then after sin, they are shameful. They are ashamed of their nakedness. They’ve discovered the reality of themselves—who they are.

Original sin is a very important sin. John Paul says that there’s been a rupture in the whole of human nature, like an earthquake (John Paul II, General Audience, May 28, 1980).

Something very evil has taken place. That original sin was the origin of all sin. It's going to be forgiven on Calvary, but it's going to leave its mark, so that all human beings for all time need to receive the sacrament of Baptism to wash away the stains of original sin, even though the tendencies or the wounds will still be there.

The saints say when you look at the greatness of the Redemption, the amount of blood that Christ allowed to flow, the brutality of the Redemption, it gives us an insight into the gravity of sin.

Lord, may I hate sin. May I run a mile from it—not just mortal sin, but also venial sin. Help me to have a great sensitivity of soul.

“But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” (Gen. 3:9).

This “Where are you?” is not just to state your longitude and latitude; state your position in the Garden of Eden.

It's a much deeper metaphysical question: Where is your being? To where have you fallen? I created you as a child of God. I lifted you up to a state of grace, and in the supernatural life.

And now look at you. You couldn't have fallen any further.

The reality of sin is something very great. With this, Our Lord gives us an insight into the gravity, in particular, of mortal sin.

When we get temptations from the devil, we have to try and fight and fight and fight—anything rather than commit sin. Anything, so that we're faithful to Our God.

Lord, give me that spirit of struggle, that spirit of fight, that toughness, that interior toughness that I need to fight off all the temptations of the devil in all the subtle ways that he may come at me.

“And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked.”

Before, they were not afraid. But now they are. Everything has changed. “And I hid myself” (Gen. 3:10).

“He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’” (Gen. 3:11).

Our first parents were given four specific gifts in the garden of paradise: the gift of immortality, whereby they didn't have to die.

Paradise is not heaven. They did not see God face to face. But if they had been faithful, they might have been taken to heaven. We don't know; it was not revealed to us.

They might have been taken to heaven, like Our Lady was assumed into heaven. But there was no death. It's only after the sin of Adam that there is death.

St. Paul says, “By the sin of one man, death entered the world” (Rom. 5:12). They lost the gift of immortality. Ever since then, all men have had to die.

The second gift they were given was the gift of impassibility. They didn't have to suffer.

Patior in Latin means to suffer. There were no thorns in the ground that would stick into their feet. There were no mosquitoes. There were no Monday mornings.

There were no other things that human beings suffer from: sicknesses, evils, no suffering of any kind. It's only with original sin that suffering entered the world.

Adam and Eve would have a lot to answer for. They had the gift of rectitude, whereby all their passions were perfectly subject to their reason, which was perfectly subject to God.

They had no trouble with modesty, purity, chastity. Everything was ordered towards God. It was beautiful.

Human sexuality is something beautiful. One writer said what we suffer from today is not so much an excess of sex, but a lack of true human sexuality, which is noble, beautiful, and refined.

We try to transmit that to so many young people.

They had the gift of knowledge. In order to acquire knowledge, they didn't have to attend classes, or read books, or all sorts of other things like that. No effort was required.

They had infused knowledge. They just clicked their fingers and they would know whatever it was they wanted to know.

But when they committed original sin, they lost the gift of rectitude and they lost the gift of knowledge. Ever since then, men have had to work with the sweat of their brow to acquire knowledge.

To lead a pure and chaste life, they have to struggle. Original sin, the condition of man, explains many truths about the human person, about society. You get that wrong, you get many things wrong.

“The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit, and I ate” (Gen. 3:12). Adam seems to say it's all her fault. What's the meaning of this part? He shifts the blame immediately.

In these early passages of Genesis, there are wonderful truths that shape the whole of our life. But one key idea is the evil nature of sin.

Lord, help me to run away from sin, to distance myself from it, to see it coming a mile away.

In the Furrow, we're told, “In our meditation, the Passion of Christ comes out of its cold historical frame and stops being a pious consideration, presenting itself before our eyes as terrible, brutal, savage, bloody…yet full of love. —And we feel that sin cannot be regarded as just a trivial error: to sin is to crucify the Son of God, to tear his hands and feet with hammer blows, and to make his heart break” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 993).

When we sin, we are like one of the crowd, shouting, “Crucify him!…Crucify him!” (Matt. 22:27-23). ‘I don't care.’

He says, “If your imagination bubbles over with thoughts about yourself and creates fanciful situations and circumstances which would not normally find a place in your way, then these will foolishly distract you. They will dampen your ardor and separate you from the presence of God. This is vanity.” Lord, open my eyes to vanity. Help me to identify vanity when it comes.

“If your imagination revolves around others, you will easily fall into the defect of passing judgment when this is not your responsibility. You will interpret their behavior not at all objectively but in a mean way. This is rash judgment.” Judgments about others.

“If your imagination concerns itself with your own talents and ways of speaking, or with the general admiration that you inspire in others, then you will be in danger of losing your rectitude of intention, and of providing fodder for your pride. Generally, letting your imagination loose is a waste of time and, if it's not controlled, it opens the door to a whole string of voluntary temptations. —Do not leave off the practice of interior mortification for even a single day!” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 135).

Our Lady was conceived without sin, conceived without original sin. She is the Mediatrix of all graces, all those graces that can wash away all our sins.

Mary, help us to turn to you more frequently; to seek the strength we need in order to flee from sin and from the devil.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

JOSH