Pope Addresses the Spiritual War

A Reuters news story Satan unleashes evil energy but God will win -Pope is excerpted here:

"Satan is still at work in the world unleashing "evil energy" but God will be the final arbiter of history, Pope Benedict said on Wednesday... the Pope also said that nations and leaders had to look for God's hand in history in the past and learn from it... "History, in fact, is not in the hands of dark forces, left to chance or just human choices...Above the unleashing of evil energy, above the vehement interruptions of Satan, above the so many scourges of evil, rises the Lord, supreme arbiter of history..." He urged Catholics to look for and recognize what he called "hidden divine interventions in history."

The Holy Father is describing Spiritual Warfare here, a concept that has been seemingly ignored for decades, and the role of Providence in history, which is also ignored.

We are at war, not with our fellow men, but with the forces of Satan: "For our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood, but against rulers, against authorities, against cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places," says Saint Paul. The modern-day Sophists, relativists, skeptics, atheists, abortionists, witches, euthanizers, materialists, and neopagans are at war with us, for sure, but we are not at war with them, for they are our brethren, suffering from the disease of this age, and as such they need our help in overcoming this disorder. And we align ourselves with Satan when we sin, and so should be far more critical of ourselves than others who may have no faith.

Spiritual Warfare has been neglected in our current materialist and psychological age. But Christ himself drives out demons, and the early Desert Fathers battled directly with demons in an astonishing way. We cannot be Christians and also deny this conflict, without redefining the word "Christian" in such a way that will cause us to be casualties of this war. This neglect of these facts has brought a great darkness over our culture, with so many people becoming hate-filled destroyers of all that is good, and that our culture embraces sin in its many forms: greed, lust, intemperance, violence, and abuse.

The Pope also tells us to look for the Hand of God in history. The modern mind will say that history is due to chance or randomness, and so history is no longer a subject being deemed worthy to study. But history does have an actual coherence, especially when seen through the eyes of faith. Only a Christian could see that Communism, although seemingly scientific, and supported by the intelligentsia, would have to necessarily fall.