Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
October 27, 2024 | "Reclaiming Halloween: A Triumph Over Evil"
Halloween might not be the sinister celebration some claim it to be. Join me as I challenge the notion that Halloween inherently fosters demonic influences, and instead, spotlight the genuine manifestations of evil in our lives—those often masked as societal norms and personal battles.
This episode is a re-broadcast from October 30, 2022.
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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.
This is Living Catholic with Fr Don Wolfe. Living Catholic is a fresh look at issues confronting each of us today. This show deals with living out the Catholic faith, what that means for Catholics, as well as the impact on the rest of society. You certainly don't have to be Catholic to enjoy this show. And now your host, father Don Wolfe.
Speaker 2:Welcome Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Father Don Wolfe, pastor at Sacred Heart Parish in Oklahoma City and rector at the Blessed Stanley Rother Shrine. Now that we're approaching the celebration of Halloween, the normally crazy posts are beginning to show up on Facebook and other places. In these posts, which I've seen in English and Spanish, we're warned how much we have to protect everyone from the staggering power of evil and the influence of the devil on this night in October, or else we'll all be seduced by the certainty of the dark side. If any person anywhere even begins to turn his eyes toward the frivolity of Halloween night, they're liable to be hauled off by the powers of darkness and into the pit reserved for the devil and his angels. That sounds a bit overblown, but the posts I've seen in Spanish are just like this. The ones in English are less extreme, but they have the same message Halloween is bad and no one should allow a child to take part in this holiday. These warnings are part of a trend that have grown into a tsunami of criticism over the last several decades, until we have parents threatening to withdraw their kids from Catholic school unless we banish all talk of costume parties or Halloween candy from the hallways of our academies. That's why we've reached a point in which concerned parents are being warned that a child is risking her soul by dressing up as Elsa, or a youngster is doomed to perdition by claiming for an evening that he looks like Spider-Man. To say these things have become odd is to simplify what's going on. Our situation is beyond odd, because we really do face the power of the demonic and the forces of evil are everywhere in our world. Do face the power of the demonic and the forces of evil are everywhere in our world, but they're not highlighted by costume parties or focused on kids who might dress as a witch or a ghost. The powers of the demonic have become overt and powerful. They are prowling our streets and the halls of government. They no longer hide behind the conventualities of politeness, but have come out into the open. The more we choose not to see them and focus on them, the more we worry our way across the chatter about costumes and trick-or-treat, and the more we do that, the more we will suffer them.
Speaker 2:I am all for everyone telling the truth about the presence of evil in the world and amidst our society at this time. But talking about Halloween, isn't it? Now, let me first say I am not diminishing any talk about the presence of the devil in our world or imagining that such talk has no place. No one who's involved with the pastoral life in our day and time, unless he's gone to too much school and has had any awareness of the nature of humanity leeched out of him, can ignore the power of evil at work in the corners of people's lives. I can't say such evil is somehow more present these days than in previous days, but I can say it seems to be more evident. Probably this is because the supporting elements of our society have grown weaker and are much less robust in the lives of everyone. So the powers of evil meet less resistance than in previous times and we pastors have become more at ease talking about them in ways that are actual and helpful.
Speaker 2:In a previous generation of pastoral life it moved much more toward the contemporary understanding of psychology about how to deal with the situation of people's lives. We were admonished to use all the tools available to us from the practice of psychological healing. With the great breakthroughs in our understanding and naming of human behavior, we pastors had a lot of help not available to us in the past. This was especially true when we were dealing with the nexus of problems of sexual abuse, addiction and dysfunction. Over the last generation, anyone whose job it is to talk with people has collected an entire body of understanding and a whole dictionary of terms that are helpful when we begin speaking with others about their problems. We might also note, along with our sophistication in these matters and the contributions to these issues, that have become enormously sophisticated and helpful. None of these concerns have been diminished. Sophisticated and helpful. None of these concerns have been diminished. This is not to condemn the insights we have or the gains that people have made as we deal with people, and it's not to condemn the pastoral life or the counseling profession in any way. It's to highlight that we've entered into a new generation concerning the awareness that we have when it comes to dealing with people.
Speaker 2:In this new generation of pastoral care, we talk much more openly about the power of evil and the function of evil and the demonic in people's lives. We don't always do this face-to-face because of a vocabulary problem that I'll talk about in a moment, but when we pastors or other helpers talk to one another about what we see, those issues are very much present to us. I have a good friend, for example, whose grandson is afflicted with substance abuse problems. They're profound. This young man has gone to treatment and he has been afforded all the care and concern that his parents can muster. In every way. All of society's understanding has been poured out over his problems and yet whenever he makes a turn away from addiction, he eventually fails. It's as if he is gripped by a power outside of himself, a power turned toward his destruction in a way that overcomes all the other power he can summon. It seems the only hope for him is to be gripped by another power for good, one that can meet the powers so readily at work within him and defeat them on their own ground. In short, he needs to be rescued, to be delivered from the ravages of the mania within him.
Speaker 2:Now, just in case you didn't notice, that's an almost perfect description of possession by an evil spirit. We don't use this vocabulary because of the twisted notion we have of such things, but as a way to think about what's going on, this actual understanding of a force for evil that has gripped a person and that can be overcome only by another power casting out that evil. This picture is as intact and as informative as the pictures developed by other methods, and even sophisticated and educated pastors are more and more taking this view into account. The corollary is that this vocabulary allows us also to bring the power of Christ to bear, both in our willingness to address these concerns, as well as in the life and with the problems of the person we're talking about Now. The vocabulary has to be very carefully monitored, partly because we're all so crazy when it comes to talking about evil and its manifestations among us.
Speaker 2:Everyone remembers the quotation by CS Lewis that the first work of the devil is to convince everyone he doesn't exist. That's been talked about and cited more times than the story of George Washington and the cherry tree and, like all helpful stories, it contains a grain of truth, helpful in its own place as a description and as a tool for understanding. If we imagine the power of evil in the world is not personal, powerful and arrayed against our good, then we haven't done a very good job of understanding it. That's Lewis's point and those pastors or counselors who choose to imagine evil and the darkness at the heart of others as mere options for behavior. They've been forced to beef up what they understand. I should note one of the most notable Catholic exorcists in the US today is a PhD psychologist who ran a treatment center for decades. His encounter with the intricacies of evil has made him fluent in an entirely different vocabulary of diagnosis and treatment. But there's also another quote, this one from Gil Bailey the second trick of the devil is to convince you that he does exist and is responsible for everything. That's also a good warning, and everyone who deals with the first quote with any serious approach will also encounter the warning from the second.
Speaker 2:Because once we begin mentioning the power of evil, we also stumble across the temptation to ascribe everything to demons floating around in our world, willing to attach themselves to everything we do and every decision we make until we imagine there's nothing else. Demons and their twisted powers and devils with their little leather wings, ready to prop themselves on our shoulders and whisper into our ears, become as common and as bothersome as mosquitoes in the swamp. They're everywhere. We can't get rid of them. Swatting them away just doesn't work. We just endure them. If we want to stay where we are, that's the image that we end up with. That's why no one in his right mind begins a conversation with a troubled soul by talking about evil or the demonic Because at our time our vocabulary is so restricted and our understanding about such things have been shaped much more by Hollywood and informed by the Exorcist much more than the New Testament. So we think of these things with the sophistication of a fifth grader, but we do talk about these things with the sophistication of a fifth grader. But we do talk about these things in the pastoral life, and pastoral care is much more concerned about the truth of the demonic than in the previous generation.
Speaker 2:About 20 years ago I was at a meeting in South Africa of the International Convocation of English-Speaking Priests. At the meeting, a middle-aged priest from Ghana who has a PhD in theology from a Roman university began speaking about his pastoral experience. He said If one of my parishioners come to me and ask me about what to do when she had a bad dream or felt oppressed by a spiritual present, I am more likely to tell her to watch what she eats before she goes to bed than to tell her how to resist the powers of evil in her life. After all, I've been trained to treat such things as if they were accidental, mere bothersome moments rather than true spiritual issues. I have more to learn, he said. He encapsulated what we've all been learning in our generation, which is the demonic, is real. There are powers at work in the world for our destruction, and the more we know about them, talk about them for what they are, the more we are equipped to understand our world and our place in it.
Speaker 2:If this may sound far-fetched, I'll mention a brief description of a conversion story that appeared in the journal First Things A year or so ago. There appeared a rather brief article by the author, paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth had been raised by two nominal Anglicans who had rejected the faith in its practice. He had never been exposed to Christian belief, except in the most distant way, and the life of belief was no more a part of his life than the life of China was present to him in the porcelain in his mother's cabinet. He had no concern for the questions or for the answers proposed by Christianity. Now he had made his living as a journalist and as an environmental activist. He's written a number of novels and essays.
Speaker 2:In his progression of thought, he's searching for answers to the fundamental questions that no one escapes asking which is the meaning of life and his place in it? And his looking led him to people who introduced him to magic, as he wrote. It's real, it works, it gives you power over people and situations and it is enormously seductive. Remember, this is an author notable for his meditations about the meaning of life and the integration of our postmodern awareness into our day-to-day choices. He's not a nut, but one day he was on his way to one of these meetings of his friends involving black magic, a meeting in which he had been promised he would be introduced to a level of practice he would find even more intriguing and more powerful than before. He knew there was something inherently disquieting about it that he should be staying away from, but he quelled his anxiety and went. As he was approaching the building, he felt a force pushing him away. It was as if someone was literally standing in his way, pushing against him. He said he could have overcome it, but he knew what it was. He was being rescued by what he knew was wrong. He was being rescued from what he knew was wrong. He was being saved from being drowned in evil. His conversion to Christ followed.
Speaker 2:Evil is real. The devil is real. Our flirting with the powers of evil at work in the world through the cooperation of evil men is also real. Anyone who imagines such things don't exist hasn't been paying attention. But Halloween and the holiday it has become and the anxiety about it from concerned parents is not one of those things.
Speaker 2:Halloween is literally the eve of all saints. It's a reminder that in our faith we celebrate those who have overcome the powers of evil in the world through the working of Christ in their lives. All Saints Day is the mark of what it means to be a joyful believer in the power of the cross to overcome the ravages of the world and the certainties of sin and death. My one sole criticism of Halloween is that we have forgotten that it is the eve of what matters, not the purpose of the holiday. Halloween is no more than the night before we celebrate the heavenly victory of saints from every nation, people, situation and circumstance. Nothing can overcome the power of God arrayed for our good in the conquest of sin, death and the world, and the frivolity of the eve of all saints, developed because of the conquest of evil. We celebrate is our victory over evil, and it is so comprehensive. We can laugh at what evil is, rather than the pursuit of the powers of darkness to vanquish our uncertainties and our enemies. We can laugh at the pretensions of evil in our lives. The source of making this a holiday is our conviction that we can make light of darkness, because the power of darkness has been overcome in the resurrection.
Speaker 2:I can't think of anything more powerful than treating any mention of evil or the powers of its seduction as if it were irresistible. And that's what happens with all this mania about Halloween. Think about it. In several of the posts I've seen, the warning is that this one night opens up the doorway into the practice of darkness that will snatch away the souls of children. Think about that warning One night of carrying a jack-o'-lantern and dressing as a zombie and a soul could be swept away forever. That's power.
Speaker 2:Now think about what we have arrayed against such things. There are churches and crosses and rosaries and Bibles and believers arrayed everywhere. I know many of those things have been emptied of meaning in our shells and not much more. And as they diminish, the power of evil grows. Yet it's hard to imagine all these are powerless against one night of kids dressing up, laughing at scary characters and saying boo to one another. If the sum of Christian life and the whole of Catholic education can't surmount whatever threat this might be for eight hours a year, then the devil has won, already hands down.
Speaker 2:But those complaints are merely squabbles from overheated imaginations. But those complaints are merely squabbles from overheated imaginations. Spending our time on them is mostly a waste of time. Is truly the real evil we have to fight against, because the talk about devils and evil spirits troubling those on the margin of society is as nothing compared to the full-blown evil we see at work in the world today, as always, the demons at work in the dark, where people become anxious at the darkness as much as at the demonic, is a distraction from the evil arrayed for everyone to see. It's what's on display every day these days that we have to worry about and resist.
Speaker 2:As of today, people are beginning to talk about the prospect of nuclear war, for example. Oh, they're only speaking about the use of nuclear war. For example, oh, they're only speaking about the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. But what happens when the line is crossed? Nobody knows, not to mention radiation fallout through Central Europe and those who would be killed, presumably in the tens of thousands, by the fireball and its effects. The use of these weapons would open the door to retaliation and escalation, which we have not thought about with much sophistication. Everyone who's done the talking on our side seems to imagine we can speak of these things and then draw back from them whenever we want to. The threat is real and we seem to be as mindful of it as a kindergartner playing with cobras. That's demonic.
Speaker 2:Currently, the national conversation about abortion has reached horrific proportions. For decades, the political conversations about abortion hinged on the polite understanding about rights and the willingness to forego mentions of the child to be aborted, that is to say, the object of abortion. The child in the womb was pushed off to the side and left in the darkness whenever the conversation was joined, was pushed off to the side and left in the darkness whenever the conversation was joined. As the political battles have heated up, the gloves have come off and any pretense of keeping things vague and unfocused is over. Suddenly, politicians are talking about unrestricted access to killing a child in the womb up to the very moment of delivery or even afterwards.
Speaker 2:In some jurisdictions, a ban on abortions after 15 weeks, which would be more permissive than any country on Europe, is now considered to be too weak and restrictive for many of the places in the conversations now going on around the country. Not only that, there are active campaigns going on to shut down the centers offering help to pregnant mothers, that help to carry their children to term, places offering diapers and counseling and shelter, and child care and ultrasounds for free are threatened with lawsuits for being abusive to women. It's almost beyond imagination, not to mention the recent arrest of a number of people who have been accused of subverting access to abortion by talking to people about changing their minds. I need not mention not one Antifa activist leader whose overt proclamation is to cause violence and to undermine the rule of law, and who were active in causing billions of dollars of damages in a series of riots throughout the country. None of them have been arrested. Amazing, don't you think? Recently, a number of hospitals across the country. None of them have been arrested. Amazing, don't you think?
Speaker 2:Recently, a number of hospitals across the country have been exposed for offering what they term to be gender-affirming care to children. This, according to their own websites, includes surgeries and life-altering drugs offered to minor children to change their bodies and to destroy their organs. These are procedures made available to those who, by law, are presumed not to have sufficient judgment to drive a car, enlist in the military or to sign a contract to buy a PlayStation, and we have parents who are concerned because there are costume parties for their kids and they won't be able to control which characters the other kids will dress up, as the power of the demonic is the power to confuse and to mislead, unless, of course, we've reached the point in which evil has no reason to hide and no reason to dissemble. I think we need to attend to that which is at work among us on every level, especially what we see on the evening news, rather than to worry about what costumes the kids put on. Finally, if we are terrified at what the kids are dressing up, as, let's be clear, the most horrifying outfit would be the modest pantsuit of the president of Planned Parenthood, who advocates abortion up to birth, unconstrained by the vote of the people. The most grotesque mockery of good would be to find a kid who put on the colors and decorations of a Russian captive in their rocket forces, ready to act on an order to launch a missile onto a logger of Ukrainian tanks. Or if we happen to find a child who wanted to put on the blue jeans and t-shirt of a fact checker at a major social media company, who is untroubled by calling anything he disagrees with misinformation and with conscience. Unburdened bans, the truth, that would be evil on stage. They are all terrifying portals into the horrors of our age and yet none of us would seem to have that much trouble if we saw kids dressed in those costumes. Remember many of the people most evil in our world today. Look like the folks on C-SPAN. Some of them are the folks we see on C-SPAN. Evil exists. It must be resisted. It has been overcome in the power of the resurrection, which all the saints know and we know as we celebrate All Saints Day, including the eve of All Saints, known by its old title, halloween, back in just a moment, thank you, welcome back to our final segment, faith in Verse.
Speaker 2:We have a poem today called On Halloween at Dusk. I had to laugh when I saw them, twin girls dressed as Holsteins, black blotches on white flannel, on the porch. At Halloween They'd come to ring the doorbell and play trick-or-treat at dusk, when our memories of important things have become as husks. But laughter is the point. And they succeeded oh so well when everyone's eyes are glued to the vision of the Son of Hell. They reminded the whole world and anyone who would look that to play is the greatest gift, the victory over what the devil took. Because in all things, and above all on this holy night, the power of Christ is on display in all his saintly might, and darkness is turned today, now, from that moment at the tomb when the Savior rose to spite the devil's work. Three days soon, that's on Halloween, at Dusk.
Speaker 2:Thank you, the invitation we have is always to remember what we celebrate. That is as true in this season as it is for any other season. We make a big deal about, well, being true to what we celebrate at Christmas and being attentive to what we celebrate at Christmas and being attentive to what we in fact pay attention to at Easter. The same is true here. The Feast of All Saints is the great gift to us, as we remember, of course. Now, with this opportunity for us in Oklahoma to remember the life and example of Blessed Stanley Rother and to call to mind all that his example has given us as what it means to go beyond ourselves to serve our brothers and sisters, on this All Saints Day, let's pause for a moment and consider him. Perhaps his life is worth paying attention to. I hope that you'll be able to join us in the future as we continue to explore what it means to be Living Catholic the future as we continue to explore what it means to be Living Catholic.
Speaker 1:Living Catholic is a production of Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.