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Angels and Demons the Fight Against the Power of Darkness Angels and demons - The fight against the power of darkness! - www.valde.com.br ANGELS AND DEMONS THE FIGHT AGAINST THE POWER OF DARKNESS Gustavo Antonio Solimeo - Luiz Sérgio Solimeo - Artpress Publisher 1 Angels and demons - The fight against the power of darkness! - www.valde.com.br Angels and demons are not the fruit of man's fantasy, nor the mere expression of his hopes and fears. They exist, they are real beings, endowed with a purely spiritual nature, far more perfect than ours, a keen intelligence and a powerful will. They continually intervene in our lives; the holy angels, by the good inspirations which they suggest to us; the demons, by their temptations, What are the real powers of angels and demons? How should we behave in the face of angelic action and how to react in the face of diabolical activity? More specifically, how to resist the temptations of the devil, his extraordinary action, the infestations and possessions? What to think of witchcraft, sabbaths and black masses? Are there still wizards and witches today? Does spiritism and macumba have any diabolical influence? Is there any relationship between Rock n 'Roll and Satanism? To answer these questions, the authors of Angels and Demons - The Fight Against the Power of Darkness consulted a number of specialized works, gathering the teaching of a hundred Catholic theologians, moralists, and canonists; They also visited the pages of numerous national and foreign newspapers and magazines. They present here, in accessible language, the result of their research, placing in the hands of the unskilled reader a dense work of biblical and theological content and at the same time of pleasant and appealing reading. Gustavo Antonio Solimeo - Luiz Sérgio Solimeo Artpress Publisher “Be sober and watch, for the devil your adversary walks like a roaring lion, seeking to devour. Resist him strong in the faith. ” (First Epistle of St. Peter 5: 8) INTRODUCTION The Angels, the Demons, and the Man "(Jacob) had a dream: A ladder rose from the earth and reached to heaven, and angels of God ascended and descended through it." (Gen 28:12) CONSIDERING the beauty of a maritime landscape at times, the elegance of the waves that come gently to the limpid sand in a swirl of foam; seagulls and other seabirds that glide sweetly, without apparent effort, in the breeze; the brightness of the luminosity that reverberates in the waters and seems to be confused with them in the horizon line; in the face of all this we feel the quiet majesty of God, his immense wisdom, infinite love for us men, giving us, without our merit, such wonders. But if, beyond the natural senses, we would consider the same panorama with the eyes of the Faith, we would realize that the wonder is even greater, and the divine wisdom and goodness even more perfect; His concern for us men, even more excellent and loving. And that, along with all that material perfection, guarding and directing it, we would know that they are spiritual creatures, incomparably more perfect than us, and whose mission is to help us 2 Angels and demons - The fight against the power of darkness! - www.valde.com.br better know and love the Creator, advise us in our doubts, protect us in all dangers, help us in all difficulties: the angels. The Holy Angels Crowning the creation, above the inanimate beings, of the plant and animal world, of the man who is king of this work, God placed the angelic spirits, endowed with intelligence (incomparably more perfect than ours), but not subject to the limitations of the body, like us. Saint Thomas explains that God created all things to make manifest His goodness and in some way to participate in that goodness. Now this participation and manifestation would not be very perfect, if there were, besides creatures, merely material, others composed of matter and spirit (men) and, finally, purely spiritual ones, that could more fully assimilate the perfections. divine. The wonderful truth of the existence of angels - beings intermediate between God and men - is illustrated poetically in the Scriptures by the dream of Jacob, Patriarch of the Elect People: “(Jacob) had a dream: A ladder rose from the earth and reached heaven and angels of God ascended and descended upon it ”(Gen 28:12). From the apex of the scale of creation, the pure spirits descend to lower creatures, ruling the material world, supporting protecting man; and they come up to God to offer him the glory of creation, as well as the prayer and the good works of the righteous. This angelic reality was foreseen by the ancient peoples, amid the mists of paganism and superstitions, in the form of benevolent geniuses of fountains, woods, and seas, which would guarantee the harmony of the universe, and were conducive to men. But it was the divine revelation that presented to men the true figure of the angelic spirits, freed from every form of superstition. The Holy Scriptures and Tradition provided the fundamental elements, which the great Doctor theologians of the Church - especially St. Thomas Aquinas - systematized, giving us a solid and coherent doctrine about the angelic world. It is this doctrine that we seek to synthesize in the present work, following the Angelic Doctor as well as more recent authors who dealt with the subject. We are sure that knowledge of this doctrine will be profitable for all believers. Knowing angels better, we will have more intimacy with them and thus be led to resort more often to their protection and protection on our earthly journey to Paradise. Especially in the tremendous struggle we must wage against the Adversary, the Slanderer, who walks about us like a fierce lion, wanting to devour us (1Pt5,8-9): Satan! SATAN AND THE REBEL ANGELS From the marvelous reality of the holy angels we thus descend into the dark reality of the infernal spirits, the demons. Even more than in relation to angels, ancient pagan peoples (as well as today's primitives) had the perception of demons. To such an extent that rationalist minds of the last century and this century wanted to see in the biblical conception of angels and demons a mere Babylonian and 3 Angels and demons - The fight against the power of darkness! - www.valde.com.br Greek influence. This appreciation is completely false because the biblical and Christian conception of angels is entirely immune from the superstitious nonsense of the pagans. Concerning demons, the ancient peoples (Babylonians, Chaldeans, or Greeks) were very confused because they could not solve the problem of the origin of evil. In their view, good and evil are mixed and confused in such a way that both gods and wicked geniuses are ambiguous, representing and practicing both good and evil. Among the Greeks, the word daimon meant the gods and other beings with divine forces, especially the evil ones, from whom men were to guard themselves by magic, witchcraft and hiding. The conception revealed in Holy Scripture and Tradition 6 is quite another: demons are not deities, but mere creatures, endowed with a natural perfection far above that of man, but infinitely below the perfection of God their creator. If they are wicked, it is not because they are essentially evil in nature, but because they are perverse; made good by God, the evil angels or demons revolted and would not submit to the Creator, serve them, and worship Him as their creature condition required. Once rebellious, the rebellious angels fixed themselves on evil, and began to tempt man, seeking to drag him to eternal perdition. This demonic activity - the temptation - theologians call ordinary, because it is the most frequent and also the least spectacular of their actions on man. In addition to this activity, he can - with God's permission - disturb man more intensely more sensitively, provoking visions, making him hear noises and feel pain; or, acting upon the inferior creatures - the animal plants, the atmospheric elements - in this way to reach man. It is the personal or local infestation, the most visible less frequent activity, called therefore extraordinary. In certain extreme cases, demons may even possess man's body to torment him. We have here the possession, the rarest extraordinary manifestation of the Evil One. God has not left us at the mercy of depraved spirits. In addition to the special protection of our Guardian Angel and other heavenly spirits, he gave the Church the preventive and liberating means to confront the devil's action: prayers, sacraments, sacraments (blessings, medals, scapulars). The most effective of these supernatural means, for cases of infestation and possession, are only the exorcisms, whereby the devil is given orders, by virtue of the name Jesus, to abandon the person's body or the place it infests or possesses. Due to their importance, we will dwell a little more on the study of exorcisms, considering their theological foundations, the way they are practiced, and the Church's legislation thereon. From the spontaneous act of the devil we pass that which he develops at the invitation of man, either by direct and explicit invocation, or by indirect and implicit. With regard to magic, witchcraft and other forms of superstition, we leave aside the controversial hysterical aspects (which would extend the present study too far and escape its objective), limiting us to consider its theological possibility, affirmed, moreover, by the Magisterium of Church and the unanimity of theologians and moralists .. 4 Angels and demons - The fight against the power of darkness! - www.valde.com.br We dedicate some pages to the revival of Satanism today, highlighting the role of Rock''Roll, especially Heavy Metal in its diffusion.
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