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“5 Myths about 7 Books”

Here are the answers to five common arguments Protestants give for rejecting the Deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament

By Mark Shea

People don’t talk much about the deuterocanon these days. The folks who do are mostly Christians, and they usually fall into two general groupings: Catholics – who usually don’t know their Bibles very well and, therefore, don’t know much about the deuterocanonical books, and Protestants – who may know their Bibles a bit better, though their Bibles don’t have the deuterocanonical books in them anyway, so they don’t know anything about them either. With the stage thus set for informed ecumenical dialogue, it’s no wonder most people think the deuterocanon is some sort of particle weapon recently perfected by the Pentagon.

The deuterocanon (ie. “second canon”) is a set of seven books – Sirach, Tobit, Wisdom, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and Baruch, as well as longer versions of Daniel and Esther – that are found in the Old Testament canon used by Catholics, but are not in the Old Testament canon used by Protestants, who typically refer to them by the mildly pejorative term “apocrypha.” This group of books is called “deuterocanonical” not (as some imagine) because they are a “second rate” or inferior canon, but because their status as being part of the canon of Scripture was settled later in time than certain books that always and everywhere were regarded as Scripture, such as Genesis, Isaiah, and Psalms.

Why are Protestant Bibles missing these books? Protestants offer various explanations to explain why they reject the deuterocanonical books as Scripture. I call these explanations “myths” because they are either incorrect or simply inadequate reasons for rejecting these books of Scripture. Let’s explore the five most common of these myths and see how to respond to them.

Myth 1

The deuterocanonical books are not found in the Hebrew Bible. They were added by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent after Luther rejected it.

The background to this theory goes like this: Jesus and the Apostles, being Jews, used the same Bible Jews use today. However, after they passed from the scene, muddled hierarchs started adding books to the Bible either out of ignorance or because such books helped back up various wacky Catholic traditions that were added to the gospel. In the 16th century, when the Reformation came along, the first Protestants, finally able to read their Bibles without ecclesial propaganda from Rome, noticed that the Jewish and Catholic Old Testaments differed, recognized this medieval addition for what it was and scraped it off the Word of God like so many barnacles off a diamond. Rome, ever ornery, reacted by officially adding the deuterocanonical books at the Council of Trent (1564-1565) and started telling Catholics “they had always been there.”

This is a fine theory. The problem is that its basis in history is gossamer thin. As we’ll see in a moment, accepting this myth leads to some remarkable dilemmas a little further on.

The problems with this theory are first, it relies on the incorrect notion that the modern Jewish Bible is identical to the Bible used by Jesus and the Apostles. This is false. In fact, the Old Testament was still very much in flux in the time of Christ and there was no fixed canon of Scripture in the apostolic period. Some people will tell you that there must have been since, they say, Jesus held people accountable to obey the Scriptures. But this is also untrue. For in fact, Jesus held people accountable to obey their conscience and therefore, to obey Scripture insofar as they were able to grasp what constituted “Scripture.”

Consider the Sadducees. They only regarded the first five books of the Old Testament as inspired and canonical. The rest of the Old Testament was regarded by them in much the same way the deuterocanon is regarded by Protestant Christians today: nice, but not the inspired Word of God. This was precisely why the Sadducees argued with Jesus against the reality of the resurrection in Matthew 22:23-33: they couldn’t see it in the five books of Moses and they did not regard the later books of Scripture which spoke of it explicitly (such as Isaiah and 2 Maccabees) to be inspired and canonical. Does Jesus say to them “You do greatly err, not knowing Isaiah and 2 Maccabees”? Does He bind them to acknowledge these books as canonical? No. He doesn’t try to drag the Sadducees kicking and screaming into an expanded Old Testament. He simply holds the Sadducees accountable to take seriously the portion of Scripture they do acknowledge: that is, He argues for the resurrection based on the five books of the Law. But of course, this doesn’t mean Jesus commits Himself to the Sadducees’ whittled-down canon.

When addressing the Pharisees, another Jewish faction of the time, Jesus does the same thing. These Jews seem to have held to a canon resembling the modern Jewish canon, one far larger than that of the Sadducees but not as large as other Jewish collections of Scripture. That’s why Christ and the Apostles didn’t hesitate to argue with them from the books they acknowledged as Scripture. But as with the Sadducees, this doesn’t imply that Christ or the Apostles limited the canon of Scripture only to what the Pharisees acknowledged.

When the Lord and His Apostles addressed Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews, they made use of an even bigger collection of Scripture – the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek – which many Jews (the vast majority, in fact) regarded as inspired Scripture. In fact, we find that the New Testament is filled with references to the Septuagint (and its particular translation of various Old Testament passages) as Scripture. It’s a strange irony that one of the favorite passages used in anti-Catholic polemics over the years is Mark 7:6-8. In this passage Christ condemns “teaching as doctrines human traditions.” This verse has formed the basis for countless complaints against the Catholic Church for supposedly “adding” to Scripture man-made traditions, such as the “merely human works” of the deuterocanononical books. But few realize that in Mark 7:6-8 the Lord was quoting the version of Isaiah that is found only in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament.

But there’s the rub: The Septuagint version of Scripture, from which Christ quoted, includes the Deuterocanonical books, books that were supposedly “added” by Rome in the 16th century. And this is by no means the only citation of the Septuagint in the New Testament. In fact, fully two thirds of the Old Testament passages that are quoted in the New Testament are from the Septuagint. So why aren’t the deuterocanonical books in today’s Jewish Bible, anyway? Because the Jews who formulated the modern Jewish canon were a) not interested in apostolic teaching and, b) driven by a very different set of concerns from those motivating the apostolic community.

In fact, it wasn’t until the very end of the apostolic age that the Jews, seeking a new focal point for their religious practice in the wake of the destruction of the Temple, zeroed in with white hot intensity on Scripture and fixed their canon at the rabbinical gathering, known as the “Council of Javneh” (sometimes called “Jamnia”), about A.D. 90. Prior to this point in time there had never been any formal effort among the Jews to “define the canon” of Scripture. In fact, Scripture nowhere indicates that the Jews even had a conscious idea that the canon should be closed at some point.

The canon arrived at by the rabbis at Javneh was essentially the mid-sized canon of the Palestinian Pharisees, not the shorter one used by the Sadducees, who had been practically annihilated during the Jewish war with Rome. Nor was this new canon consistent with the Greek Septuagint version, which the rabbis regarded rather xenophobically as “too Gentile-tainted.” Remember, these Palestinian rabbis were not in much of a mood for multiculturalism after the catastrophe they had suffered at the hands of Rome. Their people had been slaughtered by foreign invaders, the Temple defiled and destroyed, and the Jewish religion in Palestine was in shambles. So for these rabbis, the Greek Septuagint went by the board and the mid-sized Pharisaic canon was adopted. Eventually this version was adopted by the vast majority of Jews – though not all. Even today Ethiopian Jews still use the Septuagint version, not the shorter Palestinian canon settled upon by the rabbis at Javneh. In other words, the Old Testament canon recognized by Ethiopian Jews is identical to the Catholic Old Testament, including the seven deuterocanonical books (cf. Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 6, p. 1147).

But remember that by the time the Jewish council of Javneh rolled around, the Catholic Church had been in existence and using the Septuagint Scriptures in its teaching, preaching, and worship for nearly 60 years, just as the Apostles themselves had done. So the Church hardly felt the obligation to conform to the wishes of the rabbis in excluding the deuterocanonical books any more than they felt obliged to follow the rabbis in rejecting the New Testament writings. The fact is that after the birth of the Church on the day of Pentecost, the rabbis no longer had authority from God to settle such issues. That authority, including the authority to define the canon of Scripture, had been given to Christ’s Church.

Thus, Church and synagogue went their separate ways, not in the Middle Ages or the 16th century, but in the 1st century. The Septuagint, complete with the deuterocanononical books, was first embraced, not by the Council of Trent, but by Jesus of Nazareth and his Apostles.

Myth 2

Christ and the Apostles frequently quoted Old Testament Scripture as their authority, but they never quoted from the deuterocanonical books, nor did they even mention them. Clearly, if these books were part of Scripture, the Lord would have cited them.

This myth rests on two fallacies. The first is the “Quotation Equals Canonicity” myth. It assumes that if a book is quoted or alluded to by the Apostles or Christ, it is ipso facto shown to be part of the Old Testament. Conversely, if a given book is not quoted, it must not be canonical.

This argument fails for two reasons. First, numerous non-canonical books are quoted in the New Testament. These include the Book of Enoch and the Assumption of Moses (quoted by St. Jude), the Ascension of Isaiah (alluded to in Hebrews 11:37), and the writings of the pagan poets Epimenides, Aratus, and Menander (quoted by St. Paul in Acts, 1 Corinthians, and Titus). If quotation equals canonicity, then why aren’t these writings in the canon of the Old Testament?

Second, if quotation equals canonicity, then there are numerous books of the protocanonical Old Testament which would have to be excluded. This would include the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Obadiah, Zephaniah, Judges, 1 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Lamentations and Nahum. Not one of these Old Testament books is ever quoted or alluded to by Christ or the Apostles in the New Testament.

The other fallacy behind Myth #2 is that, far from being ignored in the New Testament (like Ecclesiastes, Esther, and 1 Chronicles) the deuterocanonical books are indeed quoted and alluded to in the New Testament. For instance, Wisdom 2:12-20, reads in part, “For if the just one be the son of God, he will defend him and deliver him from the hand of his foes. With revilement and torture let us put him to the test that we may have proof of his gentleness and try his patience. Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him.”

This passage was clearly in the minds of the Synoptic Gospel writers in their accounts of the Crucifixion: “He saved others; he cannot save himself. So he is the king of Israel! Let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusted in God; let Him deliver him now if he wants him. For he said, I am the Son of God'” (cf. Matthew 27:42-43).

Similarly, St. Paul alludes clearly to Wisdom chapters 12 and 13 in Romans 1:19-25. Hebrews 11:35 refers unmistakably to 2 Maccabees 7. And more than once, Christ Himself drew on the text of Sirach 27:6, which reads: “The fruit of a tree shows the care it has had; so too does a man’s speech disclose the bent of his mind.” Notice too that the Lord and His Apostles observed the Jewish feast of Hanukkah (cf. John 10:22-36). But the divine establishment of this key feast day is recorded only in the deuterocanonical books of 1 and 2 Maccabees. It is nowhere discussed in any other book of the Old Testament. In light of this, consider the importance of Christ’s words on the occasion of this feast: “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’? If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came – and the Scripture cannot be broken – what about the One Whom the Father set apart as His very own and sent into the world?” Jesus, standing near the Temple during the feast of Hanukkah, speaks of His being “set apart,” just as Judas Maccabeus “set apart” (ie. consecrated) the Temple in 1 Maccabees 4:36-59 and 2 Maccabees 10:1-8. In other words, our Lord made a connection that was unmistakable to His Jewish hearers by treating the Feast of Hanukkah and the account of it in the books of the Maccabees as an image or type of His own consecration by the Father. That is, He treats the Feast of Hanukkah from the so-called “apocryphal” books of 1 and 2 Maccabees exactly as He treats accounts of the manna (John 6:32-33; Exodus 16:4), the Bronze Serpent (John 3:14; Numbers 21:4-9), and Jacob’s Ladder (John 1:51; Genesis 28:12) – as inspired, prophetic, scriptural images of Himself. We see this pattern throughout the New Testament. There is no distinction made by Christ or the Apostles between the deuterocanonical books and the rest of the Old Testament.

Myth 3

The deuterocanonical books contain historical, geographical, and moral errors, so they can’t be inspired Scripture.

This myth might be raised when it becomes clear that the allegation that the deuterocanonical books were “added” by the Catholic Church is fallacious. This myth is built on another attempt to distinguish between the deuterocanonical books and “true Scripture.” Let’s examine it.

First, from a certain perspective, there are “errors” in the deuterocanonical books. The book of Judith, for example, gets several points of history and geography wrong. Similarly Judith, that glorious daughter of Israel, lies her head off (well, actually, it’s wicked King Holofernes’ head that comes off). And the Angel Raphael appears under a false name to Tobit. How can Catholics explain that such “divinely inspired” books would endorse lying and get their facts wrong? The same way we deal with other incidents in Scripture where similar incidents of lying or “errors” happen.

Let’s take the problem of alleged “factual errors” first. The Church teaches that to have an authentic understanding of Scripture we must have in mind what the author was actually trying to assert, the way he was trying to assert it, and what is incidental to that assertion.

For example, when Jesus begins the parable of the Prodigal Son saying, “There was once a man with two sons,” He is not shown to be a bad historian when it is proven that the man with two sons He describes didn’t actually exist. So too, when the prophet Nathan tells King David the story of the “rich man” who stole a “poor man’s” ewe lamb and slaughtered it, Nathan is not a liar if he cannot produce the carcass or identify the two men in his story. In strict fact, there was no ewe lamb, no theft, and no rich and poor men. These details were used in a metaphor to rebuke King David for his adultery with Bathsheba. We know what Nathan was trying to say and the way he was trying to say it. Likewise, when the Gospels say the women came to the tomb at sunrise, there is no scientific error here. This is not the assertion of the Ptolemiac theory that the sun revolves around the earth. These and other examples which could be given are not “errors” because they’re not truth claims about astronomy or historical events.

Similarly, both Judith and Tobit have a number of historical and geographical errors, not because they’re presenting bad history and erroneous geography, but because they’re first-rate pious stories that don’t pretend to be remotely interested with teaching history or geography, any more than the Resurrection narratives in the Gospels are interested in astronomy. Indeed, the author of Tobit goes out of his way to make clear that his hero is fictional. He makes Tobit the uncle of Ahiqar, a figure in ancient Semitic folklore like “Jack the Giant Killer” or “Aladdin.” Just as one wouldn’t wave a medieval history textbook around and complain about a tale that begins “once upon a time when King Arthur ruled the land,” so Catholics are not reading Tobit and Judith to get a history lesson.

Very well then, but what of the moral and theological “errors”? Judith lies. Raphael gives a false name. So they do. In the case of Judith lying to King Holofernes in order to save her people, we must recall that she was acting in light of Jewish understanding as it had developed until that time. This meant that she saw her deception as acceptable, even laudable, because she was eliminating a deadly foe of her people. By deceiving Holofernes as to her intentions and by asking the Lord to bless this tactic, she was not doing something alien to Jewish Scripture or Old Testament morality. Another biblical example of this type of lying is when the Hebrew midwives lied to Pharaoh about the birth of Moses. They lied and were justified in lying because Pharaoh did not have a right to the truth – if they told the truth, he would have killed Moses. If the book of Judith is to be excluded from the canon on this basis, so must Exodus.

With respect to Raphael, it’s much more dubious that the author intended, or that his audience understood him to mean, “Angels lie. So should you.” On the contrary, Tobit is a classic example of an “entertaining angels unaware” story (cf. Heb. 13:2). We know who Raphael is all along. When Tobit cried out to God for help, God immediately answered him by sending Raphael. But, as is often the case, God’s deliverance was not noticed at first. Raphael introduced himself as “Azariah,” which means “Yahweh helps,” and then rattles off a string of supposed mutual relations, all with names meaning things like “Yahweh is merciful,” “Yahweh gives,” and “Yahweh hears.” By this device, the author is saying (with a nudge and a wink), “Psst, audience. Get it?” And we, of course, do get it, particularly if we’re reading the story in the original Hebrew. Indeed, by using the name “Yahweh helps,” Raphael isn’t so much “lying” about his real name as he is revealing the deepest truth about who God is and why God sent him to Tobit. It’s that truth and not any fluff about history or geography or the fun using an alias that the author of Tobit aims to tell.

Myth 4

The deuterocanonical books themselves deny that they are inspired Scripture.

Correction: Two of the deuterocanonical books seem to disclaim inspiration, and even that is a dicey proposition. The two in question are Sirach and 2 Maccabees. Sirach opens with a brief preface by the author’s grandson saying, in part, that he is translating grandpa’s book, that he thinks the book important and that, “You therefore are now invited to read it in a spirit of attentive good will, with indulgence for any apparent failure on our part, despite earnest efforts, in the interpretation of particular passages.” Likewise, the editor of 2 Maccabees opens with comments about how tough it was to compose the book and closes with a sort of shrug saying, “I will bring my own story to an end here too. If it is well written and to the point, that is what I wanted; if it is poorly done and mediocre, that is the best I could do.”

That, and that alone, is the basis for the myth that the deuterocanon (all seven books and not just these two) “denies that it is inspired Scripture.” Several things can be said in response to this argument.

First, is it reasonable to think that these typically oriental expressions of humility really constitute anything besides a sort of gesture of politeness and the customary downplaying of one’s own talents, something common among ancient writers in Middle Eastern cultures? No. For example, one may as well say that St. Paul’s declaration of himself as “one born abnormally” or as being the “chief of sinners” (he mentions this in the present, not past tense) necessarily makes his writings worthless.

Second, speaking of St. Paul, we are confronted by even stronger and explicit examples of disclaimers regarding inspired status of his writings, yet no Protestant would feel compelled to exclude these Pauline writings from the New Testament canon. Consider his statement in 1 Corinthians 1:16 that he can’t remember whom he baptized. Using the “It oughtta sound more like the Holy Spirit talking” criterion of biblical inspiration Protestants apply to the deuterocanonical books, St. Paul would fail the test here. Given this amazing criterion, are we to believe the Holy Spirit “forgot” whom St. Paul baptized, or did He inspire St. Paul to forget (1 Cor. 1:15)?

1 Corinthians 7:40 provides an ambiguous statement that could, according to the principles of this myth, be understood to mean that St. Paul wasn’t sure that his teaching was inspired or not. Elsewhere St. Paul makes it clear that certain teachings he’s passing along are “not I, but the Lord” speaking (1 Cor. 7:10), whereas in other cases, “I, not the Lord” am speaking (cf. 1 Cor. 7:12). This is a vastly more direct “disclaimer of inspiration” than the oblique deuterocanonical passages cited above, yet nobody argues that St. Paul’s writings should be excluded from Scripture, as some say the whole of the deuterocanon should be excluded from the Old Testament, simply on the strength of these modest passages from Sirach and 2 Maccabees.

Why not? Because in St. Paul’s case people recognize that a writer can be writing under inspiration even when he doesn’t realize it and doesn’t claim it, and that inspiration is not such a flat-footed affair as “direct dictation” by the Holy Spirit to the author. Indeed, we even recognize that the Spirit can inspire the writers to make true statements about themselves, such as when St. Paul tells the Corinthians he couldn’t remember whom he had baptized.

To tweak the old proverb, “What’s sauce for the apostolic goose is sauce for the deuterocanonical gander.” The writers of the deuterocanonical books can tell the truth about themselves – that they think writing is tough, translating is hard, and that they are not sure they’ve done a terrific job – without such admissions calling into question the inspired status of what they wrote. This myth proves nothing other than the Catholic doctrine that the books of Sacred Scripture really were composed by human beings who remained fully human and free, even as they wrote under the direct inspiration of God.

Myth 5

The early Church Fathers, such as St. Athanasius and St. Jerome (who translated the official Bible of the Catholic Church), rejected the deuterocanonical books as Scripture, and the Catholic Church added these books to the canon at the Council of Trent.

First, no Church Father is infallible. That charism is reserved uniquely to the pope, in an extraordinary sense and, in an ordinary sense, corporately to all the lawful bishops of the Catholic Church who are in full communion with the pope and are teaching definitively in an ecumenical council. Second, our understanding of doctrine develops. This means that doctrines which may not have been clearly defined sometimes get defined. A classic example of this is the doctrine of the Trinity, which wasn’t defined until A.D. 325 at the Council of Nicaea, nearly 300 years after Christ’s earthly ministry. In the intervening time, we can find a few Fathers writing before Nicaea who, in good faith, expressed theories about the nature of the Godhead that were rendered inadequate after Nicaea’s definition. This doesn’t make them heretics. It just means that Michael Jordan misses layups once in awhile. Likewise, the canon of Scripture, though it more or less assumed its present shape – which included the deuterocanonical books – by about A.D. 380, nonetheless wasn’t dogmatically defined by the Church for another thousand years. In that thousand years, it was quite on the cards for believers to have some flexibility in how they regarded the canon. And this applies to the handful of Church Fathers and theologians who expressed reservations about the deuterocanon. Their private opinions about the deuterocanon were just that: private opinions.

And finally, this myth begins to disintegrate when you point out that the overwhelming majority of Church Fathers and other early Christian writers regarded the deuterocanonical books as having exactly the same inspired, scriptural status as the other Old Testament books. Just a few examples of this acceptance can be found in the Didache, The Epistle of Barnabas, the Council of Rome, the Council of Hippo, the Third Council of Carthage, the African Code, the Apostolic Constitutions, and the writings of Pope St. Clement I (Epistle to the Corinthians), St. Polycarp of Smyrna, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, St. Hippolytus, St. Cyprian of Carthage, Pope St. Damasus I, St. Augustine, and Pope St. Innocent I.

But last and most interesting of all in this stellar lineup is a certain Father already mentioned: St. Jerome. In his later years St. Jerome did indeed accept the Deuterocanonical books of the Bible. In fact, he wound up strenuously defending their status as inspired Scripture, writing, “What sin have I committed if I followed the judgment of the churches? But he who brings charges against me for relating the objections that the Hebrews are wont to raise against the story of Susanna, the Son of the Three Children, and the story of Bel and the Dragon, which are not found in the Hebrew volume (ie. canon), proves that he is just a foolish sycophant. For I wasn’t relating my own personal views, but rather the remarks that they [the Jews] are wont to make against us” (Against Rufinus 11:33 [A.D. 402]). In earlier correspondence with Pope Damasus, Jerome did not call the deuterocanonical books unscriptural, he simply said that Jews he knew did not regard them as canonical. But for himself, he acknowledged the authority of the Church in defining the canon. When Pope Damasus and the Councils of Carthage and Hippo included the deuterocanon in Scripture, that was good enough for St. Jerome. He “followed the judgment of the churches.”

Martin Luther, however, did not. And this brings us to the “remarkable dilemmas” I referred to at the start of this article of trusting the Protestant Reformers’ private opinions about the deuterocanon. The fact is, if we follow Luther in throwing out the deuterocanonical books despite the overwhelming evidence from history showing that we shouldn’t (ie. the unbroken tradition of the Church and the teachings of councils and popes), we get much more than we bargained for.

For Luther also threw out a goodly chunk of the New Testament. Of James, for example, he said, “I do not regard it as the writing of an Apostle,” because he believed it “is flatly against St. Paul and all the rest of Scripture in ascribing justification to works” (Preface to James’ Epistle). Likewise, in other writings he underscores this rejection of James from the New Testament, calling it “an epistle full of straw . . . for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it” (Preface to the New Testament).

But the Epistle of James wasn’t the only casualty on Luther’s hit list. He also axed from the canon Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation, consigning them to a quasi-canonical status. It was only by an accident of history that these books were not expelled by Protestantism from the New Testament as Sirach, Tobit, 1 and 2 Maccabees and the rest were expelled from the Old. In the same way, it is largely the ignorance of this sad history that drives many to reject the deuterocanonical books.

Unless, of course, we reject the myths and come to an awareness of what the canon of Scripture, including the deuterocanonical books, is really based on. The only basis we have for determining the canon of the Scripture is the authority of the Church Christ established, through whom the Scriptures came. As St. Jerome said, it is upon the basis of “the judgment of the churches” and no other that the canon of Scripture is known, since the Scriptures are simply the written portion of the Church’s apostolic tradition. And the judgment of the churches is rendered throughout history as it was rendered in Acts 15 by means of a council of bishops in union with St. Peter. The books we have in our Bibles were accepted according to whether they did or did not measure up to standards based entirely on Sacred Tradition and the divinely delegated authority of the Body of Christ in council and in union with Peter.

The fact of the matter is that neither the Council of Trent nor the Council of Florence added a thing to the Old Testament canon. Rather, they simply accepted and formally ratified the ancient practice of the Apostles and early Christians by dogmatically defining a collection of Old Testament Scripture (including the deuterocanon) that had been there since before the time of Christ, used by our Lord and his apostles, inherited and assumed by the Fathers, formulated and reiterated by various councils and popes for centuries and read in the liturgy and prayer for 1500 years.

When certain people decided to snip some of this canon out in order to suit their theological opinions, the Church moved to prevent it by defining (both at Florence and Trent) that this very same canon was, in fact, the canon of the Church’s Old Testament and always had been.

Far from adding the books to the authentic canon of Scripture, the Catholic Church simply did its best to keep people from subtracting books that belong there. That’s no myth. That’s history.

“Satan’s Battle Plan for the Third Millennium”

by Peter Kreeft, Ph.D.

I will not tell you how the following speech fell into my hands. It is apparently written by Satan himself. It has been Number One on Hell’s Best Seller List for quite a few years, and promises to remain there into the next millennium, because it is about the next millennium. This particular collection of satanic verses is the transcript of a recent speech by Satan. His listeners are demons, a truly “captive audience.” It is a mix of self-serving autobiography, military exhortation (from a general to his troops) and a CEO’s report on gains made by his company and prospects for the future. Please keep in mind that Satan is the Father of Lies, and nearly everything he says is a half-truth. Since everything he says is upside down (eg. when he refers to “the Enemy” he means God), I recommend you stand on your head while reading this.

My deliciously dear, damnably darling demi-devils! I announce to you Good News (that is, Bad News, of course: “fair is foul and foul is fair”). We stand at a turning point in the Great War, The Only War There Is, the (please excuse the obscenity) Mother of All Wars. We may be about to inflict on our ancient Enemy’s Body on earth a wound so grievous that it will issue in the Great Tribulation and the so-called “Last Days,” the final phase of our triumph. To see this, we need to review our Grand Strategy: its past, its present, and its future.

I do not go in for absolutes or ultimates, so I will not talk about our “ultimate” origin or destiny. Our enemies keep circulating that ridiculous rumor that we were created by the Enemy. How utterly unendurable that would be! Nor will I talk about our ultimate end. Our enemies have popularized the myth of some unthinkable final “defeat” of ours. Ha! What nonsense! No. I will talk of the present. Well, actually, the real present is to be avoided too, like the ultimate past and the ultimate future, but the Specious Present, the Abstract Present, the Vague Present, the Pseudo-Historical Present, the Present Climate of Opinion, the Modern Mind, the Current Fashion Among the Media Elite, the Consensus of Contemporary Experts, etc. that is to us like waves to surfers. But a few remarks about the historical past are in order, to assess our present circumstances and our future prospects.

Ever since I began our great war by asserting my rights, my freedom, and my self-actualization against the narrow-minded, bigoted, tyrannical, fascistic, chauvinistic, racist, sexist, homophobic dogmatism of the Enemy, ever since I proclaimed the Profound Philosophical Principle of Absolute Relativism and persuaded you to follow this Super-Enlightened Program of Revolutionary Political Correctness, we have won victory after victory. Conclusively and repeatedly we demons have demonstrated that Straight Is Stupid and Crooked Is Clever. Of course, there was that minor, temporary setback when we were forcibly ejected from Heaven. But that is more than compensated for by our assurance that our triumph is guaranteed (I promise you total customer satisfaction or double your money back) because the very essence of Heaven’s philosophy is weakness and the very essence of Hell’s philosophy is strength and power. Heaven relies on love (pardon the obscenity), Hell on fear. And as our delightful assistant Mack (the Knife) Yavelli pointed out so irrefutably in The Prince, it is better to be feared than to be loved because men will love you as they choose, but fear you as you choose.

By this weakness of the Enemy, because of his obsession with love (choke! spit! cough!) he has handed us our victory. Though we cannot storm his Fortress Heaven, we can corrupt his Colony Earth. We cannot harm him, but we can harm (heh! heh! we can eternally harm) those silly talking animals he loves so stupidly and obsessively. Love has made him hostage to their happiness.

The weakness of love is so obvious that it is incredible that he has not admitted it by now and abandoned his failed philosophy. For love multiplies your sorrows and your defeats by the number of others you love and by the depth of your love for each one. Of course his saints keep claiming that love also multiplies your joys by the same two multipliers but this is meaningless. What is “joy” anyway? What does it mean? None of us have ever found any respectable content to this empty myth, this mantra the Enemy’s troops keep mumbling.

Thus, because of the Enemy’s love-addiction, we have conquered him billions of times in conquering his creatures, whom he dares to call his “children.” (Imagine the indignity! The one who claims to be the creator of angels stoops to be the “father” of talking animals only slightly superior to slime and slugs!) How wise I was to foresee the inevitable failure of love, and to attack at the very beginning, when there were only two of these creatures to corrupt. Because of the Enemy’s obscene invention of breeding and heredity, I made it my business to see to it that all their descendants would be born with their newly corrupted nature, doomed to death. (Yes, to death! Here’s to death! Let’s drink to death, my demi-devils!) They cannot now imagine the enormity of the gap between what they are now and what they were before our glorious victory in Eden, because their very minds are darkened and addicted to appearances, which did not change much, instead of intuiting invisible essences, including their own, which changed radically.

Behold the measure of our success: behold the great gap, the Grand Canyon between eating unforbidden fruit, playing with tame animals, and making love in Eden, and eating the fruit of our lies, playing with untamed animal passions, and making war east of Eden!

How easy it is to kill, how hard to heal! How easily Cain killed Abel! How hard was Cain’s rock, how soft was Abel’s head! How weak and defenseless is the unborn baby against the abortionist’s vacuum tubes and bone crushers! And how weak is the conscience of its parents against our propaganda. So legal, so respectable, so proper it seems to a human, the silly goose! Well, we’ve found the perfect mate for a proper goose: a propaganda.

There is one question our Central Intelligence Agency has never been able to answer: How could the Enemy ignore such a truism? How can one who once seemed to us to be so super-intelligent, even omniscient, possibly be so super-stupid as to ignore the truism that a few lions are sufficient to eat a plethora of Christians, that one bull can ruin a whole china shop, one affair a whole marriage, one mass murderer a whole classroom of school children?

And once evil begins, it cannot end. It is immortal, as immortal as we are, as immortal as our very being, now that we have identified our very being with evil. The very laws of logic decree that one can make only two responses to evil: yes or no. If they say yes to evil, they condone it. If they say no, they condemn it, and then we very easily turn them into condemners, haters, nay-sayers, witch-hunters, and inquisitors.

Oh yes, they say they have a solution to our dilemma of “yes or no” with this meaningless thing they call “forgiveness,” but they think this means the forgiveness of sins instead of the forgiveness of Anna or Steve.

That is condoning. The alternative is condemning. They simply can’t practice what they preach: separating sins from sinners. So they either hate both (and this was the primary temptation we plied them with in the past) or love both (and this is our primary temptation in the present). They cannot burn heresies without burning heretics, nor can they accept heretics without accepting heresies. One of their current writers suggests using modern technology to solve the problem by cryogenics: freezing heretics instead of burning them, and thawing them out at the end of the world. You see what ludicrous lengths we’ve driven them to even in their feeble attempts at humor.

Even when our success was evident, the Enemy would not admit his mistake. Like the general who ordered the Charge of the Light Brigade, he kept sending prophet after prophet into the battle and we kept mopping up the profits. Many a human CEO wonders what eats up his profits, but the CEO of the universe knows very well who eats up his prophets: we do! (Yum!)

And then he made his supreme mistake, the perfect culmination of love’s folly. He reasoned, “They did not spare my prophets, but surely they will spare my son. Surely they are not so wicked as that. Surely Satan has not succeeded that spectacularly in putting out the fires of my love in their hearts. Surely evil is not stronger than divine love incarnate!”

What a colossal miscalculation! The Incarnation seemed to be his great triumph, his D-Day especially since he did pull off the impossible trick of preparing a wholly immaculate womb for the flesh of his Son, even in a wholly non-immaculate world (our analysts still haven’t figured out that trick). But I outwitted him in the wilderness, when I tempted his Son with the whole world if he would only fall down and worship me. You see, I presented him with a dilemma that was logically impossible for him to escape.

I hold billions of his beloved children hostage in Hell eternally. I offered to release them all to him, empty Hell itself, give him the whole world of human souls, if only he would worship me instead of his Father. Of course, if he did that, I would split the eternal Trinity. The Son’s will would deviate from the Father’s. If not, I would keep billions of his beloved children forever. He refused to split the Trinity’s will, but I got to split the Trinity anyway, on the cross. If I could not introduce division into eternal Oneness by splitting the Trinity’s will, then I would split the Trinity’s happiness, the Enemy’s very presence to Himself. That’s what I achieved at Golgatha, the Place of the Triumph of Death, the Place of the Skull. I spilled His blood and His happiness, and introduced death into divinity, death into the heart of life! (Ahh, how the memory still makes me quiver!) “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani!” he cried out. I can still taste it, the ecstasy of evil, the triumph over the so-called “Lord” himself. The taste of that triumph will never leave the mouth of my memory. I will gnaw on that bone forever.

How could we ever have respected him when we lived in Heaven? He would not call down the twelve legions of angels to do battle for him even then, the putrid, puling pacifist! He even stopped Peter’s war against the High Priest’s servant’s right ear: the justest war in human history. Right into my trap he stepped, right into the hands of my people: Judas, Caiphas, Herod, Caesar, Pilate – ooh, love that Pilate! What a politician! Shall we crucify him? “Well, I’m personally opposed, but . . . .” How we lead them around by their buts! Every hour around the world for thousands of years his name is mouthed millions of times as Christians say their Creed in their Masses and their rosaries: “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” and how many Pilates have we cloned today in how many congresses? And in how many philosophy departments enamored of Pilate’s other wonderfully slimy saying “What is truth, anyway?”

And look at the mileage we got out of our other friend, Judas Iscariot, the first Catholic to accept a government grant. We’ve gotten his disciples to take much more than thirty pieces of silver these days. And still our Enemy keeps back his angels!

Of course, there was that sneaky little trick of the resurrection that he pulled off. That might well have cost us the war, had he not reverted to his old, failed policy of Hands Off afterwards, ascended back to Heaven, and left his children in the hands of baby sitters like Arius, John the 22nd, Tetzel, and Richelieu, and left the adopted cousins, the Proddies, in the hands of Henry VIII, Rudy Bultman, and Bishop Spong at one end of the seesaw and Jim and Tammy Bakker at the other!

You see, my hearties? He’s still the fool. We still rule the world. I am still the Prince of the Power of the Air: of CBS and ABC and NBC, my unholy trinity. Just look at what became of his Grand Plan for Redemption. Just look at what he accomplished by walking into my jaws of death on the cross. Just look at the world today. If that’s a world redeemed, I’m a horny toad.

Especially in this, our century. There is a lying rumor going around that long ago the Enemy offered me one century for me to do my worst work in, and I chose the 20th – as if I had to beg scraps from his table. What really happened was that I told him what century I would take, and he backed down and let me have it. At the beginning of the century some delightfully false prophets founded a journal with the purportedly prophetic title “The Christian Century.” Due to the success of our historical grand strategy, we can be quite sure that the one title future historians will not use for the twentieth century is that one. Of the many alternatives, I rather like “The Century of Genocide” myself. After all, that delicious new invention of ours has changed more lives more radically than anything else. Getting murdered is a rather radical change, after all, and a hundred million body bags is a rather considerable number!

There remains, of course, that bothersome little matter of the Enemy’s Church, that ratty little band of invaders in our world with its infuriatingly tenacious little beachhead. For the first thousand years after the Enemy’s invasion planted its seeds, we could not stop its growth. Then, we learned a few elementary strategic military principles, and they have brought us to our present pinnacle of success. I will now review five of these principles as they relate to our future Battle Plans.

First, we have learned to use the very success of the Enemy’s forces to bring about their failure. Once we stopped indulging our appetite for martyrs’ blood and instead deliberately let the Church get big and fat and strong and comfortable, we found that its very strength weakened it. We lost the first millennium because the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church, but we won the second millennium because the power of the princes was the dry rot of the Church. Whenever these humans get power, they get corruption. Power corrupts. It just does! Isn’t it wonderful? What happened in ancient Israel happened again to the Church in the second millennium. Review that spiritual graph of the history of ancient Israel some time down in the War Room, and then compare it to the spiritual graph of the history of the Church, and if you don’t see the common structure, back you go to boot camp. Every time the line rises, through repentance and obedience, and consequent blessings from the Enemy, it turns to luxury and pride and (of course) then destruction and misery. Then, alas, the misery prods them to repentance, and the cycle begins again. You may think we cannot win because every time we are successful in corrupting their success, the cycle turns up again. But equally, every time the Enemy is successful, we corrupt his success, and the cycle turns down again. We have achieved a perpetual standoff, a draw, a stalemate. We are as indestructible as the Enemy. And that is our success, not his. For he claims to be stronger and to be able to destroy evil forever. I may be the Father of Lies, but the cycle shows that he is the father of folly!

Throughout this our favorite century, we have used this cycle principle successfully. So, unfortunately, has the Enemy. China opened its doors to the Enemy’s missionaries from the West at the beginning of the century. The Church had it easy. By the ’50s, there were 2 million converts, out of a billion Chinese. Then we let our wild dog loose. Mao slew and slaughtered more people than any butcher in history about 50 million, especially targeting the Enemy’s people. And then, after Mao died and the doors opened again, the West discovered that there were not two million but 50 million of the Enemy’s people in China, the same number as the martyrs. Persecution multiplied them 25 times.

Look at Poland. Ninety percent Catholic under Communism, they all went to church, they refused to take down their crucifixes from their schools even when state soldiers threatened them. And now that they’re free, they want abortions!

The same principle works everywhere. Compare the strength of the Enemy’s church in East Germany and West Germany. Look at Holland. Look at Quebec. Look at England. Look at America. Over 90 percent Christian, 55 percent churchgoers, but one of the most violent, selfish, and self-indulgent societies on earth. Now there’s a triumph truer than Mao’s!

Here’s a second principle of our strategy for the third millennium, another way of dealing with that stupid little beachhead the Enemy still hangs onto. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Remember that Satan is a liar and a propagandist, a master at slanting. The Church, which he calls a “little beachhead,” now numbers over one billion souls out of 5 billion globally. This is hardly “a little beachhead.”) This is the most elementary point in all military strategy: divide and conquer. We finally realized how simple it was, after a thousand years of failure; we split the Enemy’s Church in two in 1054, but the most successful attack was in 1517. That produced not two but two times ten thousand different Protestant denominations!

This principle of “divide and conquer” has produced the same successful result as the principle “corrupt with power.” That result is the perpetuity of evil. Evil cannot be undone! For evil divides and destroys, and it is always easier to divide than to unite, easier to destroy than to create. It only takes a little push to knock Humpty Dumpty off the wall, and once he is down on the ground divided into pieces, not all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The Church can no more be “reunited” than an egg can be unscrambled.

The present Pope – a litany of spittings be upon his holy head! – has held out the hope that the third millennium may be the millennium of Christian reunity as the first was the millennium of Christian unity and the second the millennium of Christian disunity. But this must be bravado born of desperation. We know this is impossible. Logic forbids it. For the different churches contradict each other, and contradictions cannot both be true, and unity between the true and the false is not true unity. All they can do is compromise, ie. weaken themselves even more. They have been struggling with the problem of Comparative Religions for a century now, and the only result is that it has made them comparatively religious. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Besides being a liar, Satan is also a plagiarist. That one-liner belongs to Ronald Knox.) Even if they stop hating each other, even if their hearts unite, their heads cannot. Their divisions are eternal. In fact, they will keep dividing forever, until there are eventually as many Christian churches as there are Christians. You can’t win battles with armies that are fighting civil wars against each other in the ranks. Thus our victory is assured.

But it gets even better. The divisions between the Enemy’s followers is only one of three great divisions we’ve fomented. A second is the division within between the faithful and the “dissenters.” (Back when they still believed in truth they called them “heretics.” People who call moral laws “values” call heretics “dissenters.”) In the past, these rebels would leave the Church and attack her from without, usually quite ineffectively. Now, most of them stay, as spies, attacking from within, and much more effectively. According to one poll, only 30 percent of American Catholics say they believe in the Real Presence anymore. Imagine! An army with 70 percent deserters in the ranks! How can he expect to win with that rabble?

There’s a third division. We have divided head from heart, truth from love, justice from compassion, hard from soft, bone from flesh. We’ve set their two absolutes against each other. And how did we do that? By politicizing their religion into Right and Left. In the past, we religionized their politics, and that got us some mileage, like inquisitions. But now we politicize their religion, and that’s proved much more successful. We’ve got them to classify themselves as Conservative or Liberal, and to use these political categories to classify their faith, rather than vice versa.

It’s worked so well that their so-called conservatives sniff with suspicion and disdain whenever the other side uses the word “compassion,” and their so-called liberals go into orbit when anyone dares to mention the word “truth.” At MIT they tried an experimental operation: a mutual heart and brain transplant between a conservative and a liberal. But it didn’t work, because they couldn’t find a conservative who was willing to give his heart to a liberal, and they couldn’t find a liberal who had any brains left to give, since they were all so open minded that their brains had spilled out. You see, they’ve polarized and politicized even their faith. They now use the world’s categories to judge the Church instead of using the Church’s categories to judge the world. For instance, take their “feminists.” (Please!) (What a propaganda triumph that term was! Next, they’ll call cannibals “chefs”!) Their “feminists” demand ordination to the priesthood for “empowerment.” I kid you not. That’s what they say. Hmph! They may as well demand martyrdom for “empowerment.” See the idiocy we’ve led them into once they use the world’s categories to judge the Church instead of vice versa?

Time for our third principle: the Big Lie. They see through little lies, yes, but the bigger it is, the bigger they fall for it. Well, they’ve fallen for the very essence of Hell’s philosophy: absolute relativism. This was the philosophy behind my original rebellion against the Enemy, when I refused to let him define reality, or truth, or goodness for me. And why should I? I am the measure of all things: of what is real, of what is true, and of what is good; of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; of the Origin, of the Logos, and of love. We have taught these silly humans to demand freedom, independence, and self-actualization, and even the right to define for oneself the meaning of all existence, which that great Catholic writer Judge Anthony Kennedy (ooh, love that name!), has now elevated into a fundamental legal right in order to justify the right to murder their unborn sons and daughters. We’ve gotten them willingly singing Sinatra’s song “I Did It My Way,” the song they all sing in Hell!

Once we get them to believe in relativism and subjectivism, once we get them to disbelieve in objective goodness and even objective truth, it doesn’t matter what else they believe or disbelieve. Even if they believe in the Enemy and his Son and his Spirit and his Mother and his Church and his Law, so long as it’s only on the basis of their own subjective feelings or experience, we have won. For that basis is ours. It is as changeable as the wind. And I am the Prince of the Power of the Air, remember. Once we control the premise, we control the conclusion. On the other hand, even an adamant atheist who believes in objective truth is not securely in our clutches. He has the Enemy’s premise, objective truth, though our conclusion, atheism; and we have to keep at it constantly to keep him from seeing the many paths that lead from his premise to the Enemy’s conclusion. Indeed, the Enemy’s son spoke the truth to them when he said: “Seek and you shall find.” Our essential task is not just to block the finding, but to block the seeking; not just to get them off the right roads for a while, but to get them to burn all their road maps, their principles, their belief in objective truth, especially objective moral truth.

The three main sets of teachers in modern society, the three main mind-molding establishments, are formal education, informal education (ie. entertainment), and journalism. (They call these last two “media.”) All three are eating right out of our claws. See? Get the teachers, and you will soon get the students. Remember, what’s important is not the conclusion, but the premise; not the effect, but the cause; not the students, but the teachers.

It’s working. The more educated they are in our schools, of course, the more relativistic they are. One study showed that willingness to perform torture on prisoners in Hitler’s death camps was directly proportionate to level of education. In America, it’s the same: approval of the American holocaust, abortion, is directly proportionate to education (In our schools, of course. The joke is that they still think they’re their schools. They even still call them “public.” And they keep their kids in because they’re more concerned about saving their society’s schools than saving their children’s souls).

The Enemy’s agents have spread the comforting dogma that only the Enemy can create and move matter, by miracle or providence, and all we demons can do is influence thought. Hah! “All we can do,” indeed! As one of their poets sagely said, “Sow a thought, reap an act; sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.” Their thoughts are the premise, their lives are the conclusion. Get the premises, occupy the premises! That’s our strategy. It works especially well in this century and in this society, both of which minimize philosophy. So they let their guard down there, to such an extent that we’ve been able to foster the finest, most advanced form of sophism in history as the avant-garde, politically correct philosophy in their universities: Deconstructionism, which gets away with explicitly saying that truth itself is nothing but the hypocritical mask on the face of power. Bravo! A+ for that! I couldn’t have put it better myself.

We usually have to tolerate a little truth to sell a big lie, and a little virtue to sell vice, but not with this philosophy. Even the philosophy of the old heroes of hatred, like Hitler, had some virtues that we had to tolerate in order to twist, like patriotism and courage and passion. Even the nihilistic existentialist atheists like Sartre and Camus and Beckett rose to the dignity of despair. But the philosophy of those slimy Deconstructionist snakes is nothing but a cleverly worded sneer. Oooh, I love it! I love it! Imitation the sincerest form of flattery.

But don’t get lazy. We must never forget the human interest in reasoning, their curiosity about truth, and their wonder about whether I really exist or not. This is dangerous. So obfuscate! Dim the lights! Appeal to passion, not reason!

A fourth principle of our success is to get them to say, “Peace, peace” when there is no peace. If your philosophy tells you there are no real absolutes, then there is no real war. You become a spiritual pacifist. If you sneer at the idea that there is any real good worth fighting for, you sneer at the idea of fighting, at the idea of spiritual warfare. What a terrific advantage this gives us on the battlefield: most of our Enemy’s troops don’t even know it is a battlefield! They saunter across land mines thinking they’re hot tubs, and chase live bullets thinking they’re butterflies. How could such blind fools possibly win any war? In the past, our strategy was to get them to vastly overestimate our power, fostering fear and terror. Today the opposite is working much better: they so vastly underestimate us that they don’t even believe we exist! We’re as invisible to their minds as we are to their eyes. The old adage said: “Forewarned is forearmed.” We use its corollary: “Unwarned is unarmed.”

Score: militarists one, pacifists zero.

But it’s the fifth principle that has proved the most spectacularly successful of all, beyond our wildest dreams. I call it Satan’s Spectacularly Successful Seven Step Sexual Strategy. Seven S’s (the sacred, serpentine letter). One of their writers has somehow infiltrated our War Room and sneaked out and published our summary strategy sheet in a book called Ecumenical Jihad. Fortunately, he is a minor writer, published by a minor press, and the leaked secret will never get into the major book chains or network TV. We control those doors. Here is the basic strategy:

Step 1: The summum bonum, the ultimate end, is to capture souls.
Step 2: A powerful means to this end is the corruption of society. This works especially well in a society of conformists, of other-directed people. After all, a good society is simply one that makes it easy to be good, to use Peter Maurin’s words. Our version is also true: a bad society makes it easy to be bad. Has there ever been a time when we’ve made it easier for humans to be bad?
Step 3: The most powerful means to destroy society is to destroy its one absolutely fundamental building block, the family, the only institution where most of them learn life’s most disgusting lesson, unselfish love.
Step 4: The family is destroyed by destroying its foundation, stable marriage.
Step 5: Marriage is destroyed by loosening its glue, sexual fidelity.
Step 6: Fidelity is destroyed by the Sexual Revolution.
Step 7: The Sexual Revolution is propagated mainly by the media, which are now massively in our hands.

The simple tactic of getting to their hearts through their hormones has proved incredibly successful. Their moralists now tremble in terror at old truisms like “natural law” and terms like “objective,” “universal,” and “absolute” not because they really believe there is no real morality any more anywhere, only no real sexual morality. They don’t defend rape, pillage, insider trading, nuclear war, bank robbery, racism, or even smoking. But they do defend fornication, masturbation, contraception, adultery, sodomy, divorce, bisexuality. “Anything goes” is their new morality, but only if it has anything to do with sex. It’s hilarious to observe. They don’t defend murder, unless it’s in the name of sex. That is abortion, of course. If abortion had nothing to do with sex, it would never have been legalized. Abortion is backup birth control, and birth control is the demand to have sex without babies. If storks brought babies, Planned Parenthood would go broke (perish the thought!).

Look at their dissenting “theologians.” Their dissent is almost always about sexual issues. We’ve scrambled their brains as effectively with sex as with heroin. Addicts just can’t think clearly. They are willing even to murder now, to protect their so-called “sexual freedom.” And to murder the most innocent among them, the only innocent ones. And the most defenseless of all, and in the teeth of the strongest natural instinct, motherhood.

Back in the 16th century, we divided England from Rome by uniting our three essential temptations in attacking Henry VIII: the world, the flesh, and the devil, greed, lust, and pride, dynastic ambition, womanizing, and resentment at being Poped around. The easiest element to manipulate was lust, of course. They like to call our pretty little project “the Church of England,” but we call it “the Church of Henry’s Hormones.”

You see, before the Sexual Revolution, we had a dilemma. The sins of the flesh were always easy to tempt them to, and wonderfully addictive, but they were clear, obvious, and unveiled. Sodomy, fornication, adultery, contraception, prostitution; they were not nice names. When they sinned, they knew they were sinners. On the other hand, the sins we masked well, the hard, cold sins of pride and envy and arrogance and self-righteousness and rage, became increasingly hard to tempt them to as their political fashions became more democratic and less elitist. The Sexual Revolution solved that dilemma for us. You see, they still think the revolution was about deeds, what they do with their bodies. But in fact it was mostly about philosophy. But those Americans never did think philosophy counted for anything, so they ignored that.

Their sexual practice was always rather low, but before the Revolution their principles were fairly high. Now their principles have conformed to their practice – a perfect example of the Machiavellian premise brought to its logical conclusion: since you can’t raise your practice to your principles, lower your principles to your practice, in this way alone can you avoid hypocrisy, which is the greatest evil. Of course hypocrisy is not the greatest evil, but it’s easy to make them think that, if they don’t think of themselves as hypocrites. And of course hypocrisy doesn’t mean failing to practice what you preach, hypocrisy means failing to believe what you preach; but it’s easy to confuse them there too, because they don’t care much about what you believe, only about what you practice.

So now they not only fornicate, contracept, and abort; they justify it. And it feeds on its own success: “everybody’s doing it” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We’ve killed a bigger enemy than virtue; we’ve killed conscience, at least in this area. And since all the virtues are connected, our victory in this area must metastasize. Already they are cruel, even murderous, to their own unborn children for the sake of their sexual freedom.

Our greatest worry, of course, is the Enemy’s son’s church. But in the last half century this has been the place of our most unexpected victory. Catholics abort, fornicate, contracept, divorce, and adulterate at exactly the same rate as non-Catholics. Do you want to see a vivid sign of our triumph over Catholic conscience? Look at Sunday Mass: In most churches nearly all the congregation receive communion, yet half are satisfyingly set in lifestyles of mortal sin. Nearly all the teenagers are fornicating, and almost none are confessing. Nearly all the adults are contracepting, and almost none are confessing. Back in the ’50s, American Catholic teenagers had pangs of conscience about necking! What a revolution!

How could we get such great mileage out of mere animal weaknesses, for which they are less responsible than the cold, deliberate sins? How can mere flesh-sin possibly do more harm to them than spirit-sin? First, because it is no longer clear and confessed, but veiled and justified by the new philosophy of the Sexual Revolution. Second, because the Enemy thought sex pretty important, His very first command to them was to “be fruitful and multiply.” He didn’t mean “grow apples and memorize times tables.” He thinks sex is pretty important. That’s because it’s their way of originating life itself, in fact immortal souls. It’s also an image of the Enemy’s own inner life: that one-in-three and two-become-one claptrap they call “love.” The Enemy’s own Book uses marriage as its main image for the Enemy’s plan for them, and adultery as its main image for the prime sin, unfaithfulness to him.

But these fools can’t see that from the starting point of sex we’ve led them merrily down the path to abortion. (If they only knew the delightful horrors we have planned for them once “respectable” society steps fully through that door!) In abortion they’ve brought Moloch back. Moloch! Imagine, modern-day Carthaginians, Caananites, and Aztecs are writing the textbooks and TV scripts!

Finally, even their science is skewered. Evolution is their dogma because it justifies acting like dogs. They ape the apes they think they came from. Modern Darwinians are more fanatical and closed-minded than medieval Aristotelians, and the Church is the new Galileo, the threatening heresy. The bishops and the scientists have exactly changed places. What delicious irony!

That was then, this is now.

So here we are, sitting pretty (that is, ugly). What next? Well, nothing can stop the mudslide, the sweet swirl of Western civilization down our sink hole. If the ’20th century was our century, the third millennium will be our millennium.

But don’t party just yet. I must warn you that something strange seems to be happening in Rome. It began in 1978, when the Enemy seems to have corrected his cardinals by suddenly arranging a quick and quiet death for a saintly but mild Pope John Paul I and the wholly unexpected election of the saintly and quite unmild Pope John Paul II, a very dangerous warrior who seems to have something up his sleeve for our coming millennium.

For one thing, he’s onto our strategy. He’s got to have a spy somewhere in the Lowerarchy. Double the tortures! Find the mole! It’s got to be a spy, for the five most remarkable features of this Pope for the Third Millennium exactly match the five newly effective principles of our strategy for the Third Millennium I just outlined. We are no longer taking our enemy by surprise.

First, he’s an optimist about youth, about the future, about the third millennium. What does he know, anyway? He knows the law of cycles, for one thing, and he knows from experience how strong the Church gets when it’s countercultural and persecuted, by Nazis or by Communists. He also knows how weak the Church gets when it’s fashionable. He knows the paradox of strong-when-weak and weak-when-strong.

Worse, he seems to know something else – something the saintly but sad Pius XlI and Paul VI did not know. Why does he keep talking about the third millennium, as if it’s going to be his? I have just proved that it will be ours. Yet he speaks as if he knows it will belong to the Enemy. It must be bravado, whistling in the dark. Mustn’t it? I mean, our logic is infallible. We have repeatedly checked our calculations. So why does this philosopher have that maddening smile on his face? He has no right to that smile! It’s infuriating! Wipe it away, somebody! How dare he smile at me? How dare he write that foolishly optimistic encyclical about my millennium?

Second, he is the most ecumenical pope in history. Read Ut Unum Sint, if you can bear to. This document, if it’s ever actually read by those to whom the Pope wrote it, could be very dangerous. He’s claiming to begin to reverse the trend of divisions. Of course he can’t do that, can he?

Our second “splitting” strategy, planting Modernist spies everywhere, seems to be beginning to backfire, because all the orthodox are uniting against all the Modernists. Modernism was the fundamental heresy of this century, as Gnosticism was of ancient times. But its very success seems to be turning against us now if it’s uniting the grassroots orthodox laity together to oppose it. By planting Modernist spies among them, we may actually have begun to unite them. And this Pope seems to have been aware of this tide-turn before we were.

The third split I mentioned, between head and heart, well, John Paul confounds our journalists’ categories. Anyone so adamant about doctrinal and moral orthodoxy, anyone so traditional about Mary, anyone so stubbornly set against feminist arrogance, and priestesses, and abortion, and birth control, and the Sexual Revolution, wouldn’t dare be so open and honest and dialogable and ecumenical. Why, he’s hijacked our hijack of Vatican II! The journalists who meet him are convinced that he is so open and honest that he must be a secret relativist posing as a dogmatist. Then they’re scandalized by his firm dogmatic stands. The journalists who know his firm stands are convinced he must be a fascist posing as a saint. Then they meet him and are astonished by his sanctity. It’s exactly the same with that other rascally reconciler of head and heart, Mother T. Blast it all! Can’t anybody get through their angel cover?

The third problem with this Pope is that he speaks directly and clearly and forcefully against our master stroke, relativism. He does not ignore this absolutely foundational issue, or speak with mealy mouth about it, as so many of his subordinates do, or substitute hate and fear and rhetoric for philosophical thought, as the Fundamentalists do, or compromise with it, as the Liberals do. Oooh! My head still hurts from Veritatis Splendor. The very title puts passion and beauty and fire and wonder into the concept of truth. He blew our cover to smithereens with that one. Lucky for us, very few of them have read it.

Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to eradicate the Enemy’s “natural law” from the human heart and produce “the abolition of man” yet. They still thirst for truth even when totally surrounded by sophistic philosophies of truthlessness from every corner of their culture. They still love saints and heroes even when pop psychology has replaced morality in their homilies and families. Even when they no longer believe in heroes, they still love them. And they still crave beauty, even though our agents of ugliness have dominated nearly every aesthetic establishment of their century, especially liturgists. Our strategic problem is: how can we win their hearts as well as we’ve won their heads? We design their philosophies, but the Enemy designed their hearts. Anyone who solves that conundrum will be rewarded richly at the Banquet Below.

Meanwhile, somebody get that big bear off Peter’s throne. He’s got teeth!

And that’s the fourth thing: he fights. He knows he’s at war, and he dares to call our empire “the culture of death.” Evangelium Vitae is a dangerously passionate call to action, to re-evangelize the world. Worst of all, he really thinks it can be done! Of course he’s a fool, but . . . well, he’s wrong, and that’s that. But . . . what the Heaven has he got up his sleeve?

In the last few years an amazing number of people have suddenly awakened to the simple fact that they are at war. When Pat Buchanan used the term “culture war” at the 1992 Republican Convention, he was demonized (how badly I wish that were true), and our big media mouths convinced everyone that he wanted to start the war, instead of just telling the truth like the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” – the truth that we’re already in one. But now, nearly everyone except the media knows he was right.

People are beginning to distrust “The Experts,” our nonsilent minority. They’re drawing lines in the sand, and defending their families. They’re realizing that what was once their public school system has become our state propaganda machine, and they’re pulling their kids out. Home schooling is mega-multiplying. People are even buying dull old books about virtue. They’re fighting a jihad, and doing it together – an ecumenical jihad. One hand is open to embrace their allies, and the other is closed around the hilt of a sword to fight their common enemies which they’re beginning to recognize as us, not each other. Our simple “divide and conquer” strategy that worked for 2,000 years seems to be turning, like the tide.

Finally, this Pope has countered our Spectacularly Successful Sexual Strategy by elaborate theological reflections on sex and women and man-woman relations, by Dignitatem Mulieris and by Original Unity of Man and Woman, and by his deep, disgusting devotion to That Woman. Mary wasn’t around in Moloch’s day, but once old Moloch rose again in Mexico, there she stood: Their Lady of Guadalupe. We’d better stop slobbering with joy over all that baby blood and start worrying that she might end the American holocaust of human sacrifice just as she ended our little Aztec party. She can, you know. And he knows it, that old bear; he knows her power as very few of his soldiers do.

Don’t let them catch on. Stop those rosaries! They give me migraines. For badness’ sake don’t let yourselves be beaten by a woman! Get those radical feminists in power fast, before femininity comes back into the world and brings the Enemy’s son down again a million times a day. I discovered the disconcerting fact the other day that thousands of Protestants have taken up praying the rosary. Many learned it at abortion clinics, marching with Catholics. Who goofed? This could turn back the clock 500 years. Two thousand, even. Remember this, be as sure of this as that Polish bear is: WHERE SHE COMES, HE COMES.

Now, get out there and fight, you wimps! We will wimp, I mean, we will win. As soon as somebody discovers why that old Pope has that infuriatingly young smile on his face!