Dear Editor, In the autumn 1944, the Western allies had the deluded idea that the Wehrmacht was beaten and that it was only a force of old men and children. What shocked them with their defeat at Arnhem in September 1944, and the Ardennes attack two months later, was the transformation of a supposedly defeated enemy into one that had the audacity not only to inflict one defeat, but to come within a whisker of inflicting another.
So it is with the paraphernalia of the occult (‘Don’t meddle with ‘dark side’ – warning’ IC 04/12/2014).
Many, including clergy, view the devil as a Halloween joke figure that is harmless. Take for example the questioning of parents/godparents at Baptism, when asked the first baptismal promise to reject the devil and his works etc.
In my experience one is faced either by silence or a muffled laugh or a barely audible response to the positive! This together with a continual attractiveness to occult matters and at the same time indifference to faith shows that we are leaving ourselves open to a spiritual naivety, on a par of that with which the British and Americans viewed the likelihood of the Germans ability to mount offensive operations in late 1944.
Yours etc.,
Fr John McCallion,
Clonoe, Co. Tyrone.