A point relevant to this thread - John L Allen Jr points out that Pope Francis' concern for the material welfare of the poor and his desire to free them from subjugation to demonic powers are not such an incongruous combination as many commentators seem to think:
ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/usvatican-ties-francis-deng-xiaoping-and-witchcraftEXTRACT
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In my 2009 book The Future Church, I included a section on the powerful hold that witchcraft and the occult has on the popular religious imagination across much of the world, and wrote the following lines: "It does not tax the imagination to picture a future pope from the global South issuing an encyclical presenting Jesus Christ as the definitive answer to the 'spirits of this world' ... A document from the Vatican along these lines would arguably stand a better chance of finding an audience at the global Catholic grassroots than virtually any other subject that Western theological elites might desire a future pope to address."
Flash forward to last Sunday, Nov. 17, with the first pope from the developing world delivering his usual Sunday Angelus address.
That day, Francis took the unusual step of handing out a door prize to the crowd in St. Peter's Square -- a small prayer card designed to look like a medical prescription one might pick up at a pharmacy. It carries an image of a heart, evoking the Sacred Heart of Christ, surrounded by thorns under the heading Misericordina, or "little mercy." The instructions for the prayer come in Italian, English, Polish and Spanish and are inspired by the Divine Mercy devotion of Polish St. Faustina Kowalska.
In recommending the prayer for wide use, Francis referred to the prayer as a form of spiritual medicine useful for "prevention against the false saviors, the would-be saints, [and] the magicians and the witches of the world."
The effectiveness of the cure, Francis said, is guaranteed by the words of Jesus. He asked the crowd in St. Peter's Square to spread the prayer cards "everywhere," quipping that he recommends the cure even though "the pope is not a pharmacist." (As a biographical point, the young Jorge Mario Bergoglio studied chemistry before opting for the priesthood.)
As a veteran churchman from the developing world, Francis knows that the pull of witchcraft and other occult practices is no laughing matter.
In Nigeria in 2007, an elderly woman was beheaded after being accused of placing a member of another tribe under a curse. Her murder triggered a spate of killing that left 80 dead. In the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico in 2005, a mob severely beat six people, suspecting them of casting spells. In Kokrajhar in India, five members of two families were killed in August 2006, accused of issuing curses that had caused several locals to come down with viral fever and jaundice. One elderly couple was hacked to death with machetes and spears.
In that light, offering the spiritual traditions of the church as an antidote makes perfect pastoral sense, however quaint or puzzling it might seem to a certain Western sensibility.
One of Italy's leading sociologists of religion, Massimo Introvigne, offered this take on the pope's gesture: "Bergoglio does not allow himself to be entrapped by the outdated distinction between progressives and conservatives," he said. "He's promoting the popular religiosity to which he was devoted in Argentina."
Granted, a prayer card isn't quite the encyclical I predicted four years ago. But still, given that I once forecast Joseph Ratzinger would never be elected to the papacy, I finally feel like I got something right.
A footnote: The prayer cards were recommended to Francis by Polish Archbishop Konrad Krajewski, a former official in the Master of Ceremonies office who was recently named the Papal Almoner, responsible for the pontiff's personal charitable initiatives. Francis picked Krajewski in part because of his reputation for strolling the Via della Conciliazione at night after work, making sure the homeless people who take shelter along the broad street leading up to St. Peter's Square were OK.
It's a further reminder that only to a secular Western mind would taking care of the poor and fighting spiritual battles against witchcraft seem an odd combination. For Francis and the kind of people he wants around him, they go together like peaches and cream because they both speak to the real concerns of ordinary people all over the world.
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BTW while we are on the subject of radical evil, and just to make clear this is not confined to the Third World, if there was ever a clearer example of someone doing the utmost evil apparently just because he could and because transgression for its own sake gave him a sense of power than Ian Watkins, the Welsh rockstar who has just pleaded guilty to abominable crimes (I won't go into details - you can find them on the website) it fails to come to mind. Just a reminder of what "non serviam" really comes to in the end.
I might add that there is a certain resemblance to some of the worse cases of clerical abuse (which often involved appeal to the occult) and that those, too, were clearly driven by the desire for power through amorality rather than being produced by clerical celibacy as a certain type of analysis would have it.