A DEVIL OF A TIME: I just read an article about a new college course that the Vatican offers to Roman Catholic priests regarding exorcism and the devil. The Roman Pontifical Academy recently set up this course in response to the big “devil problem” they’re having over in Italy. A lot of kids have been tuning in to “Satanism” there lately. This new interest in Beelzebub supposedly encouraged the stabbing death of a 19 year old girl in Italy a few years ago. The accused are all members of a metal band called “The Beasts of Satan”, and they allegedly believed the girl to have been the next Virgin Mary.

Hello, what millennium is this? Have we zoomed back to 1005 AD? Have we traded the legacy of the Enlightenment for a return to the Dark Ages? I agree that Satan worship amidst the young isn’t a good thing, especially if it leads the metal-gothic crowd to start acting out their bizarre fantasies. But I mostly blame the Catholic Church for keeping the idea of Satan alive and well for all these centuries.

When, may I ask, is the “BIG C” church going to grow up? Pope John Paul II still gives sermons denouncing the devil as “a cosmic liar and murderer”. But it’s clear that the Church also lies and maybe even murders (e.g., through its regressive policies regarding AIDS prevention, and through its homophobic attitudes). So, can you really blame a disturbed kid who sees hypocrisy under the cross and thus runs to what the Church deems to be its polar opposite?

Not that things here in the good old USA are all that peachy either. Our recent presidential election showed that old-time religion is alive and well, and that plenty of people toy with the notion of trading our rights and our individual freedoms for a righteous kingdom. OK, folks, so Locke and Rousseau and Jefferson and the rest of the Enlightenment crowd didn’t bring us Heaven on Earth. Sure, the ideals of science and rationality don’t fulfill every human need; there’s still a dark and mysterious corner of the mind and the soul that needs to be reckoned with. There’s still a deep need for art, for prayer, for song, and for a pathway to the eternal.

But at least the Enlightenment (when truly enlightened) offers a way to acknowledge and explore those needs in a respectful and civilized fashion. The Catholic Church, along with its fundamentalist imitators, never made peace with the Enlightenment (which admittedly inspired the very shabby treatment of religious types in the 18th Century, e.g. during the French Revolution). Today, the Lord Jesus people finally have the philosophes and the libertines on the ropes, only to find that the Church’s own worst nightmares have arisen in their place. Hey, the followers of Freud were able to show that in the end, a nightmare is just a dream. What happens when the Freudians are gone and the Satanic nightmares become real once more? Can all the exorcists in the world make you sleep well at night?

I’m still looking for a magnetic bow for my car that says “SAVE THE ENLIGHTEMENT”. As with democracy, the Enlightenment is a faulty ideal; but the others are so much worse.