Taking blame

By Tony Staley
Compass Editor

There's a tendency in our world to either deny the existence of Satan - the devil - or to blame him for everything wrong.

Church teaching affirms the existence of the devil, who the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes as a fallen angel, the seductive voice that lures our first parents into sin out of envy (#391).

The power of Satan is not infinite, the Catechism says, "although his actions may cause grave injuries - of a spiritual nature and, indirectly, even of a physical nature - to each man and society" (#395).

By the same token, not everything that goes wrong should be blamed on Satan - as neatly summed up in the classic line of Flip Wilson: "The devil made me do it."

An interesting take on Satan can be found in My Name Is Red (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001) by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Muslim writer who won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature.

In one part of the book, Pamuk uses the voice of Satan to denounce those who deny his existence: "... I was not the one who planted such absurdities into the heads of these dimwits; they came up with it all by themselves."

Pamuk's Satan goes on to say: "I am not the source of all the evil and sin in the world. Many people sin out of their own blind ambition, lust, lack of willpower, baseness, and most often, out of their own idiocy without any instigation, deception or temptation on my part.... I am not the one who tempts every fruit monger who craftily foists rotten apples upon his customers, every child who tells a lie, every fawning sycophant..." (My Name Is Red, p. 289).

Yes, we need to respect the existence of the devil and what he seeks to do, but we also need to take responsibility for our own weaknesses, failures and faults. Even those times when the temptation does come from the devil, we are the ones who decided to go along with it.

As Christians we believe that while the world fell into sin, it "has been set free by Christ, crucified and risen to break the power of the evil one..." (Catechism, #421).

Our sins are forgiven through the sacrament of Reconciliation, wherein we also gain "an increase of spiritual strength for the Christian battle" (Catechism, #1496).