A Diabolical, Nostalgic Plan

Dear Wormwood,

Your uncle is, as you know, a little—how shall we say?—distracted right now, and as I am considered something of an expert when it comes to Christians of the Catholic variety, I’ve been asked to help out a little.

I’ve looked at the files on your man, and you need to be extremely careful here. The believers on what the humans call the “left” of their church are easy. We’ve managed to convince them that salvation is to be found in social programs, liberal politics, and making jokes about conservatives. We’ve done a wonderful job in making it all about politics for them—all about the good they think they can do—and the angrier they become at those they see as their earthly enemies, the further they move away from their god. It’s very successful, and such great fun too. The joke is that they hardly change anything anyway, but the better and more pompous they feel about themselves the less humble and more strident they are, and that makes our enemy even more upset and disappointed.

Anyway, more about that and them later. You see, your little man is of the other variety, the conservatives. They’re much more tricky. They’ve seen through our propaganda campaign—“everything in the past was wrong”, “we have to change with the times”, “intelligent people don’t believe that” and so on. We’ve tried using doubt, confusion, fear, and the truly delicious “apathy” but it doesn’t work on them. So, let me suggest another approach. It’s what I like to call nostalgia. Try to make them confuse Catholicism with history, and faith with living in the past. It’s quite funny actually, and at times some of their more conservative Masses look more like auditions for a BBC costume drama than gatherings of the flock about to be fed His body and His blood.

You have to be careful though. Some of them are the strongest and most fearless of the damnable tribe, and they are there precisely for the continuity and the tradition in the best sense, the real sense, in His sense. It makes me so mad! But not all of them—oh no, no, no. Some are there because they have cultivated a mock cynicism, looking down from some moralistic pedestal of their own creation so as to spit their contempt on the ordinary Catholics below, whom they tend to dislike even more than our good, fine friends the atheists.

You will, for instance, hear them quote that swine of an enemy, G. K. Chesterton, about Catholicism preventing one from the awful fate of being a prisoner in one’s own time, blah, blah, blah. Thing is, he understood what he meant, whereas many of those who quote him do not. He was providing a reason, they are using an excuse. No, we want lethargy and old lace, we want condescension, we want obsession with form instead of obsession with results.

Have them use Latin in the same way: not so as to provide a universal language for the communication of what they call “the Gospel”, but as a way to make them feel separated from the world and slightly more important than the rest of the ignorant mob. Latin was, of course, once the language of Europe to those people who could read and write, but that’s long, long gone. So, these days we make it an absolute for them, to such an extent that it becomes not a weapon for him but a tool for us; we turn it into an anachronism. Have them dismiss the rest of their bunch who don’t use Latin as not being real and proper. Division. We love it, we relish it, we eat and drink it, we splash around in the bath of it.

Which brings me to their new leader. We’ve had “friends” in newspapers and on television for years now, and they’re relentless in their work for us. Thank Lucifer for that, because this Francis fellow can be a problem. His words are like arrows, like pepper in the eyes, but with enough effort we can distort them, or better still have them distorted. He gave a long interview in a newspaper, and we had our people in the media explain that interview to the world even before the bishops had seen the thing! I tell you Wormwood, sometimes I’d do this job for nothing, just for the fun of it. He went on and on about love, grace, confession, humility, messiah, mother of their messiah. Awful, painful muck. But then he advised them to introduce their work against the baby-killing stuff and the destruction of marriage—voted most successful campaign of the last decade in last year’s award ceremony by the way!—carefully and gradually. Oh he’s a clever one, this bloody man.

But we were quick. We immediately changed magnification—a method that we’ve used before, but it always works so well. Put one paragraph in huge letters, and minimize the rest. It worked like a treat. They’re running around like ants, which is what they are really, and some of them are questioning whether they should leave or not, looking elsewhere, in despair. Yes, division. It’s been a winner for centuries, and was one of our greatest victories in their sixteenth century. Their left wing, who I mentioned earlier, are loving it all, and are in for a delightful shock later; their conservatives, or at least some of them, think they’re in trouble. This is good, this is so, so very good.

Now, what we do next is vital. You have to aim carefully. Have them question the very authority they have relied on for so long. If you do this skillfully, their entire castle will crumble and we can walk through the ruins. I don’t mean the church itself; tragically, that’s been given to the enemy and is off limits. No, I mean the castle that is the soul of the little insects. If we do this properly, they will fall one by one. We tell them their Pope said something wrong, so they doubt their Pope, then they doubt their church, so they leave their church, their defenses have gone, and we gobble them up. You see, once they doubt the authority of their leader, the rest is easy. If the authority is wrong, the teaching might be wrong. We like the word “might”, because it leads to “must”. They wonder about their so-called sacraments, they doubt, they wander—and they’re ours.

This is a big fight, and never forget that while the style of the battles and the nature of the campaigns has changed in the past couple of thousand years, it’s still the same war. Remember this. He never surrenders. He fights for every one of them until the last moment, the very end, and he knows every trick in the book. Every time we think we’ve got him, he changes his march, finds a new way of responding and defending.

Never forget it my boy, or there will be the devil to pay. And I mean that quite literally.