Does anyone still believe in the devil?

Karl Keating writes that the devil is real, not holdover from scary bedtime stories . . .

Karl Keating

The Catholic Church teaches that the devil is real, not a phantasm or a holdover from scary bedtime stories. In 1975, the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship issued a document called Christian Faith and Demonology. It quotes Pope Paul VI: “It is a departure from the picture provided by biblical and Church teaching to refuse to acknowledge the devil’s existence.”

If someone tells you something different, he does so from his own mind, not from the mind of the Church. Maybe the devil makes him do it! At the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the bishops defined that “the devil and other evil spirits were created good in nature, but became evil by their own actions.”

At baptism, adult candidates are asked to renounce Satan and all his empty promises. The Church even has an official rite of exorcism — which would be unnecessary if demons didn’t exist. If this doesn’t convince you, consider what Scripture reports Jesus said and did (Mt 4:1-11, 12:22-30; Mk 1:34; Lk 10:18, 22:31; Jn 8:44).

Our Lord certainly believed in demons, and so did his early followers, the Fathers of the Church. They were very clear on the matter. At the end of the second century, Irenaeus wrote that the devil is “an apostate angel” who tries to “darken the hearts of those who would serve him.” Writing about the same time, Tertullian said “the business [of demons] is to corrupt mankind.” And a generation later, Origen noted that “ecclesiastical teaching maintains that these beings do indeed exist.”

As frightening as the devil’s efforts may be, they are not as dangerous as the demons’ more common work: temptation to apostasy and sin. “Some will turn away from the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and demonic instructions” (1 Tim 4:1).

The most frightening kind of apostasy is outright devil worship — uncommon, but becoming less so every year with the spread of modern Satanism — but generally apostasy is milder, less dramatic, yet still dangerous. Usually it manifests itself as a slow, almost imperceptible slide into a life of dull sin.

Karl Keating is the founder of Catholic Answers. This column is reprinted with permission from his book “What Catholics Really Believe — Setting the Record Straight: 52 Answers to Common Misconceptions About the Catholic Faith,” page 147 (Ignatius Press, San Francisco 1995).