From Ven. Fulton Sheen radio sermon given in 1947

The anti-Christ will not be so called, otherwise he would have no followers. He will wear no red tights, nor vomit sulphur, nor carry a spear nor wave an arrowed tail as Mephistopheles in Faust.

Nowhere in Sacred Scripture do we find warrant for the popular myth of the devil as a buffoon who is dressed like the first “red.” Rather is he described as a fallen angel, and as “the Prince of this world” whose business it is to tell us that there is no other world. His logic is simple: if there is no heaven there is no hell; if there is no hell, there is no sin; if there is no sin, there is no judge, and if there is no judgement then evil is good and good is evil.

But above all these descriptions, Our Lord tells us that He will be so much like Himself, that he would deceive even the elect – and certainly no devil we have ever seen in picture books could deceive even the elect. How will he come in this new age to win followers to his religion?

• He will come disguised as the great Humanitarian; he will talk peace, prosperity, and plenty, not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves.
• He will write books on the new idea of God to suit the way people live.

[He will] induce faith in astrology so as to make not the will but the stars responsible for our sins.

• He will explain guilt away psychologically as repressed sex, make men shrink in shame if their fellowmen say they are not broadminded and liberal.

• He will identify tolerance with indifference to right and wrong.

• He will foster more divorces under the disguise that another partner is “vital.”

• He will increase love for love and decrease love for persons.

• He will invoke religion to destroy religion.

• He will even speak of Christ and say that he was the greatest man who ever lived.

• His mission, he will say, will be to liberate men from the servitudes of superstition and Fascism, which he will never define.

• In the midst of all his seeming love for humanity and his glib talk of freedom and equality, he will have one great secret which he will tell to no one; he will not believe in God. And because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect.

• He will set up a counter-Church, which will be the ape of the Church because, he the devil, is the ape of God. It will be the mystical body of the anti-Christ that will in all externals resemble the Church as the mystical body of Christ. In desperate need for God, he will induce modern man, in his loneliness and frustration, to hunger more and more for membership in his community that will give man enlargement of purpose, without any need of personal amendment and without the admission of personal guilt. These are days in which the devil has been given a particularly long rope.

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