An Apology to Lucifer

by Sean P. Haley

The Abyss of Hell. It was Botticelli’s illustration of Hell to accompany Dante’s Inferno.

Giordano Bruno, the Renaissance mystic who was burned alive as a heretic in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori during the Inquisition. Bruno was a provocative subject for historians, undoubtedly from a Catholic perspective. Bruno believed the universe was infinite and populated by many worlds. He thought the sun was just one of an endless number of independently moving heavenly bodies, and he was the first man to state stars seen at night were identical to the Sun. Bruno also agreed with Copernicus that the Earth moved.

Thomas began to realize his belief in the faith had faded and become obscured behind the scholarship. It is a razor’s edge which all of us walk. We have no proof of existence beyond this life, we must have faith. But faith is the first thing challenged when confronted with the supernatural.

However, fighting evil is about sin and atonement; it is not about fighting actual evil in the form of invisible beings that can possess and wreck a life. Evil is a tool the Church needs to keep the whole mechanism running and granting political and social power to a small and exclusive group of men in Rome. Without evil, there is little reason for the existence of the Church.

good school and perhaps, head off to graduate studies. A

mind is a terrible thing to waste, especially when it’s spent on superstition and trivial aspects of some bygone meaning.

“Father Kennedy did not see his work as religious; I don’t know if you know that or not. He saw the tools he used as religious, but that was only due to the prevailing course in the Western World. I viewed him more as a shaman or witch doctor, dealing with evil. He could have been using a clamshell and a string of beads from the South Pacific, as far as I could tell. He fought evil with goodness, not faith.” David paused. He had never put it into words ...

When translated from its original Hebrew into English, the word shedim literally translates into the word demon.”