Pope Leo XIV has asked us as Catholics to pray the Rosary daily for peace throughout the month of October. The Holy Father is not alone in singling out the Rosary as our path to peace – yet we should not impose our own presuppositions on what this path entails. Indeed, our Lord offers us peace – though not as the world gives. The world, for its part, often gives peace under intolerable conditions and even then only sparingly. Where, then, is this true peace from the Lord that we seek?
Reflecting on the pope’s call through liturgy from these past days can yield some challenging paradoxes – and profitable insights. Monday’s first Scriptural reading for the Feast of the Holy Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael included the following:
War broke out in heaven;
Michael and his angels battled against the dragon.
The dragon and its angels fought back,
but they did not prevail.
How are we to understand this? What does it mean, to say that war broke out in heaven?
In a homily on this chapter of the Book of Revelations, Pope Benedict XVI, drawing on St. Augustine, preached of “a struggle between two loves: love of God to the point of losing oneself, of total self-giving, and love of oneself to the point of despising God, of hating others.” The Church and the Scriptures teach of the fall of the angels; this is not new to us.
We cannot know the details of such a war. We do know that the fall of the angels was occasioned by sin – meaning that whatever the meaning intended in the passage above, the “heaven” cited was a place where sin remained a threat. While the outcome could never have been in doubt, given God’s omnipotence, the victory of the angels – resisting evil, overcoming sin – was more than empty ritual. The moral and spiritual victory of Michael and the holy angels over the demons was somehow real in its own right.
Yet save for the holiness, humility, and fidelity of the angels, this victory should not be taken as a model for us. First of all, any temptation to a cinematic rendering, with lightning bolts flying and shining armor flashing among the clouds – or, by the same token, eager recourse to self-styled visionaries and celebrity exorcists – at once sensationalizes and trivializes spiritual warfare. This is, after all, the Catholic Church and not the Marvel Cinematic Universe. More seriously, the choice of the angels for sin or grace, heaven or hell, is unlike our own in a critical respect: all the angels, holy or fallen, being pure spirits free from temporal change, chose as they chose irrevocably and experience within themselves no division.
…which is most emphatically not the case with us. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously put it in The Gulag Archipelago,
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.[1]
And thus we have war – war among ourselves and war within ourselves. The “red dragon” that St. John saw in the Roman Empire and that Benedict identified in the “great dictatorships of the last century” is concealed in the “consumerism, selfishness, and entertainment” that have nested in our own hearts – and now, since Benedict’s time, seems to be hatching again into a veritable brood of brutal new dictatorships and bloody new wars.
How can we bring peace to the internecine strife in which we all live? Leo offers the Rosary – often cited in pious discourse as the “ultimate weapon of spiritual warfare.” Taken soberly and in the appropriate spirit, this is entirely correct. Yet again we must avoid any temptation to drama. Reason, prudence, and humility demand that we reject any tendency to self-dramatization or self-focus that would make us the protagonists of wars against the powers of Hell – when, in truth, we are far more the battleground.
Consider that Solzhenitsyn reiterated the quote above in different versions throughout The Gulag Archipelago; another, lesser-known citation reads as follows:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Though Solzhenitsyn was no Catholic, his words here should truly set us flying to the Rosary – for there is only one Immaculate Heart. Of all human persons, there is only one heart is whole and pure – and that heart is pierced by a sword. When our Lord offers us not peace, but a sword, it is not an excuse to swing swords – whether self-righteously at human enemies or foolhardily at the powers of Hell – but to accept them into our hearts, as we witness the sufferings of Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and of every other war of every type that wounds the loving hearts of Jesus and Mary. Our Lady of the Rosary, our Lady of Victory, has shown us the way to the victory of peace.
And with that victory comes so much else besides. In De Veritate, St. Thomas writes that our desires coming to rest in the good and peace and the beautiful, does not mean that they are resting in different things. For while we in our finitude apprehend these blessings differently, they are in truth all one.
One further path to understanding what the Holy Father has requested: Today begins October, the month of the Rosary, the month of prayer for peace on earth that Pope Leo has requested. Today is also the Memorial of St. Thérèse of Lisieux – the saint of the Little Way. Perhaps as we pray our Rosaries, we can come to understand that our shining weapons against evil are not terrible swift swords of vengeance, but tiny pins, pins that we pick up for love of God.
Image: From Anna (Kropekk_pl) on Pixabay
[1] One might add that in our lived experience the line changes from moment to moment; it is not for nothing that our Lord admonishes us to “be watchful and alert.”
Dr. Paul Chu is currently a philosophy instructor for CTState, the Connecticut Community College, and has previously taught philosophy in college, university, and seminary settings. He also served as a staff writer and editor for various national publications. He is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport dedicated to honoring the beauty and holiness of God through artistic and intellectual creativity founded in prayer, especially Eucharistic contemplation. He contributes regularly to https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/.
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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