The Lernean Hydra: Enemy Number Two

The Second Enemy is Like unto the First. The Passions are Satan's most effective tool against our minds and hearts; they cloud our perceptions, so that we are not even sure what is real. They place us inside the cloud, so we forget that there even IS a real. And they grow back, crucify them ever so strongly and freshly. They must be cauterized with their own poisons, which means that we have to feel the hurt of their venom and apply them to our most cherished illusions. All is mortal, all must end, all changes, all but God. It is painful to think upon, but the tears from that struggle are future strength. Pray God that you face the Lernean Hydra, but not without the peace that flows from both joy and contentment.

At the level of the Church, the Hydra is heresy and error, which leads to apostasy. At the level of Society, the Hydra is error or ersatz religion, which always threatens to whelm organic growth. One might say, the State, in our day? The Hydra is a cancer, and it devours all that it feasts upon. Passions, heresy, the mega-State.....they offer us, at first, escape from our individuality and personhood, our discipline. They offer to initiate us in the multiplicity of delusion. And they consume.

A challenge to the modern Hyper-Calvinists and Meta-Protestant peoples of the world, the "new men without chests": http://www.catholicism.org/clement-maria-hofbauer.html

"Almost as a postscript to the heavenly warning issued at Fatima in 1917, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, two years later, reviewed the three Great Evils of the latter times, noting: "In 1517, the Protestants rebelled against the Church; in 1717, the Freemasons rebelled against Christ; and, in 1917, the Communists rebelled against God." In a single sentence the Polish martyr had exposed common origin and natural succession of each of these Apocalyptic nightmares."