Christmas is the day God permanently and eternally perfected mankind, in and through his son, Jesus Christ.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

520     In all of his life Jesus presents himself as our model. He is “the perfect man”, who invites us to become his disciples and follow him. In humbling himself, he has given us an example to imitate, through his prayer he draws us to pray, and by his poverty he calls us to accept freely the privation and persecutions that may come our way.

521     Christ enables us to live in him all that he himself lived, and he lives it in us. “By his Incarnation, he, the Son of God, has in a certain way united himself with each man.” We are called only to become one with him, for he enables us as the members of his Body to share in what he lived for us in his flesh as our model:

We must continue to accomplish in ourselves the stages of Jesus’ life and his mysteries and often to beg him to perfect and realize them in us and in his whole Church… For it is the plan of the Son of God to make us and the whole Church partake in his mysteries and to extend them to and continue them in us and in his whole Church. This is his plan for fulfilling his mysteries in us.

In a nutshell: How divine redemption works.

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Series of four inspirational articles about Heaven isn’t quite Catholic, but pretty close.

New Heaven and New Earth united (Part 1)

Heaven a secret? (Part 2)

Heaven — God’s home and man’s destiny (Part 3)

Heaven — we were made for planet earth (Part 4)

Angels and Demons in the lives of the saints

The existence of the Angels and Demons is a truth of faith: these are beings created by God, as is attested in the Dogmatic Constitution, “De Fide Cattolica” of the Fourth Lateran Council (November 30, 1215): “We firmly believe and openly confess that the true God is one alone#133;. that He is the only source of the universe, the creator of all things visible and invisible, spiritual and material. With His all-powerful force He – from the very beginning of time – created from nothing both orders of creatures: the spiritual and the material, namely, Angels and the earthly world. Then he created human beings as sharers, as it were, of both one and the other, composed of body and soul. In fact, the Devil and the Demons were created by God naturally good, but on their own they transformed themselves into wicked beings. Then man sinned through the instigation of the Demon.”

The sin of the fallen Angels is worse than that of man because their spiritual perfections, the knowledge of their Angelic intellect, their freedom and closeness to God were greater. By rejecting the truth about God with an act of his own free will, Satan becomes “the cosmic liar” and “the father of lies.” (See Jn 8:4). The French writer, Charles Baudelaire used to say that the most insidious cunning of Satan consists in persuading us that he doesn’t exist. John Paul II used to say that Satan “lives in a radical and irreversible negation of God and tries to impose on creation, on the other beings created in the image of God, and in particular on human beings, his tragic ‘Lie about the Good,’ which is God.”

In certain situations God “permits” the Devil to “torment” people but does not allow the Devil to try them beyond their strength. In fact, we know by faith that God is always able to draw from this “evil” an even greater good because, with His grace, the heart is purified by trial and faith becomes stronger. In the stories of these Saints we can see that the Devil generally works with temptation, deceit and deception. This topic has to do also with us because the Demons have always tried to ensnare men and women with a thousand acts of cunning. However, we know that Jesus Christ has – once and for all – conquered Satan, smashing the power of the evil spirit: “Have faith in me, for I have conquered the world,” the Lord tells us (Jn 16:33). “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which is immovable; which forever stands” (Ps 125).

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