“The Screwtape Letters” first appeared in London’s Guardian newspaper during the dark days of World War II. In 1942, the Letters were published in book form in England — dedicated to Lewis’ friend J.R.R. Tolkien. The following year, the book appeared in America to great acclaim. (Courtesy http://www.screwtape.com)

Editor’s Note: On the occasion of the Year of Faith, the following is the second in a series of “letters” from a demonic supervisor to his underling regarding a plan to dismantle a family and ruin souls, written by Mike Phelan, director of the Marriage and Respect Life Office of the Diocese of Phoenix. In this series of fictional letters, keep in mind that the letters are written by a fictional demon. Therefore his “likes” are a horror and the Enemy he refers to is God Himself. All the while, the Guardian Angels of the family are battling in ways mostly hidden both to us the readers and to the devils for the family’s strength and salvation.

My Dear Little Gluestick,

You take cues well. As I wrote in my last letter, we look this time at the affront of the human animals’ covenantal institution of marriage. You proactively sent details from early observations of the Barr marriage, only one of which was news to me, yet I nonetheless note with approval your attempt to exceed expectations.

Dis-membering a family is always an excellent first step, hence your work as a DTAD. And the key to family dismemberment is prevention or dissolution of matrimony. How so? Let us look again at the Divine founding of this human horror.

I retell here the Creation Account in the Luciferian Memoirs — Our Terrible Leader Below writes: “Nothing prepared me for the outrage of the creation of woman from the side of the Adam.

“Up until that point I was cautiously in favor of much of what He-Who-Goes-Unnamed had brought about. The Adam was alarming I will admit — this bizarre admixture of water and dirt and spiritual soul — but alone he posed little threat to spiritual excellence, and I supposed he was a sort of “toy” to the Godhead. Indeed, the man was physically impressive, perhaps an earthbound version of something like Myself — perhaps the plan (which was never, ever disclosed, even to Me) was to echo the excellence of Myself on the physical plane, I thought. But an Eve!? Equally striking, and yet quite different, complementary to the Adam. An animal-communion? A unity of bodies with spirits — and thereby a reproduction? Disgust is too weak a word to describe the prelude to my Just Spiritual Rage.

“The moments of the human Parents’ first meeting set many of my angelic comrades singing with a new and servile joy. Not I, and not all. Indeed my silence left a hole in the melody noticed immediately on High. But the song grew in strength and self-forgetfulness, and the trees of the garden, and the wind and the birds and insects and beasts and the whole dirt-driven display returned a volley of notes, and the man and woman themselves showed naïve but Vocal skill and added an unheard-of strain…

“… then, in a moment burned on my Dark and Powerful Mind, began the Dance. And the woman and man moved together, and their dance mirrored the music and affected it as well, and the whole creation — Angels too!! — fit the music to the movement of the man and woman. They were not toys but somehow beloved of the Godhead, somehow given a free share — beasts given a share! — in the harmony of the world. And I had but one recourse. The music would be not stop. I waited. When the unendurable moment was over, a grave silence fell. The man and woman slept. And my voice, absent from the music but now tuned to the fullness of its beauty-clothed-in-rage, was heard. “No! I will not share the harmony with beasts! Non Serviam!”

Hence the Great War began. Gluestick, my serf, you will recall that my own rise to this position of demonic prominence followed my lecture Stop the Dance: The Threat of Matrimony and the Demonic Task. Stop the dance. This is our objective in the attack on every marriage.

Your notes indicate in the Barr marriage much of what is already known to us. The marriage is sacramental — those demons formerly charged with preventing this grace-laden consent have been, er, given other assignments. (One, Slipknot, nearly as well-regarded once as yourself is now un-named Slippers, and serves neatly in warming my own “feet.” FYI.) The sacramentality of their union is an obstacle, but not an impossible barrier by any means.

Husband Barr comes from a lifelong marriage, though his father was reserved and somewhat alcoholic. Passivity is in your male project’s bones, much to our advantage. Wife Barr is the childhood product of divorce, a lightly neurotic if not un-virtuous woman with the nagging sense that all could fall apart at any moment. This we knew. But the news you share of his new potential friendship with a real-believing Catholic Christian man of the parish is not lightly received. Get that relationship off track immediately.

Persevere at your post. Stop the dance. Get-In-Between. The orchestration of our temptation-plan of Husband Barr is our subject for next time.

LameWorm

“The Screwtape Letters” first appeared in London’s Guardian newspaper during the dark days of World War II. In 1942, the Letters were published in book form in England — dedicated to Lewis’ friend J.R.R. Tolkien. The following year, the book appeared in America to great acclaim. (Courtesy http://www.screwtape.com)

Editor’s Note: On the occasion of the Year of Faith, the following is the second in a series of “letters” from a demonic supervisor to his underling regarding a plan to dismantle a family and ruin souls, written by Mike Phelan, director of the Marriage and Respect Life Office of the Diocese of Phoenix. In this series of fictional letters, keep in mind that the letters are written by a fictional demon. Therefore his “likes” are a horror and the Enemy he refers to is God Himself. All the while, the Guardian Angels of the family are battling in ways mostly hidden both to us the readers and to the devils for the family’s strength and salvation.

My Friend, Gluestick,

Your first month with the Barr family, hidden in the shadows of the kitchen junk drawer (an excellent choice of observing posts — the stomach-driven animals spend so much time there), has been a moderately successful start. You might make a middling Domestic Temptation Anti-choir Director (DTAD) yet, if your Disastermas Morning initial report was accurate.

Thanks to some apparent coordination on your part, the Barrs find themselves entering the New Year in greater financial debt than ever before. One of the few benefits to us of this whole giving extravaganza each December is that the little moles overspend with regularity. While it takes some time to understand fully — we demons have no need of cash — the delightful anxiety that financial problems and economic concerns cause can be of great service. A spouse or parent in debt has a chain around his neck that drags his eyes downward, from heaven to earth, right where we want them.

Let us recover some basics of your homebound task of temptation. The review here may seem pedantic to you; you assume that all must have been covered in your initial debrief — let me assure you that we mentor-devils find that the fundamentals of our soul-capturing efforts cannot be repeated often enough. This is especially the case with you younger devils, if I may add, who have the attention span of houseflies. And NO, you may not TEXT me your future reports!

Your new work of temptation is tricky, but most rewarding upon success. The dismantling of a human family, which greatly aids (never guarantees — the family is a means to an end, both for Us and for Them) the ultimate damnation of as many of the members as possible, you will see, proves remarkably slippery. Look closely from your position in the kitchen. When the family is together — indeed, strangely, “when two or more are present” — do you not see the nearly impossible cobweb linking them all? It is a web of rooted affection, unlike any other source of natural comfort the humans have. You not only must gain intimate knowledge of the personalities, strengths and weaknesses of each family member, but you must take account of each thread of this web — you will particularly notice, if the family has any health at all, the seeming tangle emanating from the wife/mother to her husband and to each child in a hundred places. What a tangled web family love weaves! But this seems to be our Enemy’s plan.

I will never forget my own first family temptation assignment. The complexity of the linking cables nearly drove me to despair. It was patient work, but both spouses have joined the eternal wailing throng, and the children seem readily on their way to our House Below. A DTAD that proves himself worthy must become an orchestra conductor of the first rate, each of your underling tempters must be a violinist on these “relational cords”.

Your enemies in the home, the assigned Guardian Angels of each family member, do not lack for cleverness or assistance from Him directly. (It is not fair play!) The Guardian Angels seek to build a harmony on the relational chords between the members, and even following our discordant victories with sin, even when a key thread between husband and wife seems ready to break(!), we can lose due to the problem of forgiveness, an awful musical chord that can drive a devil mad.

That will wait for next time, when my counsel focuses on our main obstacle to victory over every family, the abomination of marriage.

LameWorm

“The Screwtape Letters” first appeared in London’s Guardian newspaper during the dark days of World War II. In 1942, the Letters were published in book form in England — dedicated to Lewis’ friend J.R.R. Tolkien. The following year, the book appeared in America to great acclaim. (Courtesy http://www.screwtape.com)

Editor’s Note: On the occasion of the Year of Faith, the following is the first in series of “letters” from a demonic supervisor to his underling regarding a plan to dismantle a family and ruin souls, written by Mike Phelan, director of the Marriage and Respect Life Office of the Diocese of Phoenix. It is not an original idea, but a variation on a theme begun by the great C.S. Lewis in his classic satirical book, “The Screwtape Letters.” If this series succeeds in getting more Catholics reading that book, it will have done what the author had hoped.

Lewis’s book observes the temptation of a single individual soul in World War II London. This short series observes the temptation of a “typical” Catholic family in our own nation, in our own time, in fact during the Year of Faith called for by our Holy Father. It is not the picture of any one concrete living family, but rather a fictional glimpse of 21^st century Catholic home realities in the land of the wannabe-free and the homes of the wish-we-were-brave.

Keep in mind that the letters are written by a fictional demon. Therefore his “likes” are a horror and the Enemy he refers to is God Himself. All the while, the Guardian Angels of the family are battling in ways mostly hidden both to us the readers and to the devils for the family’s strength and salvation.

My Friend Thorn,

Welcome to your new assignment in the Family Temptation Special Unit Forces (FTSUF). In analyzing your file (letter by letter, you will find I miss nothing), I am both cautiously optimistic and deeply concerned with your recent record. Tempter’s Academy named you Uberdaemon upon graduation and your natural gifts are not commonly paralleled outside the inner circle of Our Father Below. And yet, the flaws are glaring.

How you, the young prince of simmering hope, talented but naïve, were given such a Christian to tempt in her final days is beyond me. The bottom line remains: you lost. Your loss is ours. How sweet it might have been to savor a potential saint’s fury at He-who-goes-unnamed, her final despair which seemed all too ready to burst just days before her death. She, who had been so close to her Master, was on the verge of “curse God and die.” But you couldn’t resist, could you? You simply had to drive the nail in the coffin by a foolish frontal appearance, devilish grin and all. And there, near final victory over a truly tasty human soul, at the foot of the disorienting hospital bed, she glimpsed with horror (not with the vampiric-victim lust you’d hoped) the disparity between your malice and His mercy. She laughed aloud at the clarity! All was undone. The patient work of your betters bitterly wasted.

I carefully noted as well your intake form, containing a level of disgust at the mediocrity of the new assignment both in general, the concept of Familial Temptation, and in particular, the trudging lowpoint of this particular small herd of human animals. Beneath you, are they? What threat do they pose, you ask?

Foolish questions. It is not with exaggerated fear that the Lowerarchy has always regarded the human family and especially the disgusting affront of matrimony. We are the Special Forces for good reason. In the family, our demonic hosts find a snaggle of defenses which frustrated our methods at every turn. Not only do the Guardian Angels assigned to each member seek incessantly to strengthen the bonds among the wretches, but any natural inclination toward charity, forgiveness, affection and stubbornly sticky virtue education done there seems to be nearly irremovable. We find the most natural instance of soul-defense given to the talking beasts right here, in the home. Your work of directing the anti-choir of assigned tempter-devils at this home is of great import, and, I may remind you, of great consequence for yourself if you fail.

This Year of Faith called for by the Church — I mention Her once here for sake of clarity and will try not to curse in future correspondence — seems to have Our Father Below, er, energetically concerned. Not that they tell me everything — and not that I’m complaining! But they have assigned me you and specified the target, an unusual circumstance. Oh, and equally unusual, they have recognized my authority to un-name; yes, your dignified title of “Thorn” recognized in the horrid Scriptures themselves is to be replaced by one of my making. Get used to your new name: its domesticity, its humiliation, its mission-in-a-nutshell effect. I HEREBY UNNAME YOU THORN, AND NAME YOU GLUESTICK. Get thee into the deepest shadow of the family craft closet, and stay hidden and alert. I look for your first report by Disaster-mas morning, the twenty-fifth.

Oh, and while I will save the non-filed details from the spouses’ families-of-origin, much of which work in our favor, this was missed: both families associated this repugnant Incarnational season with happiness and even fell into some joy, a happy memory for both husband and wife. This is to be undermined. Get to work on that now. Encouraging thoughts of shopping in the place of shalom is a good place to begin.

Your “Friend,”

LameWorm

Rain drops are seen on a figurine of an angel at a makeshift memorial to the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Conn., Dec. 17. The small Connecticut town shattered by an act President Barack Obama called “unconscionable ev il,” was preparing for the first of 20 funerals for schoolchildren massacred in their classrooms last week. (CNS photo/Mike Segar, Reuters)

What can we even say about December’s massacre in Newtown, Conn.? Adam Lanza murdered his mother, forced his way into a school, and killed 20 children and six adults before killing himself. The slaughter was especially frightening and sad because it involved so many little children and the adults protecting them.

There was a depressing familiarity to it. In less than two years we have seen a lot of similar incidents:

• Jared Lee Loughner killed six people and wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords outside a grocery store in Tucson, Ariz.
• One L. Goh shot seven people at Oikos University in Oakland, Calif.
• James Holmes killed 12 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.
• Wade Michael Page killed six people at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee.
• Jacob Tyler Roberts killed two people at a mall in Portland, Ore.

These recent massacres call to mind earlier killings at Virginia Tech, Columbine High School and a dozen other places. The frequency of the crimes almost suggests a kind of Werther effect — the name we give to suicide contagion caused by public attention to the phenomenon.

We were still praying for the children and their parents when the media began airing the debate about how to keep this from happening again. This too has a familiar air about it. We always turn to the government and the psychiatric profession for solutions.

Some say the government should ban handguns or semi-automatic weapons. I’d be in favor of that. And it might make a dent in the killings. But it wouldn’t make a big difference.

Federal law forbids people Lanza’s age (20) from buying handguns from dealers. (He used his mother’s guns.) Federal law also forbids guns within 1,000 feet of a school. To make shootings impossible — not just illegal — we would need a system of controls that would surpass the most dystopian regulatory fantasy.

Some say we should do a better job at identifying and treating mental illness. We should. The shooters almost always are young men and often mentally ill. More often than not they kill themselves at the end of their rampages. But there are a lot of sullen, withdrawn and awkward young men out there.

For our psychiatric safety net to catch the potential shooters, it would have to scoop up thousands of ordinary guys who are just struggling to get through adolescence or the trials of young adulthood. And what would we do with them once we rounded them up?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t pursue those ideas. But I think we won’t make real headway with the problem unless we change the culture, and that is a job for us, not for the government or the psychiatric profession.

The culture that young men grow up in is one where violence is not just present but glamorized. At the national and corporate levels we see unjust wars and the arms trade. At the state level, capital punishment. At the individual level we give constitutional protection to abortion, to video games that simulate assault and murder, and in some places to assisted suicide.

We teach our children that they are autonomous moral actors, responsible for defining their values. This produces a culture where the strong decide the fate of the weak. Then when something like this happens we want the government to protect us from the natural consequences of our own folly.

When Cain killed Abel, he tried to deflect the Lord’s inquiry by suggesting that we are each in charge of our own affairs: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We have to relearn Cain’s lesson. Yes, I am my brother’s keeper. All life is sacred. We must teach our children habits of virtue, not leave them to chart their own course through the moral life. The Werther effect can work both ways.

- – -

— By John Garvey, president of The Catholic University of America in Washington.

I don’t know about you, but I love the word “rebate.”

Remember “Cash for Clunkers”?

Yes, it’s always better when you get your money back.

Here in Arizona, we have a couple community-serving tax credit programs that effectively work the same way: the Private Education Tax Credit that supports our Catholic schools, and the Charitable Tax Credit, which helps our Catholic charitable-service organizations.

Don’t be afraid of the term “tax credit.” In fact, instead of getting lost in technical tax jargon, just think of these two tax credit programs as “personal rebates” for you to apply toward a cause of your choosing.

Do you value Catholic schools over, say, a myriad of nebulous government programs with untold costs? How about taking a “rebate” of up to $2,006 for Catholic Education Arizona, and direct your tax dollars to be invested to help low-income students, right in your own ZIP code?

Would you prefer your state taxes go to serving needy individuals in our community? Why not take a “rebate” of up to $400 for our diocesan Catholic charitable organizations such as St. Vincent de Paul, Catholic Charities, and Foundation for Senior Living?

Or better still, why not do both!

Really, these options sound so much better than paying taxes, don’t they?

Of course, the benefit of taking these “rebates” is only realized when taxpayers know how to take advantage of tax credits.

So to help Catholics learn how to direct their “rebates” to deserving education and charitable organizations in our diocese, Catholic Education Arizona has created a “must-have” product for your end-of-year tax-related planning: “The 1-2-3 Guide to Arizona Tax Credits,” and it’s available as a free PDF download at www.TakeTheCredit.org.

The new tax credit guide makes the complex simple (think of the “rebate” example above) and shows how Catholics can — and should — take advantage of Arizona’s unique tax credit laws that allow you to choose Catholic education and charitable giving in lieu of paying state taxes.

The “1-2-3 Guide to Arizona Tax Credits” provides answers to commonly asked questions:

• “How does giving through a tax credit cost me ZERO dollars out of pocket?”
• “What if I get a refund? Can I still participate in these tax credit programs?” (Yes, surprisingly you can — and the clear explanation is in the guide)
• “What’s the difference between a tax credit and a tax deduction?” (there’s a HUGE difference, so if you pay taxes, you’ll definitely want to read the answer in the Guide.)

We’re all very busy trying to be good, faithful Catholics and followers of Jesus: Who really has time for all this tax stuff? It’s easier to just accept the whole “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s” bit and move on. Taxes are just an unavoidable reality of life here on earth, right?

Well, it’s true that most people would rather get a root canal — or plan their own funeral — than discuss or even think about taxes.

But in Arizona, unlike death, taxes are actually NOT an unavoidable reality.

To help you navigate this likely unfamiliar terrain (the world of “What? I don’t have to pay taxes?”), you just need something simple, straightforward, and “plug-and-play.”

You just need the “The 1-2-3 Guide to Arizona Tax Credits.”

With Dec. 31 fast approaching, you owe it to yourself and the charities you could support to get online and download your free PDF copy today.

Who knows? By taking just a few minutes to look over the guide, and get answers to the most commonly asked questions, you could be opening up a whole new chapter in your autobiography on charitable giving.

So don’t delay. Visit www.TakeTheCredit.org today and discover how taking advantage of these tax credits is a smart year-end giving strategy that will make your hard-earned dollars go further — and make quite a positive impact on deserving families in your community.

Talk about being a good, faithful Catholic.

Something tells me Jesus wouldn’t object to “giving to God what is God’s” …and what is Caesar’s, too.