ROME — Pope Francis said Sunday that Satan is a spirit of negativity, one who promotes “gossip and idle chatter” to drive people apart.
Bitterness, pessimism, and negativity “never come from the Holy Spirit,” the pontiff declared during his homily at Mass for the feast of Pentecost. “They come from evil, which is at home with negativity.”
The devil often uses this strategy; he “stokes impatience and self-pity, and with self-pity the need to blame others for all our problems,” he said. He “makes us edgy, suspicious, querulous.”
“Complaining is the language of the evil spirit; he wants to make you complain, to be gloomy, to put on a funeral face,” he continued. “The Holy Spirit on the other hand urges us never to lose heart and always to start over again.”
“Envy is the door through which the evil spirit enters,” Francis asserted. “The Bible tells us this: by the envy of the devil, evil entered the world. So never be envious!”
While the Holy Spirit leads us to love, concretely, in the here and now, the evil one “encourages gossip and idle chatter,” he said. “Idle chatter is a nasty habit; it destroys a person’s identity.”
The Holy Spirit “is practical, he is not an idealist,” the pope insisted. “He wants us to concentrate on the here and now, because the time and place in which we find ourselves are themselves grace filled.”
“The spirit of evil, however, would pull us away from the here and now, and put us somewhere else,” he said. “Often he anchors us to the past: to our regrets, our nostalgia, our disappointments. Or else he points us to the future, fueling our fears, illusions and false hopes.”
The worldly spirit “drives us to concentrate on our own problems and interests, on our need to appear relevant, on our strenuous defense of the nation or group to which we belong,” Francis stated.
“That is not the way of the Holy Spirit. He invites to forget ourselves and to open our hearts to all. In that way, he makes the Church grow young,” he said.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.