Slaying Satan near the DMZ
About a week ago, Pope Francis in an Interview concerning the Ukraine-Russia war said: “We need to move away from the usual Little Red Riding Hood pattern, in that Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad one. Something global is emerging and the elements are very much entwined.” At first, I was relieved to see the head of the Roman Catholic Church speaking common sense, trying to insert a bit of nuanced reality into the black-and-white narrative. Then I remembered that Pope Francis is head of an institution that is exemplary in peddling one of the most egregious Little Red Riding Hood stories. After all, it is founded on the assumption of a basic polarity in which the world is divided between God (good) and Satan (bad).
Reading the Pope’s comments made me think of a sculpture that sits beside a recently built Catholic church not far from where I live, which is located right next to what was once the main highway between Seoul and Pyongyang, but which today is just a minor road. Running parallel to it is a wide dual carriageway that head up towards the DMZ, and, for those with permits, continues onwards to Panmunjom about two miles away, where not so long ago President Trump met Kim Jung-un. As you can see from the photograph above, the sculpture, which is actually a plastic cast, is very realistic.
A website called ‘Religious Decor’ says the following in answer to the question why Saint Michael statues are so popular: ‘he is the greatest enemy of Satan and the fallen legions and is specifically named in the Book of Revelation to fight against Satan, descending at the end of the world, and commanding the armies of the Lord in their final struggle.’ Now, in my opinion, a violent (and, it has to be said, homoerotic) representation of a man murdering another man does not seem a very appropriate one for a church - or indeed any building - especially one located near the DMZ. I am deliberately bracketing out the Catholic iconography, and looking at it for what it actually depicts.
The statue belongs to a church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima, which has a small convent attached. It is actually a kind of bunker church, as the space is located underground. In this picture you can see the steps down to the entrance:
Entrance of Our Lady of Fatima church.
Above ground is an open area where you can do the Stations of the Cross. There are also a shrine to the first apparition, and one to Our Lady. Here they are:
Fatima, which is in Portugal, is one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations for the faithful. The first photograph above shows a re-staging of the ‘Angel of Peace’ appearing to three child-shepherds in spring 1916, and again in the summer, and a third time in the autumn. The Angel told them that heaven had “designs of mercy” and taught them to offer prayers and sacrifices. In May 1917 things started hotting up. Our Lady herself appeared to the children, in the end a total of six times, the last in October 1917, by which time a huge crowd had gathered, and weird things were reported to have happened to the sun.
In passing, I note the association of such apparitions of Our Lady with the rose, my special interest. Witnesses claimed to have seen a shower of rose petals during and after the apparitions. Annually a group of Catholic faithful in the United States named ‘America Needs Fatima’ makes it a special mission to deliver masses of roses to the site. On his pilgrimage to Fatima in 2017 Pope Francis declared: “Hail Queen. Blessed Virgin of Fatima. I implore to the world the concord between all peoples. I come like prophet and messenger to wash the feet to all, around the same table that unites us. Together with my brothers, for you, I consecrate myself to God, O Virgin of the Rosary of Fatima."
Saint Francis’ word help explain why there is a church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima near the DMZ: because the “Angel of Peace’ and Our Lady asked the children to pray for peace and for humanity to do penance to help bring it about. But ‘peace’ can have a strange way of happening. Read this, from ‘The Catholic Thing’ website, discussing the immediate aftermath of the apparitions on events in Portugal and beyond:
Historical changes began almost immediately. Physicist and theologian Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, who traveled to Portugal to undertake a thorough scientific investigation of eyewitness accounts and depositions regarding the “miracle of the sun,” observes in his book, God and the Sun at Fatima:
The day after the miracle of the sun Portugal’s history began to change in the voting booths, though at that time nobody could see the ultimate portent of this. What, one may ask, if Portugal had fallen the prey of the plans of Lenin who described Lisbon as the most atheistic capital in the world? He would not have watched Lisbon so closely, had he no designs about it. What would have happened to Spain [during the Spanish Civil War], with Portugal already in the Communist camp? And what would have become of France, ruled by a “Popular Front,” if the entire Iberian Peninsula had turned into an outpost of Moscow?
So, what is this person saying, exactly? That the apparitions at Fatima was God’s way of giving the green light to fascism?
I assume that within the Little Red Riding Hood world of Catholicism Saint Michael and Fatima converge near the DMZ to signify the destruction of the atheistic Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. For part-and-parcel of this kind of stark dualism are polarizations like this in which opposing communism leads one to embrace fascism. But as the Pope says (but surely must find difficult to enact within the institution he leads) “the elements are very much entwined.”
It is worth noting that the Russian Orthodox Church has sided with Putin, causing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to schism. The war, and the role of the Orthodox Church in condoning it, makes the implications of the following lines from the same website I quoted from above seem, to say the least, distressingly ambivalent:
Signs [of Fatima’s influence on events] in post-1989 Russia are many: Orthodox Christians number 60 million, including the president and prime minister. According a 2009 National Geographic article: ‘In 1987 there were only three monasteries in Russia; today there are 478. Then there were just two seminaries; now there are 25. Most striking is the explosion of churches, from about 2,000 in Gorbachev’s time to nearly 13,000 today.
Here, to end this post, is the uncompromising atheist Sam Harris writing in The End of Faith (2005):
Many have observed that religion, by lending meaning to human life, permits communities (at least those united under a single faith) to cohere. Historically this is true, and on this score religion is to be credited as much for wars of conquest as for feast days and brotherly love. But in its effect upon the modern world – a world already united, at least potentially, by economic, environmental, political, and epidemiological necessity – religious ideology is dangerously retrograde.
So, back to the statue of Saint Michael slaying Satan. I think it is shockingly bad taste and should be removed. How about you?
References:
Angela Giuffrida, ‘Pope Francis says Ukraine war was “perhaps somehow provoked”,’ The Guardian, Tuesday 14 June 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/14/pope-francis-ukraine-war-provoked-russian-troops
https://www.religiousartdecor.com/who-is-like-god-archangel-saint-michael-statues/
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2013/09/08/fatima-and-world-peace/