The Power of Baptism!

2 Corinthians 10:4

For the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds.

Joseph Stalin once sneered, “How many divisions does the Pope have?”  He was a materialist and supremely confident that the only real things in the world were power, steel, and death.  He presided over an ideology that once held a third of the world’s population in its thrall.  He is now dust and the empire he dominated fell down in a heap less than 40 years after he went to face his Maker with the blood of tens of millions on his hands.  (“One death is a tragedy,” he had once said, “a million deaths is a statistic.”) As he breathed his last, a certain Polish priest a few hundred miles to the west of Stalin was engaged in a long, slow and stubborn process of refusing to regard himself or any human person as a statistic.  He was also refusing to adopt the Western European and American faith that the cure for communist materialism was hedonistic materialism, that the atheistic vacuum of the East could be filled by the spiritual emptiness of the West, or that the Soviet worship of centralized power could be healed by the American worship of individualistic selfishness.  In short, the priest (who became Pope John Paul II) held fast to the truth that we do not fight hell fire with hell fire but that we quench it — with the waters of baptism.  The devil always presents us with two bad options.  Reject them both and receive only what Jesus gives.

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Mark P. Shea is a popular Catholic writer and speaker. The author of numerous books, his most recent work is The Work of Mercy (Servant) and The Heart of Catholic Prayer (Our Sunday Visitor). Mark contributes numerous articles to many magazines, including his popular column “Connecting the Dots” for the National Catholic Register. Mark is known nationally for his one minute “Words of Encouragement” on Catholic radio. He also maintains the Catholic and Enjoying It blog and regularly blogs for National Catholic Register. He lives in Washington state with his wife, Janet, and their four sons.

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