The devil wears Balenciaga (first published in the Catholic Herald)

During my teens I fell in with a crowd of disaffected older youths. We skipped school and spent our days in the underpass smoking cigarettes before moving on to harder drugs. I lied to my parents and went clubbing at weekends to notorious goth clubs in the city looking like Morticia Addams. I could feel myself falling into a hole that I knew would be hard to get out of, even at the time, and I was frightened. After a vision of me in a black wedding dress and veil, my mum went to our parish priest and asked for his help. She was right to be concerned and she rightly knew the source of the threat. Looking back, it is only by the grace of God that I survived this period unscathed. At just 15 I was staggering back from clubs, through the streets of London in immodest clothing listening to Christian Death and Fields of the Nephilim, vulnerable fodder for any sinister creep looking to exploit a young woman. The creeps operated largely in the shadows, afraid of the light because when they came into the light people would recognise evil, cross the road, shield their children. Or so we thought. At the same time as I was embroiled in that which was obviously sinister a friend of mine was being abused by an upstanding member of the community; you know the type, shirt and tie, stable job, family man, the lot. We didn’t know. Her mother was not seeking help from the priest, why would she? walk on by, nothing to see here.

This week the fashion house Balenciaga have found themselves in hot water over a pervy Christmas ad that sexualises children. Quite rightly people are shocked and calling for a boycott of the brand which featured BDSM bears and battered women. Images have appeared of designer Lotta Volkova looking every bit the satanist holding blood covered babies and staring demonically down the lens.

It’s good that we are shocked by this, it’s a ‘get to the priest’ moment and protect our children, but all the while there’s the girl next door whose violation nobody notices.

If the plans of the enemy were always so overt we might be swept into action. But for every Volkova, Lil Nas and Marilyn Manson there are thousands of ordinary looking people doing ordinary day jobs, subtly, quietly, seeking to destroy our children as they write scripts for movies, create educational programmes for schools, and draft legislation that challenges the true, the good and the beautiful;

“Together our mind moulding media constitute a non-organised religion of missionaries who are evangelising religious people out of their primitive superstitions like poverty, chastity and obedience and into the missionaries new ‘enlightened’ religion of greed, lust and pride; out of peace with neighbour, self and God and into peace with the world, the flesh and the devil’ Peter Kreeft

The Balenciaga story is a frightening reminder of just how mainstream attempts to legitimise paedophilia have become, but there is something of a sleight of hand about the whole thing; what is the enemy up to whilst we’re looking at his trick? ‘Is not the deepest triumph of Satan the fact that we are not even mildly shocked at what our ancestors would have been utterly stunned by…is he not even more pleased at killing consciences than killing bodies?’ Peter Kreeft

As we rightly reel in horror at the offensive fashion house ads, 73 million babies are ripped from their mothers wombs each year, freedom to speak against this atrocity is being curtailed, governments around the world are making it easier for medics to kill the most vulnerable through a ‘kind’ programme of euthanasia, a wall is being erected between children and their parents as the state indoctrinates them with sex education based on feelings and fun not holiness and sacrifice.

We cannot hope to defeat an enemy if we do not know we are at war. The first step is to let the Balenciaga ad open our eyes to just how depraved our culture has become, and then to ready ourselves for battle. The devil is real, magnetically attractive and comes to us disguised as an ‘angel of light’ (2 Corinthians 11:14), he prowls around looking to devour (1 Peter 5:8) and loves to target women and children because it is by a woman and a child that he is defeated. There is only one solution to supernatural evil and that’s supernatural goodness. The weapon that will win this war is saints. To be a saint is not simply to be a humanly good person, it is to conform our will to the will of God, it is the humility of Mary’s fiat, and though we can be ‘nice’ without God, we cannot be holy without Him, and holiness is what will conquer evil;

‘You fast, but Satan does not eat. You labour fervently, but Satan never sleeps. The only dimension with which you can outperform Satan is by acquiring humility, for Satan has no humility’ St Moses the Black.

In 2022 we don’t like to talk about the devil. It’s not de rigueur. We’ve grown out of that sort of primitive nonsense, haven’t we? Well if our faith means anything then we take Christ seriously and He certainly took the devil seriously. The eternal souls of our children and our children’s children are at stake in this war, that’s why we must wake up and smell the corpses.