From Mr. Michael Brown at Spirit Daily:


There it was, in a "revelation" during an exorcism -- if we can believe revelations during exorcisms. A swarm of spirits, it was said, had been released from the abyss. It was the conclusion of one famous exorcist in Germany that "since the pontificate of Pius IX, the Church has entered into a period of severe persecutions.

"The militant Church has to suffer a twofold evil: externally, through the persecution of her enemies, and interiorly, through the corruption of her members," he said, basing his ideas on what spirits were commanded to reveal. "And since Pius IX ascended the throne, this twofold tendency is constantly increasing. The cause of this heavy burden laid upon the Church is due, according to the confessions of the demons, to the unusually strong and numerous invasion of diabolical spirits upon this earth."

Can we really believe this? Might it not just be a deceptive spirit being deceptive?
Whatever the case, Pius IX reigned from 1846 to 1878 -- a time of enhanced evil. His successor, Leo XIII, is said to have had a vision in which he heard the devil request a period of time to test the Church. Such was granted. By some accounts, it was to be a "century."
The vision and time period -- which may be metaphorical (a "century" may simply mean a long time, in spiritual jargon), it was then that Pope Leo who penned the famous -- and potent -- prayer to the Archangel Michael on October 13, 1884.

His successor, Pius X, recognized a new undercurrent of evil and issued documents calling doctrines of modernism the "synthesis of all heresies" and said he "felt a sort of terror, considering the disastrous conditions of humanity at this present hour."
During the onset of the twentieth century, he fretted that it might be "the beginning of the sorrows which must take place before the end of the world."

Meanwhile, Anne Catherine Emmerich, the famed German stigmatic, who also saw a period of special evil, once said: "I heard that Lucifer, if I am not mistaken, would again be freed for a time about fifty or sixty years before the year 2000. A number of other devils would be released somewhere earlier as a punishment and a source of temptation to sinful human beings.”

That tied to the early days of Medjugorje, in which a seer said she was informed that the devil had asked for a century, and had been given such a period of time to test the world.
Truth? Hyperbole?

Back to Pius IX.
What was it about that pontificate? Why that particular time?
A very holy man, Pius IX was born on May 13, 1792, with a childhood filled with an intense religious life and mortifications. He was especially known for his Marian and Eucharistic devotions. It is said that St. Vincent Pallotti (left) predicted he would become Pope and that the Virgin of Loreto would free him of an illness he was suffering -- which indeed occurred.
Born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, Pius was elected Pope on June 16, 1846 -- three months before the famous apparition of Mary at LaSalette (in France), where the Blessed Mother allegedly gave a secret (in addition to an officially accepted one) that mentioned that there would be corruption in the Church, that occultism would spread in convents, and that the devil would attack priests (causing them to do wickedness and "bedimming" their intelligence).
"In the year 1864, Lucifer, together with a large number of demons, will be unloosed from hell," said one LaSalette prophecy (which the Church has always keep at a distance). "They will put an end to faith little by little, even in those dedicated to God. They will blind them in such a way that, unless they are blessed with a special grace, these people will take on the spirit of the angels of hell; several religious institutions will lose all faith and will lose many souls."
"Evil books will be abundant on earth and the spirits of darkness will spread everywhere a universal slackening in all that concerns the service of God... The Church will be in eclipse, the world will be in dismay."

The year 1864 was smack in the midst of Pius IX's pontificate -- which ending as it did in 1878 was the longest in history.
He certainly did nothing wrong that raised the smoke from hell -- but it was no coincidence, one might guess, that he was placed there to battle it.

Indeed, as one biography points out: "It is astounding how fearlessly he fought, in the midst of many and severe trials, against the false liberalism which threatened to destroy the very essence of faith and religion. In his Encyclical 'Quanta Cura' of 8 December, 1864, he condemned sixteen propositions touching on errors of the age. This Encyclical was accompanied by the famous 'Syllabus errorum,' a table of eighty previously censured propositions bearing on pantheism, naturalism, rationalism, indifferentism, socialism, communism, freemasonry, and the various kinds of religious liberalism."

Beatified in September of 2000, Pius spent part of his pontificate in exile and was the one who proclaimed the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin as a dogma of the Church. Perhaps this helped spur the attack -- or blunted it.
At his insistence, the Catholic world was dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus -- and like John Paul II, who would also have a tremendously long pontificate, he presided over an unprecedented number of canonizations.

If Satan was rising from the pit, there was this saintly man to fight it, just as there was the saintly personage of John Paul when the predictions of anti-christ, beaten back for a time, rose with new furor in the twentieth century.

A war this was, and maybe it was the special popes, including Leo, who have thus far helped hold an anti-christ at bay. For that had been another prophecy from LaSalette -- rise of anti-christ (and, as we will see in the next installment, it was a notion that came from the demons as well).