Don Amorth: in Medjugorje Satan cannot prevent God's plans

The question is asked frequently and is stimulated by the messages of Our Lady of Medjugorje, who often said expressly: Satan wants to prevent my plans ... Satan is strong and wants to upset God's plans. Lately, we cannot hide it, we have had all a great disappointment, due to the cancellation of the Pope's trip to Sarajevo. We fully understand the reasons: the Holy Father did not want to expose the immense crowd that would gather to the dangers of armed aggression; we also add the contingencies that could have been created if the crowd had panicked. But the disappointment was there, and great. First of all for the Pope himself, who cared so much about this peace journey; then for the populations that awaited it. But, we cannot deny it, our hope had been fueled by the message of August 25, 1994, in which Our Lady joined us in prayer for the gift of the presence of my beloved son in your homeland. And he continued: I pray and intercede with my Son Jesus to make the dream come true that your fathers had. (If the dream of the fathers refers to the Croats, it was realized with the Pope's trip to Zagreb -ndr-) Possible that the prayers of Maria SS, united with ours, did they not have an effect? Could it be that his intercession was disregarded? I believe that in order to reply we must proceed in reading that same message: Satan is strong and wants to destroy hope ... But in short, what can Satan do? The devil has two limits to his power, very precise. The first is given by the will of God, which leaves no one the guide of history, even if it implements it respecting the freedom it has given us. The second is the consensus of man: Satan can do nothing if man opposes him; today it has so much strength because it is men who consent, listen to his voice, as the progenitors already did.

To be clearer, let's bring some closer examples. When I commit a sin, I surely break God's will for me; for the devil it is a victory, but it is a victory obtained through my fault, by my consent to an act contrary to the divine will. Even in great historical events the same thing happens. We think of wars, we think of persecutions against Christians, of genocides; think of the mass atrocities carried out by Hitler, Stalin, Mao ...

Human consent has always given the upper hand to the devil over the will of God, which is a will for peace and not for affliction (Jer 29,11). And God does not intervene; wait up. As in the parable of the good wheat and the tares, God waits for the harvest time: then he will give everyone what he deserves. But isn't all this a defeat of God's plans? No; it is the way in which God's plans are carried out, in respect of free will. Even when it seems to win, the devil is always defeated. The clearest example is offered to us by the sacrifice of the Son of God: there is no doubt that the devil worked with all his strength to reach the crucifixion of Christ: he obtained the consent of Judas, the Sanhedrin, Pilate ... And then? What he believed was his victory was his decisive defeat. God's plans unfailingly come true, in the broad lines of history, which is history of salvation. But the ways followed are not what we think (My ways are not your ways, the Bible warns us -Is 55,8). God's plan is carried out in respect for the freedom that God has given us. And it is with our personal responsibility that we can make God's plan fail in us, his will that everyone be saved and nobody perish (1 Tim 2,4). Therefore I will pay the consequences, even if the plan of God, started with the creation, will infallibly reach its purpose.