The previous posts are specifically connected to St. Louis De Montfort’s book, True Devotion to Mary. Well I’m going to do something a little different in this one. I ended the last post by saying that in the following one I’m going to talk about what the devil is currently doing to attack Mary’s children and how we can best arm ourselves for battle. I’ll continue with the True Devotion/Louis De Montfort series in an upcoming post, but I thought this might be a good point to temporarily change direction.
Back in 2017, I learned that the first abortion ever performed by Planned Parenthood took place in 1924, in my hometown of Syracuse, NY. I made that discovery purely by accident, which led me to an article from a Syracuse, NY publication about Planned Parenthood celebrating its 90th anniversary in 2014. The article included a timeline, beginning with Margaret Sanger opening the first abortion clinic in 1916, in Brooklyn, NY. So apparently, several years after that first abortion clinic opened in Brooklyn, NY, Planned Parenthood was “born” only minutes from the hospital where I was born and the house where I lived. Not only that, but I also read that Planned Parenthood Center of Syracuse became the first free-standing abortion clinic in the nation, one day after New York State legalized abortion on July 1, 1970. Also, our house on Dorothy Street was located four minutes from the Syracuse Chapter of American Birth Control League’s (ABCL) clinic at 486 James Street. Dr. Edward Van Duyn opened that clinic in his home in 1933. If you read through the timeline in the article, you will see the various name changes the clinic went through. You will also notice the prominent role Syracuse played in all of this.
Here is the article, and I encourage you to take a look:
Planned Parenthood Marks 90 Years of Service to Community
It’s bad enough that abortion is everywhere, but what are the odds that it started practically in my own backyard? Those of you who may remember my old blog, The Rosary Trail, from several years ago may also remember the struggles I was having and continue to have to this day regarding demonic harassment in and around my home. Many of the occurrences have either subsided or completely gone away, but some continue to bother me.
Mysterious Malaise
In 1970, around the same time as New York State legalized abortion and the Planned Parenthood Center of Syracuse, located at 1130 East Genesee Street, became the first free-standing abortion clinic in the nation, I started having supernatural visions and visitations. It’s probably just a strange coincidence that our house on Dorothy Street was a five-minute drive from the Planned Parenthood clinic, but given the nature of the inexplicable events that began to occur and their odd timing, I can’t help but wonder if there may possibly have been a connection.
I started writing a memoir about my childhood experiences from 1970 and on, and for now I have the basic outline completed, along with sections of chapters that I haven’t yet fully organized into a manuscript. I’ll share part of that here, just to give you an idea of some of the things that I witnessed. These are a few notes from my book outline:
In 1970 I was visited multiple times by a UFO. We were living in Central New York in a country town called Marcellus. Our closest neighbor, Farmer Brown, lived a cornfield away. One night I had somehow found myself in our yard. The darkness was illuminated by the large bright object that was several feet in front of me. It cast a pale yellowish glow on the grass by my feet. I stood and watched as several people, who looked almost like light gray shadows, were going in and out of the side of the object. No one spoke, and no one seemed to notice me. Mom and Daddy were nowhere in sight.
I was five years old when I saw a large black cat in my bedroom one night. We were living in DeWitt, a suburb of Syracuse, having moved there in the late fall of 1970. As I was drifting off to sleep, I noticed a black cat across the room, staring at me. It looked more like a panther that I’d seen in a National Geographic magazine. It was sitting upright against the red burlap-covered wall. I couldn’t make out its facial features in the dark—its head a round black shape with black nobs that might’ve been its ears, and a tail that appeared to be a few feet in length. Why was it in our bedroom?
My neighborhood in the 1970s is infested with gloom. The woman down the street loses her husband to carbon monoxide poisoning. He and another woman are found naked and dead in his car one cold winter night. Another neighbor hangs himself in his garage after coming home to his wife making out with a man in their front yard. A few streets away the neighbors have parties where they swap husbands and wives. The drug-addicted teenage boy across the street shoots himself in the head after a failed attempt at gassing himself in his garage. Drug dealers and jewelry thieves frequent the house next door, and the owner of the house threatens to shoot our dog for wandering onto his property. A street away lives our paperboy who, years later, turned out to be one of the victims at the Waco siege.
Four Tactics of the Devil
There is so much to say about this topic, but in the interest of time I have to keep it on the shorter side, so I’ll write a follow-up post and pick up where I left off. I’m going to conclude this post with some insights I heard a priest speak about a few years ago. He was giving a talk on the ways the devil can attack a person and cause significant spiritual suffering. I don’t recall the name of the priest, but I believe that it may have been Father Wolfe. As he spoke, I took notes, and this is what I wrote down:
One of the tactics of the devil is that he bites. The biting tactic causes a person to lose peace; it also causes anxiety. Obstacles are placed in the person’s path. Another tactic he uses against us is sadness. The sadness tactic causes a person to feel heaviness of heart about his/her relationship to God and prayer life. The third tactic is placing obstacles in one’s life. That tactic causes a person to feel disheartened and impedes the person’s progress. The devil puts forth suggestions as to why it’s going to be too difficult for that person to make progress in any given area. The fourth tactic is what Father calls “disquieting with false reasons” and it causes a person to find one reason after another as to why he/she is deficient.
I think it’s safe to say that at one time or another we’ve all experienced at least one of those four forms of demonic attack. Please feel free to leave a comment below if you have a story or some of your own personal insights that you’d like to share. And may I suggest praying the Rosary every day! According to Saint Padre Pio, it’s the greatest weapon of all.
2 thoughts on “Spiritual Warfare”
Thank you for sharing. Very helpful
Thank you for your story!