In an age of dissent, few people think of Catholic dogmatic theology as a source of consolation, but that is because of spiritual blindness and not because Catholic tradition is not brilliantly luminous through the Holy Spirit.

The Fourth Lateran Council categorically declared that evil has not existed from the beginning but that everything evil has temporal limits and arises from the free choice of creatures [D428]. There is no absolute evil. All evil is finite. Evil is not a positive reality but the lack of a a due good in a being created good by God, a being whose entire goodness can never be completely taken away.
Even Satan is a creature, INFINITELY distant from God. Unlike a Manichean god, Satan is not the equal of God in being or in power or in any other way. He is utterly dependent on God for his continued miserable existence at each moment. If it wasn’t for the indefectibility of His will to evil by virtue of being a fallen angel, we could even pray for Him. Alas, we cannot because he is incapable of repentance.

Contrary to Manichean portrayals of the devil in films like “the Exorcist” and the “Amityville Horror,” Satan and his angels are not and have never been a match for God. Contrary to appearances, Satan did not beat God in Auschwitz and Dachau and Treblinka. The innocent little Jewish girl clutching her teddy bear as she was led into the terror of the Nazi gas chamber is still alive with God. The uncountable victims of abortion, a number reaching almost a billion, are with God. Few people realize how large the number ‘one billion’ is. It would take a human being 40 years to count to a billion!

None of the innocents killed by abortion escaped God’s notice. He notices the fall of the seemingly insignificant and dull-colored sparrows. So He notices the fall of his own beloved children whose hairs He was numbered and counted.

None of this is said to minimize evil. There is an old Jewish saying that when Cain killed Abel, he murdered not only Abel but all the descendents of Abel down to the thousandth generation: half the human race! Well, for every child murdered by abortion, all the descendents of those children are aborted down to the last generation. Billions multiplied by billions, billions of times and every abortion aborts the very will of God. But the Prince of this world cannot ultimately destroy them, for they are with God, the God Who will right all wrongs at the Last Judgement.

Therefore, we must be joyful in the Lord, always and not give in to despair. As Christians, we are both those who are joyful in the Lord and those who mourn. And these two are not contradictory.