At Easter we are asked, as we renew our baptismal promises, whether we renounce Satan: we dutifully reply: “I do.” During the rest of the Church’s year, mentions of Satan at Mass are few and far between – although he appears quite often in St Mark’s Gospel – but perhaps we would benefit from paying more attention to what Jesus Himself tells us about Satan’s role in the universe.
This may help us towards better answers to two troubling questions. First, why, if God is omnipotent, does He permit evil – not only moral evil, but also the evil of physical pain? And secondly, in the light of modern scientific discoveries, no one would sensibly claim that Genesis is to be understood as a science manual giving a literal account of Creation. How, therefore, are we to understand its teaching on the Fall?
