: If Satan can’t get us to leave the Church, he doesn’t stop there. He has other tactics up his sleeve to divide us from Jesus Christ. We must be vigilant against his wiles as they can wreak havoc in our lives and others’. 1/8

1. Lukewarm faith: Satan loves to get people to put their faith on the bottom rung of the ladder of life’s priorities so he can distract them with other worldly concerns: money, fame, success, power, sex, etc. 2/8

2. Pride: If Satan can’t get us through pride to leave the Church he’ll try to get us to divide ourselves from the Body of Christ through prideful divisiveness and dismissiveness of those we refuse to love in the charity of truth. 3/8

3. Exaggerated or Anti-Intellectualism: Satan loves when we reduce the faith to ideas so we can lord our knowledge over others. Or the reverse, when we refuse to purify our faith of irrationality, believing merely what confirms our opinions, fears, & sinful inclinations. 4/8

4. Disdain for Legitimate Authority: Satan loves to set people against the Church’s unifying hierarchy and her magisterial teaching. He strives to convince us that our conscience need not be formed by authority and that we possess special knowledge that others don’t. 5/8

5. Division through Objectification: Satan is the prince of division and he loves to sow it in our hearts by getting us to obsess over the failures & sins of others, people made in the image and likeness of God who become mere objects for us to lob in ideological fights. 6/8

In all these tactics, and the method is really immaterial, Satan’s goal is to separate us from Jesus—from his people, from his Church, from his fervor, from his humility, and from his Heart. 7/8

Satan hates nothing more than for us to have a real, intimate, transformative, prayer/sacrament-based relationship with Jesus Christ because that powerfully informs and transforms lives, especially our attitudes toward others & our relationship with the Body of Christ. 8/8