Humans (3rd Revised Edition), Volume Three: The Demoniac: The Untold Story of Adam and Eve and their Descendants

A virtuous but rather naïve member of St. Augustine's seminary brotherhood has a class assignment to turn in a thesis on "Original Virtue". But he has a runaway imagination, and easily gets snared into serving in a very strange role, namely the role of scribe to none other than Satan. Misled by the practice in Rome that has one of the cardinals (the Promoter of the Faith) play the role of the so-called advocatus diaboli (Latin for Devil's advocate) in order to argue against the canonization of the candidate for sainthood, he falls for the temptation to employ the devil as his mouthpiece for expounding on the doctrines of the church. He imagines that if he succeeds in doing that, he will effectively make Lucifer who is also known as Beelzebub work for the salvation of souls instead of their damnation. And, incredibly, the seminarian appears to succeed in tricking the Evil One into working against his own interests and helping him craft a thesis that looks like a definite winner! Satan sets out to advocate for the damnation of all but those souls that lead the most heroic lives, like Mother Theresa and Josephine Bakhita, the Sudanese human trafficking survivor who ended up as a cloistered nun in Italy. The devil brags about how he derailed the father and mother of mankind, and it soon begins to dawn on the student that it is the Evil One who is using him instead of the other way round. Using the free platform provided by the unwitting seminarian, the devil indicates gleefully that he is in total control, and that his evil plan to consign everyone, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, the luckless student himself included, to hell is on track! And that former "Angel of Light" and also "Father of Lies" succeeds in ensuring that humans are on the road to perdition by pulling off the most unlikely hat trick of all, namely shining as much light on truth as possible so that humans (who are already inclined to sin) don't have any excuse at all when their time of reckoning comes - or so he leads the seminarian to believe! Predictably the devil also brags that he is more knowledgeable in matters of theology than all the doctors of the church combined! And as he goes about shining light on the "Truth", the devil seems quite happy to use this opportunity to show the world that he does not just profess the Catholic faith, but he is actually more Catholic than the Catholics themselves! In an expansive, record shattering homily on the battle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil, Satan paints the picture of descendants of Adam and Eve who are inclined to sin as a consequence of the fall from grace of the first man and the first woman, and won't give a second thought (albeit with a little help from the Adversary himself) about turning the house of the Deliverer's Father, that (according to the Catechism) encompasses the "Sancta Ecclesia" and the "people of God" (CCC 781-797), into a place of commerce! But the devil knows what he is up against, namely the Deliverer and those saints who just go marching into the Divine Banquet Hall for the Marriage Feast of the Lamb. Before long the student himself starts to see limitless possibilities of benefitting from the scheme, and dreams about riding on the cocktails of Diabolos and achieving fortune and fame by converting the "winning" thesis into a mega-selling blockbuster! While the devil is quite happy with that mutual arrangement and wants to see the student succeed, because disseminating "Truth" in whichever way now serves his purposes very well from one angle, from a different angle, because as the Father of Lies he is being coerced to act against his nature and sees it as punishment, all this now puts the student's eternal salvation in the greatest peril because of his central role in it.