FROM Fulton J. Sheen’s Communism and the Conscience of the West, [Bobbs-Merril, Indianapolis, 1948], pp. 24-25.
Our Lord tells us that the Antichrist will be so like Him that he would deceive even the elect – and certainly no image of the devil as he has been seen in books could ever deceive even the elect.
The Antichrist will not be called that; otherwise, he would have no followers. He will not wear red tights, nor vomit sulfur, nor carry a trident, nor wave an arrow-shaped tail like Mephistopheles in Faust.
This masquerade has helped convince men that the devil does not exist. When no one recognizes him, he wields more power. God has defined himself as “I am who I am,” and the devil as “I am who I am not.”
Nowhere in Sacred Scripture do we find justification for the popular myth that the devil is a jester who primarily dresses in red. Rather, he is described as a fallen angel, as “the prince of this world,” whose mission is to tell us there is no other world. His logic is simple: if there is no heaven, there is no hell; if there is no hell, then there is no sin; if there is no sin, then there is no judge; and if there is no judgment, then evil is good and good is evil. But above all these descriptions, Our Lord tells us that he will be so like himself that he would deceive even the elect—and certainly no image of the devil seen in books could ever deceive even the elect. So how will he enter this new age to gain followers for his religion?
…he will come disguised as a great humanitarian; he will speak of peace, prosperity, and abundance not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves. . . .
. . The third temptation in which Satan tempted Christ to worship him and that all the kingdoms of the earth would be his, will become the temptation to have a new religion without a cross, a liturgy without a world to come, a religion to destroy religion, or a politics that is a religion – one that makes you give to Caesar, even the things that are God’s.
Amidst all his apparent love for humanity and his rhetoric of freedom and equality, he will have a great secret that he will tell no one: he will not believe in God. Because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, it will deceive even the elect. He will create an anti-church that will be the ape of the Church, because he, the devil, is the ape of God. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the antichrist that in all external things will resemble the mystical body of Christ.
[Quoted here]
