“If I were the Devil…”

Liberals demand that you deny common sense and they reduce the supernatural to the natural.

Paul Harvey on 13 October 1964

[wp_youtube]VatjpiaYqPM[/wp_youtube]

The third session of Vatican II was going on when this was on air.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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22 Comments

  1. kelleyb says:

    Madonna del Soccorso pray for us.

  2. Bea says:

    WOW
    What foresight!!!
    Are we living it now, or what?
    Every Bishop, School principle, congressman and conscientious media member should hear this. (Not to mention parents who SHOULD have the ultimate say-so in teaching their children)

  3. My Lord! It sounds like the campaign strategy of the Obama Administration! Verbum sapientiam sat!

  4. keithp says:

    Well… I was 4 years old when that came out.

    You all don’t suppose that Satan was a Paul harvey fan, too? Seems like Satan could have been sitting there listening and saying, “Dang! This guys spot on! Wait… let me get a pen to write this stuff down… this is Good… I mean Bad…”

  5. mysticalrose says:

    I’ve got to be honest — I had to google Paul Harvey to figure out who he was.

  6. wmeyer says:

    Kids! I was in high school when Paul Harvey broadcast this. ;)

    Seems to me that he had it nailed.

  7. Laura98 says:

    My mom was pregnant with me when Paul Harvey spoke those words! Wow!! That’s just scary. I always enjoyed listening to him on the way to work, many years ago… but I had no idea he had been on the air so long.

    And yes, it certainly seems like we’re living it now. Maybe Satan was taking notes….

  8. HyacinthClare says:

    Every summer lunch for my WHOLE CHILDHOOD, we sat down at noon and turned on Paul Harvey on the radio. That voice just reverberates memories for me. My father thought he was the smartest man he’d ever heard. I wish he hadn’t also been a prophet. My grandfather knew him personally, and he was a guest in my grandfather’s home occasionally. I was already gone off to my sophomore year in college in October of 1964, so I probably didn’t hear this one live. In 1964, in the little town in Arkansas where I grew up, nobody would have believed it, or would have had any reason to believe it.

  9. Sissy says:

    “One of Satan’s best tricks in the Twentieth Century, is to make people believe he doesn’t exist”. C. S. Lewis

  10. tonyfernandez says:

    What was most clairvoyant was his statement: Our father, who art in Washington. I could not state that better myself. I myself see this as one of the most troubling aspects of modernity. We have replaced God with the state and have succumbed to the religion of the government. It is just ghastly to me the way people talk about governments these days as though they are omnipotent and omniscient.

    The way he talked about avoiding extremes and being moderate was also very true. No, we are not allowed to have our own opinions. Either fall in line with the majority or be castigated as an extremist! This is what is most sickening to me about our dialogue these days. Truly we are controlled by the tyranny of the media in this manner.

    Finally, I particularly was pleased by his statements about marriage and swinging. People get married so late now. People are “not ready to settle down” and “too young to get married.” This is nonsense. And our culture supports the obscenity of this single lifestyle. Being single is fine, but being single just to avoid responsibility in life is simply reproachable.

  11. Faith says:

    A fun picture of the devil is in the Minneapolis museum. http://www.imamuseum.org/art/collections/artwork/st-dominic-and-devil-pietro-della-vecchia It seems that while St. Dominic was reading, the devil disguised as a monkey started to pester him. So St. Dominic commanded him to hold the candle, while he read. The “monkey/devil” held the candle until it burned down to a stub and burned his palm. The monkey howled and jumped all over the place!

  12. jflare says:

    Ahhhhhh…. I DO miss Paul Harvey….

  13. The Cobbler says:

    Are we sure that isn’t a hoax — Paul Harvey basically nailing the past half century, from a somewhat spiritual perspective to boot, at its start? I know one or two good Paul Harvey imitators out there and it’s quite easy to make an audio recording sound old (which also makes imitators harder to weed out, too). I guess I just have a hard time believing that not only had somebody figured it out so quickly, but somebody in radio had figured it out so quickly (I mean, sometimes the talk radio guys do, but usually amidst a flurry of sneering at Democrats, y’know?) — but then, I haven’t heard enough Paul Harvey to know if seeing the obvious was his talent or something.

  14. Tom Ryan says:

    It is so sad that he could show this sort of prescience at times and at other times come across as an anti-Catholic windbag and snake oil salesman.

    Rest in peace.

  15. Supertradmum says:

    I grew up listening to him daily, as my parents loved him. However, many of my parent’s generation and mine, fell into exactly the lies from the Father of Lies Paul Harvey warned us against. We need clear voices now, and they should be coming from the Church and the Catholic laity.

  16. Vincent. says:

    ..and now we know, the rest of the story.

    We have a lot of work to do about this.

  17. lucy says:

    Since everyone else is disclosing, I was a baby during Oct. of 1964. He was spot on as someone earlier said. I’m continually amazed that many predicted all these things would come to pass….Chesterton; Fulton Sheen; numerous priestly writings that my Catholic Women’s book club reads……it’s as though we’re reading something written yesterday.

  18. Tina in Ashburn says:

    Aw… that’ll never happen. Paul Harvey is just exaggerating for a good story.

    [ugh. did he suspect that things would be even worse than he could have imagined?]

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  20. tputnam says:

    If I were the devil… another perspective.

    Andy Gullahorn’s “If I Were”

  21. Robert_H says:

    Snopes.com says that the original version of this was indeed published by Paul Harvey in 1964, but it underwent several updates over the years. This appears to come from a 1996 newspaper column. So perhaps in some of the details Mr Harvey wasn’t so far-sighted but overall he certainly hit the nail on the head.

    http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/devil.asp

  22. Sandra_in_Severn says:

    @Robert_H,

    The recording Fr. Z is using IS THE ORIGINAL 1964 version. It was updated in 1996 and posted over at World Net Daily SNOPES is just one person’s opinion, not the Gospel truth, and certainly not the ultimate “fact-fact” authority.

    Very scary indeed, how correct Mr. Harvey was on some matters.

Comments are closed.