'One day, while I was hearing confessions, a man came
to the confessional where I was. He was tall, handsome, dressed with
some refinement and he was kind and polite. He started to confess his
sins, which were of every kind: against God, against man and against the
morals. All the sins were obnoxious! I was disoriented, in fact for all
the sins that he told me, but I responded to him with God's Word, the
example of the Church, and the morals of the Saints. But the enigmatic
penitent answered me word for word, justifying his sins, always with
extreme ability and politeness. He excused all the sinful actions,
making them sound quite normal and natural, even comprehensible on the
human level.. He continued this way with the sins that were gruesome
against God, Our Lady, the Saints, always using disrespectful
round-about argumentation. He kept this up even with with the foulest of
sins that could be conjured in the mind of a most sinful man. The
answers that he gave me with such skilled subtlety and malice surprised
me. I wondered: who is he? What world does he come from? And I tried to
look at him in order to read something on his face. At the same time I
concentrated on every word he spoke, trying to discover any clue to his
identity.. But suddenly; through a vivid, radiant and internal light I
clearly recognized who he was. With a sound and imperial tone I told
him: "Say long live Jesus, long live Mary!" As soon as I pronounced
these sweet and powerful names, Satan instantly disappeared in a trickle
of fire, leaving behind him an unbearable stench.'
