I had liked Pope Francis, and was even prepared to respect him, but I was forgetting that, after all, he's a Christian. And Christians believe in (and fear) the "Devil,"

Just as they believe in the literally Divine inspiration of everything that Saul of Tarsus ("the Apostle Paul") said: Like the ignorant pre-Enlightenment Peasants that they, in essence, really are--who believe things simply and solely because their fathers and mothers believed them; not because they are true, or because they are likely to be true.

This isn't something that most 3rd-worlders--or the inhabitants of Red States, or even the inhabitants of Blue states who were raised Catholic--can readily understand, but: believing in the existence of the Devil, or Satan, and "the Powers of Evil," is ordinarily summarily dismissed as a ridiculous barbarism by liberal Protestants (like myself), who are, after all, the majority of Americans.  When I (culturally Protestant, despite, or, really, because of my lifelong atheism), for example, just a few years ago, was apprised of the fact that my friend Roseanne (raised Catholic) actually believed in (and feared) the existence of--that Fallen Angel, the former Lucifer--the Devil (Sic!), I could not help being appalled, and, woundingly to my old friend, repulsed, by this trait of sub-human (as I blurted without thinking) barbarism in her character--quite as if it had been revealed to me that she had been raised by wolves in the woods without indoor plumbing.  It was the "sub-human" which really struck a nerve (as I know because she has mentioned it resentfully several times since), and which she now tries to mitigate by pointing out the very Pope's deep-seated and long-abiding belief in the wicked intelligence of the Author of Lies--about which to be sure, I had had no previous awareness. Pope Francis, indeed, goes very far towards irremediably crass barbarity in attributing personhood to the Devil, which Milton for all his personification of Satan, at least, avoids doing--a subtle point, but necessary to a civilized understanding of the difference between angels (however non-existent and theoretical) and human beings; and which the vulgar many, almost as proof of their vulgarity, utterly fail to grasp when they make "the Devil" a person like themselves, albeit much more intelligent than they are.