Star Wars and Catholicism Part 2: Jedi, Sith, and the Power of Light and Dark

Welcome again to my ongoing post, Star Wars and Catholicism! This is part 2 of my post, and I hope that everyone reads Part 1, too!

All right, so in Part 1 we discussed the Force and Redemption in the eyes of Star Wars and the Roman Catholic Church. Now on to a little more complex topic in this: the Jedi and the Sith, and the darkness or light that they perceive.

The Jedi, in Star Wars, are powerful users of the Light Side of the Force, and were protectors of the galaxy in the Old Republic. Now, it is needed to be made clear that the Jedi came before the Sith did. Good came to existence before evil came into the universe. Just like in the book of Genesis in the Bible, God, the ultimate good, came before any evil of any kind came into the world. God existed before any evil existed!! When evil DID come into the world, it was chosen, not created, just as the Sith don't create darkness, they simply choose it.

The Sith are the warriors of the Dark Side, and choose the side of evil. They seem to be more powerful than the light-side-using Jedi, but are ultimately (seemingly, as we see that they return by movie #7) destroyed instead. There are Sith in this world too, and, just like Palpatine in  the original trilogy, they can hide themselves very well and will reveal themselves in a way that no one ever can understand or expect. Does this mean that they ever will ultimately win? Not so.

"Darkness is merely the absence of light," Albert Einstein once said. Just in this way, the dark of the Dark Side is merely the absence of the Light Side in any given force-sensitive. In a way, we are all like those force-sensitives in that we have a choice: we can either hide in the shadows of the Dark Side or we can live in the brightness of the Light Side.

Just because there is so much darkness in the world doesn't mean that the light is dead. Just as the Sith could not completely obliterate the Jedi, darkness can never completely destroy the light. As St. Francis of Assisi once said, "All the darkness in the world can never destroy the light of a single candle." Darkness itself cannot destroy light, just as the Sith cannot (at least completely) destroy the Jedi. We should take this as a sign of hope. Even in "Revenge of the Sith" there is hope by the end with the birth of Luke and Leia.

Please tune in soon for more! If you want any more questions answered about this comparison, please comment! Comments make my day!

May the Lord be with you,

Elizabeth