Salieri turned his back on God when the composer did not get the fame and fortune he desired. He wanted to be the best, but God gave talents superior to Salieri to someone else. Salieri refused to be purified and scorned God, choosing evil.
Salieri knew that he was mediocre and, therefore, thwarted Mozart's success.
Pure evil...
Remember Salieri calling himself the patron of the mediocre?
Those who are mediocre hate those who are gifted and reaching for perfection.
Such is the ideal of satan-to ruin the road to perfection for all men and women; he encourages mediocrity.,
Whether the play is really "truth" or not does not matter, as the main idea resonants in this day and age.
Those who are superior in any way, daily, are shut down, marginalized, condemned.
This is the message of the Common Core Curriculum. My parents had trigonometry and calculus in high school. Gone are the days of classical education in this country.
Cooperate with the purification of the Dark Night and allow God to give you the graces of the Illuminative State.
Why? Because the Church needs holy lay people. Quit moaning about poor clerical leadership and become the saint God has called you to be.
We are no longer children past middle-twenties. There are no excuses in wallowing in a long adolescence spiritually.
And, the many, many young saints, I have highlighted on this blog, put us older ones to shame. Mediocrity cripples the Church and may even destroy the presence of the Church in certain areas.
Read this from Garrigou-Lagrange:
When the liturgy recalls these words during Advent and at the beginning of Lent, it addresses not only souls in the state of mortal sin that are in need of conversion from evil to good, but also many Christians already in the state of grace who are still very imperfect and have to be converted from a relatively mediocre to a fervent Christian life. On Ash Wednesday it recalls to them Joel's words: "Now, therefore, saith the Lord: Be converted to Me with all your heart, in fasting and in weeping and in mourning. And rend your hearts, and not your garments, and turn to the Lord your God; for He is gracious and merciful, patient and rich in mercy, and ready to repent of the evil." (7) These words are so much the better understood in proportion as the soul that hears them is more advanced and, although in the state of grace for many years, feels the need of a more profound conversion, the necessity of turning the depths of its will more completely toward God. The laborer who has plowed a furrow goes over it a second time to force the plow deeper and turn over the earth which must nourish the wheat.
Do not turn your back away from suffering or complain about suffering. See this time of purification as the great preparation for the Illuminative State.
How desperately does the Church need saints now. Do not keep saying, "If only we had holy priests."
If only we had holy lay people.
A repeat of Garrigou-Lagrange quoting Lallemant:
"Such people ordinarily direct their lives by the common feeling of those with whom they live, and as the latter are imperfect, although their lives are not disorderly, they will never reach the sublime ways of the spirit, because the number of the perfect is very small. They live like the ordinary run of people, and their manner of governing others is imperfect.
"The Holy Ghost waits some time for them to enter into their interior and, seeing there the operations of grace and those of nature, to be disposed to follow His direction; but if they misuse the time and favor which He offers them, He finally abandons them to themselves and leaves them in their interior darkness and ignorance, which they preferred and in which they live thereafter amid great dangers for their salvation." (16)