Exorcism

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Exorcism Understanding exorcism in scripture and practice

by Fr Jeremy Davies M.A., M.B., B.S.

All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society

CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY PUBLISHERS TO THE HOLY SEE

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Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Kinds of Demonic Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3. Causes of Demonic Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 4. Degrees of Demonic Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 5. Discernment and Diagnosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 6. Exorcism and Deliverance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 7. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

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1. Introduction ‘The Church participates in the victory of Christ over the Devil: Christ gave his disciples the power to expel demons. The Church exercises this victorious power through faith in Christ and prayer, which in specific cases can take the form of exorcism.’ (Pope John Paul II, 1986) The Creation and the Fall Before his Ascension, Jesus commanded his Apostles, ‘Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptised will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned; and these signs will follow those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons…’ (Mark 16:15-17). Exorcism has a particular place in the work which Christ has entrusted to his Church and must be understood in the light of that whole work.

In Christ ‘all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible’ (Colossians 1:16) – the invisible things are the angels. On the first day of creation God said, ‘Let there be light…and God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light

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from the darkness’ (Genesis 1:3-4). The sun and stars were not created until the fourth day and the light of the first day may have been that of the angels – and the separation of the darkness the fall of a third of them described in the Apocalypse (12:3-9): ‘another sign appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon…his tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth… War arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven; and the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world – he was thrown down to the earth and his angels were thrown down with him’.

St Paul, speaking of himself, wrote: ‘I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven’ (2 Corinthians 12:2). The ‘third heaven’ is the Presence of God. The second heaven seems to mean the created spiritual home of the angels, from which they adore God and are sent as guardians and messengers to our world. The first heaven, ‘the firmament of the heavens’ (Genesis 1:15), is our ordinary sky with the sun and moon and stars. From the second heaven, Satan and his angels were thrown down to the ‘first heaven’ and earth, where they became ‘the world rulers of this present darkness’ (Ephesians 6:12). Since the fallen angels are

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outnumbered by those who remained faithful, how did they become the world rulers? It was human sin that made them so.

Both angels and men were created good and the greatest gift of this goodness is the power to love God freely. By its nature this gift had to be exercised in order to become permanent. From the leader of those angels who had rejected that love before us came our moment of decision: ‘The serpent said to the woman…’. The power of the angels, although infinitely less than that of God, is much greater than that of man without God. Choosing to disobey God, we have put ourselves in the power of the fallen angels. In Genesis 3 the Devil, in the form of the serpent, is seen clearly. In the rest of the Old Testament there are occasional glimpses, such as Isaiah’s (27:1) of ‘Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent … the dragon that is in the sea’; but he has entered man and there, inside, he is, for the most part, hidden in the dark sea of human sin and error.

The Exorcisms of Christ ‘Everything reproved by the Light is revealed’ (Ephesians 5:13). When Christ the Light came into the world, the demonic spirits could no longer remain hidden. He challenged the Devil in the wilderness and there rejected all his temptations, thus constituting in himself a new humanity, confirmed in the power of loving God freely

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and selflessly. He taught in the synagogue at Capernaum and, from one of the congregation, an evil spirit, hitherto hidden, screamed and was cast out (Mark 1:21-28). He spoke of the Cross and this exposed the Devil’s foothold in Peter, whom Jesus then rebuked: ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ (Matthew 16:23). So it is throughout the Gospels – and this Light, Christ has entrusted to the Church. How grave a responsibility it is, not to conceal once more what cost him so much to reveal!

In the New Testament the fallen angels are also called the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places, the elemental spirits of the universe, cosmocrats, powers, dominions, thrones, names, princes, lords, gods, angels, unclean spirits, evil spirits and demons.

Sometimes one or other of them is described according to his work e.g. deaf-and-dumbness (Mark 9:25); divination/python (Acts 16:16); antichrist (1 John 4:3).

The head of the fallen angels is usually called Satan (Hebrew) or the Devil (Greek), both meaning accuser/ adversary/slanderer; but he has many other names: Lucifer (‘light-bearer’), Beelzebub (Prince Baal, the chief pagan god of Canaan), Abaddon (‘destroyer’), Belial, the Serpent, the Dragon, the Lion, the strong one, the evil one, the tempter, the enemy, the liar, the murderer, the god of this age, the ruler of this world and the prince of the power of the air.

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Satan himself, it is understood, tempted Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). Often, however, in the New Testament, the Devil’s name designates one of the lesser demons – because Hell, emulating Heaven, has its own grotesque hierarchy: a totalitarian dictatorship which Nazism and Communism and the rest seek to reproduce on earth. Thus a bent back is attributed by Our Lord to Satan but by St Luke to ‘a spirit of infirmity’ (Luke 13: 10-17). Similarly, Jesus first speaks to the Gadarene demons in the singular: ‘Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit!… What is thy name?’ The answer acknowledges the singular but reveals the plural: ‘‘My name is legion for we are many’; and he begged him not to send them out of the country’ (Mark 5:8-10). Those legionaries are, no doubt, the slaves of their spokesman, their captain, just as he, possibly through other intermediary ranks, is a slave of Satan. Sometimes during an exorcism, the evil spirit will say something like: ‘I want to leave but he won’t let me’ – by ‘he’ meaning either his immediate superior or the Devil.

During his ministry Christ did many exorcisms (e.g.

Mark 1:32-34, 39). Eight are mentioned individually (Matthew 9:32; 12:22; 15:21-28; Mark 1:21-28; 5:1-20; 9:14-29; Luke 4:38-39; 13:10-17). Three of these are described in some detail, including Jesus’s words of exorcism (Mark 1:25; 9:25; Matthew 8:32).

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Like his healings, Christ’s exorcisms were an essential but subsidiary part of his work of evangelisation – ‘‘Let us go on to the next towns that I may preach there also, for that is why I came forth’; and he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons’ (Mark 1:38-39). His exorcisms of individual demons led up to his great exorcism of the ruler of this world and his creation of a new world, by his death on the Cross, his Ascension, his Gift of the Holy Spirit and his saving work in the Church: ‘‘Now is the judgement of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself’. He said this to show by what death he was to die’ (John 12:31-33).

In Our Day When, at the foot of Mount Tabor, the disciples were unable to cast out the evil spirit, the Lord rebuked them as a ‘faithless and perverse generation’ (Luke 9:41) – but at least they got the diagnosis right, which is more than one can say for some biblical scholars. If any of those disciples were among the seventy sent out soon after, it is encouraging that they had learnt from their failure, for they returned in triumph and Jesus said to them: ‘‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall

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harm you…I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’

Then turning to the disciples he said privately; ‘Blessed are the eyes which see what you see!’’ (Luke 10:17-19, 21-23). Recognition of evil spirits and authority over them are given to the babes who have faith and hidden, withheld, from ‘the wise and understanding’.

The ministry of exorcism in the Church flourishes in proportion to the living faith of her members in the word of God. In the ‘Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation’ (Dei Verbum), the Second Vatican Council was inspired to call for a biblical renewal. That is the key to the other great themes of the Council: ecumenism, the universal call to holiness and the new evangelisation. So far it has been largely frustrated by a resurgence of biblical modernism – disbelief in the historicity and inerrancy of the Scriptures. A century ago St Pius X saw clearly its demonic nature and cast it out of the Church; but in the past 40 years it has flooded back. In his book, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict shows us what is required: not only the ejection of modernism but its replacement by the faith in the word of Our Lady (Luke

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1:38) – by the deep understanding and love of the Scriptures that were imparted to the Church by her risen Lord (Luke 24:44-49). After 40 years in the desert since ‘Dei Verbum’, a new springtime of the word of God in the Church is now possible in our day, as the Pope has said (14-9-5), and every one is called to partake.

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2. Kinds of Demonic Influence Indirect Rule through Sin Fallen man is self-centred; we orbit around ourselves instead of around God; and in this state we are in enemy territory. The conscience of every human being is enlightened with ‘the true Light’ (John 1:9) that leads to the love of God; but insofar as we resist that Light, we are still, at least indirectly, under ‘the ruler of this world’ (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11) – and this would be so even if he were to exert no direct influence over us at all.

Direct Influence through Sin Satan is the Tempter (1 Thessalonians 3:5); and as he originated the fall of man, so he still directly influences us to reject grace and commit sin. This is his ordinary mode of action (1 John 3:8-10). By love God draws us to love him freely in return (1 John 4:7-21). Spirit has the power of uniting with spirit; the fulfilment of our human spirit is union with the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:16). The Devil, by deception and psychic violence, seeks to imprison us in his own separation from God (John 8:3147). If an evil spirit tempts us to sin, how, if we yield to that sin, should we not be united with that spirit? Our will

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is free – not entirely but sufficiently to be the rudder on which our eternal destiny depends. The spiritual war is over the free decisions of our human will.

After the deliverance of the Gadarene demoniacs (Luke 8:26-33), something very strange happened – all the local citizens were ‘seized with a great fear’ (8:37) and instead of welcoming Jesus with joy, as people did elsewhere, and bringing other demoniacs to be liberated, they asked him to leave their district. Why? Perhaps their joy was elsewhere, in their prosperity and their pigs, and they weren’t aware of having any other demoniacs.

‘There are multitudes, poor and rich, who are set on upon nothing else whatever but on getting money… the pursuit of wealth blocks up the avenues of their hearts, and they have not time nor thought nor love for the great things which concern their peace. What is this but another possession of the Devil?’ (Cardinal Newman). Through the ordinary attachments that are second-nature to fallen man, of which money is but one, the Gaderenes were under the Devil’s rule; but only Jesus’s appearance among them revealed both their self-bound state and the Devil’s hand in it – for the evil spirits ‘begged Jesus not to send them out of the country’. It was the Decapolis, Gentile territory, ruled over by pagan gods, and the evil spirits were at home there – and so were the citizens and the fear they were seized with was surely, in part, that of the spirits in them.