Idol gossip

Mary O’Regan on the risks of dealing with those who would lead us away from the Faith

With a heavy heart I watched the sad saga of an Amazonian statue, the Pachamama idol, venerated in the Vatican Gardens and saw a coterie of people bowing to honour a wooden carving which is defined as a pagan deity by the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There was, of course, the main reason to be sorrowful: the devotion given an effigy, which should be given to Our Lord. But for me personally this incident stirred painful memories.

When I was a child in Ireland, I knew a woman who showed signs of what can only be described as demonic possession. At first, I thought she could teach me a great deal. She was considered a genius and I was seduced by her pretence of being one, but in the end, I learned nothing of value from her. While she had been raised a Catholic and maintained a carefully cultivated appearance of still practising, I discovered that in reality she had thrown away her Catholicism. Yet she needed to keep up the façade of being a Catholic because when she “practised” she harassed good priests and nuns. Yet when she described her practice of what appeared to me to be a kind of idol worshipping paganism, she was praised by an admiring audience of fallen Irish Catholics and broken priests and nuns who lauded her free spirit and even encouraged her. But they were also afraid of her.

I saw first-hand that souls who give up fear of God will become terrified of people in their midst who can seem demonic, and they will be subservient to them, because they have abandoned the protections that the Faith gives, which makes them vulnerable, and rather than admit in humility that they need to re-embrace the Faith, they will often instead cooperate with someone who seeks to destroy their Faith.

I must admit that I too was, for a time, seduced – I fawned over the woman because my sinful ambition was such that I wanted to get what I could from her. But to my chagrin, I found she disliked me intensely. At first I put my troubles with her down to a personality clash, and that she despised me for the many flaws in my character and how narcissistic I was, but it became clear to me she had a particular hate for my name, Mary, because when she had to say it, she lost all semblance of her Irish brogue and her voice became metallic and hissing.

In her many character assassinations of me she relied on much hidden knowledge. At first, when she’d rant about my faults and my sins, I thought she was perceptive. There came a time, however, when in a painfully legalistic way she detailed venial sins I had committed when I was alone.

‘There followed an escalation in her knowledge of my venial sins, which was very traumatic’

In my deep pride I felt I could not tell anyone, because to do so would also be to tell my sins, and whenever I tried to talk to someone about her, they reminded me of her great intellect. There was an episode with showed me that I could no longer put her “insight” down to genius-level intelligence. One rainy Irish morning I put some pro-life literature in my bag. A few hours later I met with this strange woman and she sneered at me for carrying pro-life material and made wicked comments against the precise pro-life apologetics espoused in the literature I had in my handbag, complete with a devastating critique of the pictures accompanying the text. Again, it bears repeating that I had shown no one the literature and the whole time she jeered at the literature, it was buried in my bag!

I began to see that her status as a “genius” did not rely so much on her meagre native intelligence as it did on some sort of demonic intelligence she had imbibed when venerating her little wooden friends. There followed an escalation in her knowledge of my venial sins, which was very traumatic. At the time, however, I was not so convinced of the offence given Our Lord by venial sins, and I did not know that a person with her kind of knowledge may be said to be possessed.

This brutal experience taught me that we should not for one moment sanction the open tolerance of idol worship and occult ritual by the heads of the Church. We must speak out against it with every breath in our bodies. As asinine as they look, wooden idols work against the true Faith. We must oppose all idols for they are by no means harmless.