Continue reading » No related posts.]]>

Overwhelmed with requests for exorcism practitioners, U.S. Roman Catholic bishops recently held a special training workshop in Baltimore to teach the rite. The church signed up 56 bishops and 66 priests for the two-day session, aiming to boost the small group of just five or six American exorcists currently on the church’s books.

“There’s this small group of priests who say they get requests from all over the continental U.S.,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, stated. Concerning exorcists, he added that “actually, each diocese should have its own.”

Neal Lozano, a Catholic writer, reports that he knows an exorcist in the church who receives about 400 inquiries a year about performing an exorcism. Out of this number, the exorcist determines that only two or three cases require an exorcism.

Although the procedure is not performed frequently, the question that should immediately occur to most freethinkers is why, in an era of relative scientific sophistication, this ritual is ever done and what is the church’s motivation for encouraging interest in this ritual that logic says should have been abandoned centuries ago. Before we tackle these questions, general information about exorcism will be helpful.

The religious concept that explains the alleged need for exorcism is a belief in demonic possession, a situation where a demon can inhabit the human body and produce abnormal behavior or abnormal medical findings. This belief in demonic possession is older than Christianity itself. Christianity simply co-opted the idea from other cultures and religions, as they did with many of their other beliefs. The term “exorcism” became prominent in early Christianity from the early second century onward.

In Christian belief, angels were created good. Since they were endowed with free will, some of them rebelled against God, were banished from heaven, and became demons. The leader of the demons was Satan.

Jesus commanded his followers to expel “evil spirits” in his name. The New Testament contains several examples of Jesus casting out evil spirits from people, and the church notes these acts in the Catholic Catechism.

In pre-scientific Christianity, the church taught that disease was punishment from God for sins or was caused by demonic possession. In this discussion, the focus is on demonic possession. In its current usage, exorcism is mainly reserved for certain aberrant mental behavior.

The organizers of the training workshop in Baltimore were keenly aware of the potential for ridicule since many Americans view exorcism with skepticism. Exorcists in the U.S. keep a very low profile.  In 1999, the church updated the Rite of Exorcism and cautioned that “all must be done to avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition.”

Exorcisms, according to the Canon law of the church, can only be performed by an ordained priest (or higher prelate), with the express permission of the local bishop. In addition, a careful medical examination to exclude the possibility of mental illness is required.

An exorcism is much less dramatic than what is presented in movies. It is done in private and includes sprinkling holy water, reciting Psalms, reading aloud from the Gospel, laying on of hands, and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Some additional measures are allowed for different circumstances such as invoking the Holy Spirit followed by blowing in the face of the subject, tracing the sign of the cross on the person’s forehead, and commanding the demon to leave.

Some of the classic signs of demon possession, according to Bishop Paprocki, are speaking in a language the person has never learned, extraordinary shows of strength, a sudden aversion to spiritual things like holy water or the name of God, severe sleeplessness, lack of appetite, and cutting, scratching, and biting the skin.

For a person to accept the efficacy of exorcism, it is necessary to believe in demons. How common is this belief in the general population? According to an August 2007 Pew poll, the figure is, astoundingly, 68 %.

Demonic possession, of course, is not a valid psychiatric or medical diagnosis recognized by the standard diagnostic reference books in psychiatry and medicine, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) for psychiatry and the International Classification of Disease (ICD-10) for medicine. The signs that the church lists as evidence of demonic possession can be found in a wide variety of psychiatric and medical conditions.

There are multiple possible explanations for the increased interest in exorcism by the hierarchy of the church and its members:

• Interest has been whetted by Hollywood. Exorcism has been a staple of fright films, most notably the 1973 film The Exorcist.
• Reports of successful procedures on famous people tend to give them credence. For example, Mother Teresa allegedly underwent an exorcism late in life when the archbishop of Calcutta, Henry D’Souza, noted that she showed extreme agitation in her sleep. He feared she “might be under the attack of the evil one.”
• Reverend Richard Vega, president of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, an organization for American priests, said that there could be a rising demand for exorcism because of the influx of Hispanic and African Catholics to the U.S. He noted that people from those cultures were more attuned to the supernatural.
• Another reason for increased interest in exorcism could be Pope Benedict XVI’s call for a return to traditional rituals and practices.
• But the really fundamental reason behind it all is stated unambiguously well by R. Scott Appleby, professor of American Catholic history at the University of Notre Dame. He is a longtime observer of the bishops. In referring to the recent training program in Baltimore, he stated: “What they’re trying to do in restoring exorcisms is to strengthen and enhance what seems to be lost in the church, which is the sense that the church is not like any other institution. It is supernatural, and the key players in that are the hierarchy and the priests who can be given the faculties of exorcism. It’s a strategy for saying we are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.”

There you have it. A profound Wizard of Oz moment by a prominent Catholic theologian. The curtain was pulled back and the all-powerful Oz was revealed as just a fallible human being without any supernatural powers. Professor Appleby reveals the fundamental flaw of Catholicism and all other religions that depend on belief in a supernatural realm. Without the alleged magical powers that they can tap into by this belief, they would just be another secular institution.

There is a complete lack of any scientific evidence that a supernatural realm inhabited by fanciful and titillating entities such as gods, goddesses, angels, devils, and demons exists. But this naïve and mythological belief is enhanced and perpetuated by a gullible public.

So exorcism, an isolated belief in the supernatural, provides important lessons for freethinkers in how to accelerate the presently slow trend toward a secular world. Every time we encounter a specific supernatural claim, it must be promptly answered with a rational scientific explanation. This applies particularly to scientists, who by their detached attitudes have allowed supernatural claims to flourish. And as for an overly credulous public, the long term answer is increased levels of education, particularly in science and especially scientific (critical) thinking. Only by these measures will be able to pull back the curtain on the charlatan behind it.

No related posts.