So anyhow, I just saw that Winona Ryder flick “Lost Souls” and thought it was pretty lame. But it got me to thinking, does the Catholic Church still perform exorcisms? I’m nominally Catholic myself and I seem to recall that they do, but how does it all work? How do they decide someone is really possessed and not a nutcase? What’s the ritual? And can I tag along? And do any other religions have rituals similar to exorcism or is specifically a Catholic thing?
I know it’s a lot to chew on, so answer any question at random.
I can’t seem to get any of my regular Catholic links, so I’ll try to wing it.
The Catholic Church does still perform exorcisms, but they’re pretty rare. As for deciding whether someone is possessed, the Church performs extensive investigations. The Church has never been known for jumping to wild conclusions–even when they’re investigating someone to become a saint, they have a researcher play “devil’s advocate” trying to discover whether the saintly guy had any not-so-saintly skeletons in the closet. That’s on top of the requirement for three confirmed miracles.
I believe some of the signs of possession are knowledge of events or things one cannot possibly know and the ability to speak in a language the person has never been exposed to. There are others. I do know that psychiatrists are regularly employed in these cases to make sure a person is not merely mentally ill. Physicians are also involved. I suppose the most well known exorcism that ever occurred in America was the one done here in St. Louis on a boy from Maryland, I believe. It was done at a Jesuit retreat and was what William Peter Blatty was thinking of when he wrote The Exorcist.
As for the rite of exorcism, I’m pretty sure you could find it online. It’s not a secret. I understand the one used in The Exorcist is pretty close. Some Protestant fundamentalists “cast out demons” all the time, but I doubt they have a defined ritual.
There are some Protestants who do excorcism but call it deliverance ministry. If you are interested in how they go about it I would recommend the book “Defeating Dark Angels” by Charles H Kraft.
Heck, we don’t even use real wine in communion. My family and I deliver communion to homebound members of our church every 1[sup]st[/sup] Sunday. We have little kits with mini-shotglasses, bread holder, and a small vial of “wine”. Last Sunday, the kit I grabbed was low on wine. The woman who prepares them took my vial, reached into the fridge and got a bottle of Welch’s Grape Juice, and topped me off.
A woman I went to college with was married and pregnant. Her husband basically went nuts and became convinced she was bearing the Antichrist. They discussed it with their minister and went through a great deal of counselling. Eventually her husband agreed that an exorcism was a necessary and agreeable solution.
They performed the exorcism over her, but he decided it didn’t take. He left her anyway.
Her minister asked her if she had thought of any names for the baby. “Yeah,” she said. “Damien.”
The Catholic Church has become very sensitive about the whole topic of demonic possession. As modern psycotherapy has progressed, the Church has been more and more stringent that those who are supposed to be possessed undergo rigorous evaluation to make sure they aren’t suffering from regular, secular mental illness. As such, the number of exorcisms has gone way down.
FWIW, I had a relative who was deeply religious but began showing symptoms that maybe a century ago would have been called possession. After evaluation, she was diagnosed and successfully treated with medication – no clerical intervention or green pea soup involved. The fact that someone’s strange behavior has religious overtones is not (in the eyes of the RCC) evidence of demonic possession.
It claims to tell the truth about this exorcism. For example, it claims that even before the onset of alleged demonic manifestations, the boy was known for getting into trouble, behaving like a little devil(!), and that the boy was capable of faking possession. Also, one of the assisting exorcists said that during the exorcism he did not see any absolutely sure signs of the presence of demons.
