When the demons strike back: experience of an exorcist after an exorcism

I have been an exorcist for three years, and I know all too well that it always costs something to enter onto the devil’s territory and wrench a soul out of his grip, but I have never experienced a demonic retaliation like the one I am about to recount. The only reason I write this true story is to encourage those who read this to remain vigilant, faithful and confident that Christ and His angels have all-surpassing power over demons. The demons may make us suffer temporarily, but they are no match for the power of Christ’s Love and the vigilance of these holy spirits who never cease to come to our aid in time of need.

Several days after performing a solemn exorcism which lasted nine full hours and was a tough piece of spiritual warfare, I was attacked unawares. I guess I had let my guard down after the exorcism was over, and I was directing my attention to other matters at hand. On this particular morning I was to have a meeting with my bishop. When the alarm clock woke me at 7 immediately, without warning, collapsing at the foot of my bed, I felt a wave of nausea flow over me. I just sat there on the floor sweating and thinking I felt so bad that I was going to throw up and be sick the rest of the day and therefore miss my long-awaited meeting with the bishop. Hoping that the nausea would go away, I sat still as a lamb, but I just got more nauseous as the minutes passed. I then staggered up into the bed again knocking hard against the dresser thinking that if I actually lay back down the nausea would go away.

The two young dogs in the house where I was staying heard the noise and barked, and the younger of the two immediately rushed into the room and got half on the bed licking my face as if he knew something was really wrong. Animals have a good sense of when people are hurting don’t they?! They are God’s little angels and man’s best friend in every way.

As I lay there getting sicker and sicker I thought I was going through another violent bout of food poisoning like I had experienced earlier in the year, but this nausea seemed of another character. I could not identify just what was happening to me, but I kept feeling worse. No more than five minutes had gone by since I woke up, and I was in dire straits and still sweating profusely.

The nausea just got worse, and by this time I knew I was going to throw up so I rushed into the bathroom like a drunken man, sat on the bathroom floor and lurched over the toilet thinking that this was it. I wanted whatever was in there out of my system, but nothing at all came out. In the meantime I was getting sicker, and I didn’t think it could get worse! The nausea was causing me serious blurry vision and malaise, and I was on the point of actually blacking out. My greatest sadness was that this hateful thing in my system was going to make me miss my meeting with the bishop. I am sad to say that I was not even thinking of God at the moment because I think I feared my bishop more!

But just then, as I was at my lowest point and literally on the point of fainting, something took hold of me and lifted me up and said, "We're not taking this!" or words to that effect. Then somehow, from a sitting position on the floor, I reached up and grabbed the sink with a power I didn’t know I had and yanked myself to a standing position saying to myself, "No! Shake it off—I'm not taking this."

Well, bam, it was over. Immediately the nausea dissipated—I mean completely. It did not linger or take its time getting out of my system. It disappeared as quickly as it had come. My color came back in a few minutes, the sweats stopped instantly and I felt not the slightest bit of sickness at any time after that the whole day, night or week. What a miraculous resurrection! I was dumbfounded. At one moment I felt like I was sinking into the pit of hell and the next moment I was placed on the pinnacle of the Temple!

Simply put, I was attacked for daring to go against the demon to liberate a soul from his grip. It was not food poisoning that hurt me because nothing came up; the last time I was in that state the poisoned substances took a good two days to clear out of my system. But here, nothing. The illness was instantly gone. Not the slightest bit of sickness remained after I stood up. It was as if a spirit of nausea had been sent into me as retaliation for my pastoral love of that soul and was as easily cast out of me by my guardian angel who just said, “Enough is enough!” Tell me, how can we live without our faithful protectors? My, how I learned the truth of what St. Paul said to Timothy when he witnessed, “The Spirit God has given us is no cowardly spirit” (2 Tm 1:7). Intrepid is a better word.

Let all faithful Christians take comfort. Our guardian angels never let us down if we strive to help others out of their spiritual bondage. When we engage in spiritual warfare we may have to bear some scars from the fray, but we will never be abandoned by Christ’s angels and saints. I had seven or eight minutes of persecution which I in turn offered for the sake of the soul I am still trying to liberate. If the devil’s intent was to drive me away, he picked the wrong guy with the wrong guardian angel. In fact, he just caused a potent bout of suffering to be offered for the liberation of the soul he oppresses much harder than he persecutes me. He lost in every way. St. Augustine says that God prefers to extract good from evil rather than suppress evil entirely. Now I understand why. God gets so much more out of it when we suffer with faith.

And there is a reason for all this warfare. St. Peter says that we “may for a time have to suffer the distress of many trials; but this is so that your faith, which is more precious than the passing splendor of fire-tried gold, may by its genuineness lead to praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ appears” (1 Pt 1:6-7). Amen to that.

I do not have the impression that Catholics, ordinary Catholics are any more "naturalistic" abouyt the events of the Old Testament than the New. As for the intellectuals, they seem to distance themselves from the miracles of Lourdes. One thing you do not consider is that the ordinary Catholic really doesn't know much about the Old Testament. Barbara Tuchman, the Jewish historian, once reminded us of the close identification that English Protestants felt weith the "Israeltes," who for them replaced the Catholic Anglo-Saxons as their "true" ancestors. The number of Hebrew names among the Puritan fathers exemplifies this. That's because they no longer honored the saints and confined themselves to Biblical names.

This is true, and it has had both positive and negative consequences. The positive is the pull toward Judaism; the bad is British-Israelism and its evil progeny, "chr*stian identity."

I am not sure you understand completely the point I am trying to make, though perhaps you do. I was Catholic for six years and Catholic magazines and periodicals of all kinds ran friendly articles about exclusively Catholic supernatural phenomena such as bilocations, blood liquefaction, the miracles of saints, and above all Marian apparitions. The articles would usually contain a small disclaimer that official Church approval didn't mean that the miracles were authentic but only that they did not contradict Catholic faith and morals, but aside from that all the articles were very enthusiastic.

In contrast with this those same publications never mentioned Genesis without insisting that it was mythology. There was sometimes a disclaimer that it was exactly forbidden to accept the Genesis stories as literal history, but the implication was that who would want to? In other words, the Catholic Church, while reverent enough when it comes to its own miracles, is highly suspicious of the supernatural phenomena of the "old testament" and absolutely refuses to show the slightest compassion to people for whom this constitutes a problem. Intellectuals get all the compassion, Fundamentalists get scolded for being an "embarrassment." Similarly, I have never seen any material expressing discomfort about the excesses of Latin folk Catholicism. Rather, it is defended just as the Fundamentalist culture of the American Heartland is attacked and condemned.

Donal Anthony Foley, a British Catholic literalist, is quite honest about the fact the Catholic openness to evolutionism and blasphemous higher criticism derives precisely from a "suspicion of the Bible" that arose as a reaction against the Protestant Reformation.

I suppose I really shouldn't be complaining, though. This hostility to the Bible is precisely what will prevent my people from ever even being tempted to give the Catholic Church (or the other ancient liturgical churches) a hearing, and as long as that is so, the possibility of cultural conversion to Noachism is still possible.

Catholicism "suspicion" of the Bible has nothing to do with the the histoical character of Genesis and everything to do with the ahistoricism of radical Protestantism. To turn your complaint around, this stand was willing to dismiss every thing that happened after the first century as a perversion of the true Gospel. Luther and many of the other Reformers were Biblical scholars was nonentheless embraced the Church Fathers as peers and men of good faith with whom they felt free to disagree on points of doctrine. Radical protestantism dismissed all of them, because they were tainted by Catholic teaching. Likewise they dismissed the whole of what the Orthodox call "the Holy Tradition."except for the Scriptures. IAC, those Fathers made two crucical decisions: (1) to accept the Jewish Scriptures as Holy Writ and (2) To "Christianize" those Scriptures, by searching them for passages that were most consistent with the Gospel. As you know, they, at the same time regarded them as historical accounts of real events. However, from almost the beginning, Christian scholars applied the method of allegory. They were by this means able to discern references to Christ which the Rabbis denied as applying to him. They saw in Scripture what a Rabbi did not. The doctrine of Original Sin is not a necessary interpretation of the events of Genesis. Ironically, many of the modernists who have spent so much time deconstructing the Scripture have followed Pelagius rather than Augustine and so they have reached the same conclusions as the Rabbis. They are reluctant to give Paul any special authority, just as they refuse to give Moses such authority. . You wonder that they don't accept the parting of the Red Sea? What about their approach to the Calming of the Seas by Jesus?

Catholic Answers, run by Frank Keating, is evolutionist and hardly has inerrancy or the integrity of the "old testament" at the top of its list. The same goes for such publications as New Oxford Review and The Wanderer. The Kolbe Center has had run-ins with both Keating and the NOR (unfortunately, Kolbe has the ant-Jewish lunatic Bob Sungenis, with whom I used to be friendly, on its board of advisors). Keating is also closely associated with Fr. Peter Stravinskas, who blatantly denies total Biblical inerrancy.

I fail to understand why you, who subscribe to this same "garbage," are trying to direct me away from it. Surely none of this stuff bothers you, does it?

PS: Feel free any time to explain why Catholicism, defender of tradition, feels compelled to criticize the Pharisees for not taking a "sola scriptura" position on the Hebrew Bible.

Adam, Eve and Evolution., from the Catholic Answers website. I wouldn't characterize this essay as "evolutionist," but you're free to draw your own conclusions.

PS: Feel free any time to explain why Catholicism, defender of tradition, feels compelled to criticize the Pharisees for not taking a "sola scriptura" position on the Hebrew Bible.

We do? The "Chair of Peter" directly reflects the authoritative teaching "seat of Moses," and has always been understood as such. Jesus certainly didn't reject the tradition of the Pharisees, so the Church certainly would not.

In the time of Our Lord such was their power and prestige that they sat and taught in "Moses' seat".
Pharisees
1917 Catholic Encyclopedia

Keating is also closely associated with Fr. Peter Stravinskas, who blatantly denies total Biblical inerrancy.

Maybe we have an equivocal understanding of inerrancy. How do you define the inerrancy of Scripture?

I found this explanation of inerrancy from a Catholic perspective.

And this entry in the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia on Biblical Criticism (Higher):

Higher Criticism may be called a science, though its processes and results do not admit of nicety of control and demonstration, as its principles are of the moral-psychological order. Hence its conclusions, even in the most favourable circumstances, attain to no greater force than what arises from a convergence of probabilities, begetting a moral conviction.

I just read "Hostage to the Devil" (finished it this week as a matter of fact). It was very intriguing!

I think that's the best book available on exorcism and demonology. Fr. Martin's scholastic analysis of the phenomenon in the "Manual of Possession" section is simply brilliant.

His choices of the five American cases typify major trends in contemporary society: moral relativism, materialistic science, gender-bending, rat-race pursuit of the dollar, and dabbling in the occult.

The sub-story of one priest's soul-searching on the question of evolution alone makes the book a "must-read."

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