Matt Baglio is a young American journalist living in Rome. When he heard of a California priest who had been sent to Rome by his bishop to learn how to be an exorcist, Baglio became intrigued. Why does the Catholic Church still exorcise people? Is this stuff for real?
He writes about his journey into the world of contemporary exorcism in "The Rite", which has just been published. Over the course of his reporting, Baglio returned to Catholicism, in part by being confronted with the reality of the demonic -- of disembodied intelligent evil, and the power of Jesus Christ in the Church to deal effectively with it.
I conducted an e-mail interview with Baglio, from Rome. In it, he discusses what exorcism is, and is not, the presence of supernatural evil in the contemporary world, and a strange but joyful mystical experience that happened to him, and just might have been a sign of the presence of the Virgin Mary. The entire interview is below the jump.
Rod Dreher: How did this journey into the world of contemporary exorcists change you personally?
Matt Baglio: When I first began, I really didn't know anything about exorcism. In fact even though I'd been raised Catholic, I wasn't really a practicing one. But being a very curious person by nature I really wanted to understand the reality of the phenomena.
Early on I saw that most books on exorcism had a fairly biased approach--either discounting the phenomena out of hand or seeing demons around every corner--neither of which I found very convincing. Instead my whole goal was to be as journalistic and accurate as possible, not to limit myself and to ask the tough questions no matter where they led me. I witnessed exorcisms, interviewed countless individuals who claimed their lives had been marred by evil, others claiming their illnesses have been healed by the power of prayer. I spoke to exorcists who told me what it was like to be able to see the power of God, and to psychiatrists and scientists who didn't discount the possibility of a spiritual realm. I also read countless books on spirituality and on the history of the Church. In the end I found the process to be an incredibly edifying experience on many levels and it really helped me to reconnect with my faith. Now this doesn't mean that I don't still have some questions, but it certainly has helped me to understand the value of faith in a way I never did before.
You write in great detail about things your protagonist, Father Gary Thomas, saw in his training sessions with Father Carmine. Were you there to witness them? If so, what was that like for you?
I was able to see about 20 exorcisms, some of which Father Gary participated in. The thing that most surprised me was the relative normalcy of the people who had come to be prayed over. You could even have conversations with them. Of course once the exorcist began praying the Ritual then all that would change and the person would react, sometimes violently. Most of the cases I saw were of the milder sort where the person coughed, or just sat completely still. However I did see a few violent ones in which the person thrashed and their personality changed and they began speaking in a gruff and guttural voice that to me sounded very unnatural. In those instances I was really struck by the intense suffering that these people undergo.
Another thing that surprised me was the way the exorcist went about praying the Ritual. Initially I expected things to be more dramatic in the sense that the exorcist would be shouting and really berating the person. Instead the exorcists I followed were very calm and prayed the Ritual almost under their breath.
Many people today scoff at the idea of Satanic cults, but the exorcists you interviewed insist that they are a reality. Is the threat mostly real, or mostly imagined - and how, precisely, do cults threaten?
Well, I think it's pretty clear that Satanic cults do exist, some even have web sites. Now the question then becomes are they harmful, and if so how?
The first thing to understand is that these groups can be very different as not everyone believes the same thing. Some consider the devil to be kind of a natural force that they see as being repressed by organized religion. Other groups apparently do believe in a personified devil, and they perform rituals, which are said to involve drugs, orgies and in extreme cases even human sacrifice. Another group could be classified as just young kids into the trappings of certain music and primarily looking for a way to rebel. In fact some experts feel that Satanism is more of a cultural phenomenon. Others, including exorcists, see Satanic cults as a real threat that can open a person up to demonic attack.
Whatever your view, however, the police here in Italy clearly see cults as a problem. I was able to interview several detectives who've been following cases, some involving murder. According to what they had to say, Satanic cults do exist and they are responsible for committing some pretty heinous crimes, though these cases are usually rare.
Of course this doesn't mean that Satanic cults are harmless. In fact even skeptics point out the damage that these groups can cause to society because they preach a doctrine of hate and despair, and create narcissistic individuals who are incapable of feeling any kind of empathy for others. One police detective from Florence told me how hard it is for him to confront these groups because their members essentially take the shared values that we all have and flip them upside down. They take pleasure in lying and they celebrate death. He found it difficult to even talk to them because there was no common ground from which to start from.
Your exorcist contacts advise you, as mine - the late Father Mario Termini - did me, that people should absolutely stay away from the occult, even in its most apparently benign forms, because that is a gateway to the demonic. Yet occultism seems ever more present in popular culture. Does this concern you?
I think it is very troubling even just from the standpoint that it really reflects on how we have become a society of instant gratification. Nobody wants to struggle anymore, or accept the notion that there may be mystery, or things outside our control. I think there is also this notion that life should always be dramatic, and that we should be constantly pushing our senses to the limit or we're not really living. Seen in this context, for some people, just going to Church is pretty boring and so they go looking for answers elsewhere.
One of the things the course talked about was the concept that where faith decreases, superstition grows. And as more and more people turn away from traditional religions, other beliefs are rushing in to fill the void. What people don't realize is that there can be a consequence. Exorcists of course are adamant that this can lead to demonic attack. But even looking at this from a secular standpoint, you can have impressionable people becoming victims to "magicians" or "psychics" who defraud them out of thousands of dollars, destroying families and ruining people's lives.
Exorcists tend to have great concern, and even disdain, for contemporary priests and bishops who deny the reality of the demonic. In your opinion, how widespread is that denial in the ranks of the clergy, what are its roots, and what is its result? In my personal experience, once you've seen this sort of thing with your own eyes, it takes a superhuman act of will to deny the reality of malevolent spirits.
One of the first things I found fascinating at the course was this notion that some priests didn't believe in the devil. When I first met Father Gary he was quite candid about the fact that he'd never been taught anything about the devil or exorcism. He also told me of a few instances that had happened to him in Rome where he'd shared with some of the other priests he was living with that he was the exorcist and how some of them had dismissed him out of hand.
I talked to a variety of priests, including spiritual directors at some major Catholic seminaries, and got several reasons for why that might be. The first thing to say is that not that many Christians like to talk about the devil, and for good reason. The Church itself never really emphasized the devil, and so it became quite easy for priests to push that aspect of the faith aside. In addition a confluence of events in the late 1960s and 1970s really contributed to priests of that era turning away from the concept of the devil as a personified being. Many priests point to the turmoil that existed in the Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council as being one part of the puzzle. Some priests had a hard time adjusting to the openness that Vatican II was ushering in. For sure it made it easier for many in the clergy to embrace a lot of other changes going on in society at the time. And during the 1960s and 1970s advances in science and medicine were explaining a lot of what in the past was considered to be in the realm of the spiritual. So I think priests saw that and said let's just be modern and open and not worry about these "medieval" things like evil spirits and Satan.
The result was that many priests saw the devil as a metaphor for evil and didn't believe in things like demonic possession or exorcism, which is the biggest complaint that exorcists make. This meant that Christians who in some way felt their lives were being affected by evil spirits had to go outside the Church to get help. Interestingly, Father Gary told me that the newer generation of seminarians is more apt to believe in the reality of Satan.
Why do some people become possessed, and others do not?
Exorcists say that a person can become possessed through occult ties, a life of hardened sin, through a dedication to a demon (a Satanic ritual), and through a curse. As to why one person becomes possessed while another does not, is a great question. Exorcists are quick to point out that there is still a lot of mystery involved in the process, and that it's still up to God. Since the devil is a created being, God is still in charge. So then the obvious question is why God would allow a person to become possessed. Some exorcists say that it could be for the expiation of sin, or to test a particularly devout individual.
Of course everything is tied up in the notion of free will. We all have a choice to do good or evil. With the exception of a curse, in which the person is a victim, the basic dynamic involved is that the person has made a conscious decision to turn away from God, and it is through this action that a demon is said to be given an opportunity to attack. So it isn't just that a person sins once, or plays with a Ouija board out of curiosity and that they are going to be possessed, but if they become dependent on the Ouija board as the source of their knowledge, or become addicted to a certain sin, then that takes their focus off of God, which is said then allows them to become targets of a demon.
It is important to note that in the Catholic tradition, demons are not the cause of every vice. It isn't that a person is an alcoholic because of a demon, or that they committed adultery because of a demon. Sometimes it is said that certain sins can open a doorway to a demon, but it isn't that the demon causes those sins. As individuals we are still responsible for our choices.
One of the most remarkable, and frankly depressing, aspects of "The Rite" is to learn that there are some people who undergo regular exorcisms for years, and are still not completely free of demonic influence. (I'm thinking of Sister Janica, the nun who had been raised in a family mired in ritual abuse). How do you explain that?
Father Gary had the same reaction when he began to see the same people prayed over time and time again. He couldn't understand why the prayers of exorcism weren't working, and it was then that he began to see that rather than a one shot deal, exorcism is really more of a process. As I detail in the book, the prayers of the Ritual weaken the powers that the demon has over the individual, which then allows them to return to church, to praying, and to go to confession. The whole goal of the demon is to keep people from praying, from having this communion with God, and so through subtle "attacks" it maneuvers a person as far away from God as possible. It's up to the person to change their lifestyle and renounce to any sins that may have opened them up for attack. Many of these cases that seem to go on forever usually involve an individual who is unwilling to change his or her own life, or thanks to an outside person (such as through a curse) that has some sort of connection to the victim, which is the case with Sister Janica.
"The Rite" makes it clear that full-blown possession is by far the most rare form of demonic influence, though certainly the most dramatic. What are some of the more common ones exorcists are called to deal with?
The first thing to mention is that according to exorcists the majority of people who come to see them don't actually need an exorcism. Many are just confused individuals or as one exorcist put it, have seen too many movies. They tend to be people down on their luck who are convinced that a curse has been put on them (very popular in Italy where things like curses are thought to be commonplace).
According to exorcists there are a variety of ways in which the devil is allowed to attack us. The most obvious one is temptation, which exorcists say is also the most common. Though this doesn't mean that the Catholic Church says that all temptations come from the devil. The "extraordinary" action of the devil is usually broken down into infestation (the possession of a place, like a haunted house); oppression (exterior attacks on a person, such as Padre Pio being pushed down a flight of stairs); obsession (an intense attack on the mind); and then finally possession. Exorcists told me that these should not be considered in any way to be a sequence that leads ultimately to possession.
You had a miraculous experience during the reporting of the book, a beneficial one. What happened, and what was the message you took from it?
I had an interesting thing happen to me as I was driving home one day after having interviewed a woman who was supposedly possessed, and who had entered into the trance state during the interview. She'd become pretty violent and had cursed an image of Mary and then tore it down off the wall, and according to the exorcist, the reason she'd done this was because Mary had apparently helped her a lot. So having been raised Catholic, I sort of said a quick prayer to Mary asking that she help the woman again. The woman continued to scream and yell so I didn't really think anything of it.
Then, at one point while I was driving home later that day, I smelled this powerful aroma of flowers inside my car. At first it didn't think anything of it (only later would I come to learn that some people associate this phenomena with mystical experiences). When the flower smell didn't go away I found myself smiling, not really knowing why. For me this was a powerful experience, but I don't know if I'd go so far to call it miraculous. In a lot of ways I'm still processing it. In the book I'm quite honest about the fact that I don't know where the aroma came from. However to me what really stood out was not the source but how it made me feel, which was this sense of comfort, and in turn a real sense of joy.
Unsurprisingly, your book was received harshly by Laura Miller, a reviewer in Salon.com, who called you "credulous in the extreme." Two questions from this: 1) how do you deal with scorn and guffawing from the mainstream media by reporting this story, and 2) does Laura Miller have a point - I mean, do you worry that perhaps you have been too quick to believe these frightening stories from exorcists?
I've been very surprised to see how the book has been received by the media. I think rather than scorn, a lot of people don't quite know what to make of a book that neither belittles exorcism nor sensationalizes it. Now a lot of people who have actually read the book have responded to it and the reviews have been overwhelming positive.
I'm big enough to know that not everyone will like the book or appreciate the way I went about dealing with the topic, but I was very perplexed by Laura Miller's review. Either she didn't read the book or purposefully misconstrued things I had written, but either way I found it perplexing. For instance she writes that in relating the experience of smelling the flowers in my car that I was "convinced that the Virgin Mary was making her sympathies known to [me]," which I never said. She also said that I was anti-Vatican II, which is nonsense, and a couple other things that were inaccurate.
I think for a certain segment of the media it's very easy to belittle a person's religious beliefs. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to really understand what was going on, why people still believed in demonic possession and what science had to say about it. The material collected in the book is a cross pollination of a number of sources, including skeptics and scientists. Many of the most bizarre stories I heard came not from priests but from people who had no religious beliefs at all, or from psychiatrists who seemed to be at a loss to explain phenomena that they knew wasn't caused by mental illness. These weren't crackpots or manipulating priests, but sincere professionals.
One thing that was totally absent from her review is the fact that these Catholic exorcists are seeing people who are paying "psychics" to remove non-existent curses and in this contest it's the priest telling them to calm down, that nothing is wrong. I think for too long this notion has existed that the only reason that people believe in this stuff is because the Church is trying to brainwash them. Like many other aspects of exorcism that my book addresses, the reality is very different.
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