Demons!

July 28th, 2018| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

A couple of months ago, there was a strange gathering in Rome.

Two hundred wannabe exorcists. They were there for a week-long course in casting out demons.

Apparently, there is a high demand for the service among Roman Catholics. We don’t have figures but Professor Giuseppe Ferrari, who regularly teaches “Course on Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation” at the Pontifical Regina Apostolorum University in Rome, said:

The number of exorcisms has definitely increased over the years, as the requests to carry out exorcisms has increased. This course is useful because it prepares the priests who carry out exorcisms to have a complete vision, a multi-disciplined view of the situation.”

Priests and laymen, including several women, part of the two hundred who attended the current conference, took in lectures and workshops on everything from witchcraft in Africa to distinguishing between demonic vs. organic illnesses. There was also a session with a step-by-step guide to exorcising said nefarious beings.

If you were interested, you could also have sat in on one forum that talked about exorcism through … cellphones!

Said Cardinal Ernest Simoni, 90, of Albania (famous for having celebrated a mass for assassinated President Kennedy in 1963, for which Simoni was jailed by the Communist government of the time):

They call me and we speak and that’s how I do it. I just read the prayers of exorcism in Latin over the phone just as I would if performing the lengthy rite in person.”

Students received a certificate after the conference. But only priests can perform actual exorcisms in the Roman Catholic Church, and that only with their bishops’ permission and license. Lay folks can be “auxiliary exorcists,” and be present at exorcisms lending a hand with praying and offering moral support to “exorciser” and “exorcisee.”

His Eminence Cardinal Simoni warned:

Exorcisms should only be attempted after doctors are unable to explain the behavior of a person deemed to be demonically possessed. Discernment is important—I am only an instrument of a higher power. It is Jesus who liberates. It is his power. In all the exorcisms I have done, the Lord has helped me. I am not the great one.”

In our “sophisticated” Western world, we are generally materialists. If we can’t see/hear/touch/taste/smell something, it doesn’t exist—the materialist view. And so we deny the existence of evil beings in an unseen world.

But Satan is alive and well, working evil in us, in societies, in institutions, in nations. The Bible is clear about the existence of evil supernatural beings that are anti-God. And, yes, those antithetical and inimical beings are, therefore, going to be arrayed against us, God’s people, too.

But Jesus Christ has conquered them all.

… the surpassing greatness of His power, which [power] He [God] worked in Christ,
raising Him from the dead and seating [Him] at His right hand in the heavenlies,
far above every rule and authority and power and dominion and every name that is named,
not only in this age but also in the one to come.
Ephesians 1:19–21

The good news continues:

And He [God] put all things in subjection under His [Christ’s] feet,
and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body.
Ephesians 1:22–23

Well, if evil powers are under Christ’s feet, and if we, the church, are his body, then it means the evil powers are under us as well, subject to us, even as they are subject to Christ. What a reassuring truth: God’s power works on our behalf. His power is ours.

Yup, you can strike Satan and demons off your panic list now!