<em>The Exorcist Files: True Stories About the Reality of Evil and How to Defeat It</em>
<em>By Fr Carlos Martins</em>
<em>Hodder and Stoughton, £18</em>
“People ask me what it is like to battle the Devil,” muses Fr Carlos Martins. “My opponent is hatred himself … When I walk into a room to conduct an exorcism, the contempt and disdain of the ancient serpent, the one who refused to obey God, the one who caused our first parents to fall, the one who delights in every human misfortune and suffering, meets me head-on.”
Since the death in 2016 of Fr Gabriele Amorth, the Italian priest who was played by Russell Crowe in the fantastical 2023 film <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJXqvnT_rsk">The Pope’s Exorcist</a></em>,</mark> Father Martins has emerged as perhaps the world’s most renowned expert in this field, not only because the many exorcisms he has performed but thanks to his <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-exorcist-files/id1635371540"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><em>Exorcist Files</em> </mark></a>podcast which has been downloaded by millions.
Fr Martins, a Canadian and former atheist who converted to the Catholic faith at university, <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><a href="https://a.co/d/gZKGz8t">in this book</a> </mark>describes how he first encountered the Devil shortly after his ordination. He was called by a woman staying in the house of an uncle serving in Afghanistan who complained of mischievous supernatural phenomena, including a music box which would play spontaneously. On arrival, Fr Martins sensed that he was “being watched by something that didn’t want me there” and weird things began to happen including the music box playing. When he opened the box there was nothing inside, “no parts, no chimes, no wind-up mechanism and no place for the batteries … it was an empty wooden box”.
He uses the word “Devil” as a generic term for the many demons who “wander the earth for the ruin of souls”, one or more of whom had infested that house. They are legion, as the Bible tells us, and all have names. Fr Martins explains that they also exist in a hierarchy headed Satan, the most powerful of the fallen angels.
Most people do not directly experience explicit manifestations of such demons because sin is the normal way any ordinary soul is corrupted and temptation is the normal way it is achieved. The demonic also operates, however, via infestation, vexation, oppression, obsession and possession. All of these are extremely serious but none has captured the imagination of Hollywood as readily as the last on the list.
Like other priests who work in this ministry, Fr Martins is frequently asked about the veracity of the scenes in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU2eYAO31Cc"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><em>The Exorcist</em>,</mark> </a>the 1973 movie that began the genre.
“Except for one phenomenon — the 360 degree head turn by the possessed — everything in the movie depicts what a possessed person might do,” he writes, recalling how he saw one possessed middle-aged woman throw a man, brought in to restrain her during the exorcism, over her head “as if he were a rag doll”.
“The man was over 6ft tall and weighed more than 300lbs. Doing a complete flip in the air, he landed on the floor 10ft in front of her. The woman then pointed her finger at the nearest light switch on the wall, about 12ft away. One of the screws holding the switch's cover plate unscrewed itself and darted into her open right hand through the air. She drove it into her left forearm. Later, in the same session, she struck me in the face with such force that I needed two surgeries to repair the damage I sustained to my skull.”
Superhuman strength is one of the four major indicators of possession, the others being knowledge of unlearned languages, of events which could not be known, and a violent reaction to holy names, prayer and sacred objects. There are many examples in this book to illustrate them.
They include a 13-year-old schoolgirl so severely grieving the loss of father who abandoned her that she became entranced in her own fantasies. In a row over a missing towel, she badly injured her mother and stepfather without expending any effort. Thinking she was mentally ill, her mother prayed silently in her mind for God to “help my baby … please heal her …”
The demon heard the unspoken prayer and yelled in fury at the mother, who contacted Fr Martins when she realised that her mind had been read.
Possession, though real, is rare but increasingly common with the decline of Christianity. Fr Martins goes to great lengths to explain that it occurs only when a door has been opened to the demonic chiefly by sin, trauma and by invitation, often via occult practices, some of which are mundane and very accessible since they have seeped into popular culture.
Another route by which people become possessed or afflicted by demons is through extra-marital sex, to which this book devotes a full chapter and parts of several others. This phenomenon has not gone unobserved previously. Fr Amorth, in his 2016 book, <mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><em><a href="https://amzn.eu/d/aafrErO">An Exorcist Explains the Demonic</a></em>,</mark> for instance, noted that “the most diffuse are the spiritual ills that are tied to an unrestrained use of sex”, while the late Fr Jeremy Davies, a London-based exorcist, wrote in<mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"> <a href="https://amzn.eu/d/iKLVSxp"><em>Exorcism</em>,</a></mark> a 2008 Catholic Truth Society booklet, that “intercourse, which belongs in the sanctuary of married love, can become a pathway not only for disease but also for evil spirits”.
According to Fr Martins, sexual activity is a conduit partly because the sexual act is by design spiritually unitive. He uses colourful anecdotes from his own ministry to demonstrate just how much trouble the misuse of the sexual faculty can bring to the unwary and some are so bizarre that it would have been difficult to make them up. He relates the story, for example, of a trucker seduced by a witch who left him so spiritually and physically damaged that he declined to leave the shelter of a bible camp for months, with ailments to his genitals disappearing only after exorcism.
Fr Martins also recounts how an atheist called Christopher came to him suffering from a spiritual affliction so severe that it was causing personal and professional ruin and only after he had exhausted ever other avenue. Fr Martins worked out that Christopher's problems began immediately after a dirty weekend spent with a woman he had met on a dating app. Christopher walked out of a counselling session with Fr Martins because he could not accept the subsequent supernatural claims of the priest, or admit that he had behaved in any way out of the ordinary. It was, after all, not the first time he had done this kind of thing. He had been fine on previous occasions, and other people did it without complaint too. Yet nine months later, Christopher was back, this time begging for help. He was liberated by exorcism, baptised a Catholic the following Easter and he now speaks to youth groups about the importance of the teaching of the Church on sexual morality.
Although this book is deeply unsettling it is also highly valuable as a catechetical instrument. It serves as a stark reminder that the whole of human history is marked by the huge and dramatic clash between good and evil told symbolically in the Book of Revelations. Such context has the power to shake the lukewarm and the sceptical from complacency. At the same time, it offers the reader hope, encouragement and the consolation of the victory already won by Christ. It calls upon the reader to have faith in Our Lord, to believe the truth of the Gospels, to protect themselves by avoiding sin, by leading good lives and by constant recourse to the sacraments.
It is a book which invites the reader to gaze upon Jesus Christ as the Saviour of mankind who, as we will hear in this and every Christmas, is the light who shines in the darkness and whom the darkness cannot overpower.
<em>Simon Caldwell is the author of <a href="https://amzn.eu/d/8AMRAKs"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">The Beast of Bethulia Park</mark></a></em>
