In some circles, Catholic and otherwise, exorcists are the new celebrities. You may have heard of Fr Gabriel Amorth, often known as the exorcist to the Vatican, who famously claimed there were more demons per square metre resident there than anywhere else on earth.
Or you may be one of the million or so following the astonishing Fr. Chad Ripperger on <em>YouTube</em>, who informs his followers on a variety of aspects about the spiritual life, lately including the question of whether or not demons have a particular antipathy to Gregorian chant.
If so, you may also have become aware of Fr Carlos Martins, who has just published a book that the <em>Catholic Herald</em> is about to review<em>, The Exorcist Files</em>.
There was much concern over the last few days in relation to Fr Carlos, when accusations suddenly erupted online claiming that he had been accused of safeguarding offences and asked to leave a parish he had been visiting on an evangelistic tour, as well as being expelled from the diocese.
Fr Carlos had been at the Queen of Apostles parish in the diocese of Joliet in the US state of Illinois. He was there to introduce his travelling apostolate, which included a display of relics which he uses for his ministry of healing and evangelism. Something seemed to have gone terribly wrong during the visit.
There appeared to be pressing reasons to fear the worst. The optics were terrible, while the communication release from the parish and diocese sounded ominous.
“During the course of the day’s veneration an incident with the priest and some students was reported to have happened in our church. We immediately contacted the police. The police investigation is still ongoing,” stated the release.
It also noted that "in an abundance of caution" the incident was reported to the bishop, that the rest of the tour by Fr Carlos planned at other parishes in the diocese later in the week was cancelled, and that the priest was notified that he must leave the parish and diocese.
<em>The Pillar</em>, a publication of repute, got hold of the details, asked for clarification, got none – and published.
At a stroke, the reputation of Father Carlos Martins was trashed by innuendo and implication. It looked like some incident not wholly dis-associated with sexual abuse might have taken place.
Except that nothing of the sort of had actually happened.
It turns out, when the facts emerged, that Father Carlos had carelessly touched someone’s hair.
But to appreciate the dynamics, it helps to know that Fr Carlos is very bald. Indeed, if Fr Chad Ripperger is thought to look a little like a benign house-elf straight out of the Harry Potter genre, Fr Carlos looks like an amiable version of a Mafia hit man. He often uses his baldness as an entree into evangelistic conversation.
An eyewitness report offers this description of what happened.
“As he always does, Father Martins began his interaction with students in chitchat dialogue. He is bald and apt to joke about it as a conversation starter. During his conversation with the older students, he made a comment to a student about her long hair, remarking, ‘You and I have almost the same hairstyle’, [about] which everyone giggled. He joked he had once had long hair like hers and used to floss his teeth with it.
“Everybody laughed. He asked her if she had flossed her teeth with her hair, and she said she hadn’t. He lifted up a lock from her shoulders to show its length, and said, ‘You have the perfect length for flossing’. She giggled with the others.”
Those of us with a longer experience of safeguarding would’ve recommended that, preferably, you just never touch a child under any circumstances.
What happened next was that the girl returned home and told her parents about her day. Having discovered that a priest had touched his daughter’s hair, the father became infuriated. So much so that he called the police. The police responded immediately. They turned up at the parish, investigated, questioned everybody, and decided, based on the facts, that nothing of any significance had taken place and to therefore do nothing further.
This displeased the father, who become even more infuriated and insisted that the police return to the scene of the flossing conversation, and also charge Fr Carlos with battery. It is true jurisprudentially that technically – but only very technically – touching someone can in some circumstances constitute battery. But only very technically speaking, and, in this case, not in any way that remotely approaches a criminal threshold.
So far so bad. But it got worse. For reasons that are not obvious, the diocesan press release that followed the police visit was couched in words that appeared to deliberately give the impression this was an offence potentially involving sexual (not technical) interference.
Behind all this appears to lie a kind of turf war between the parish clergy and the visiting exorcist with his relics. Commentators have pointed out that the diocese of Joliet has an appalling record for sexual abuse by clergy in the past. If you take a psychological slant on this, you might wonder if this was something amounting to displacement activity by the diocesan clergy, hyper sensitively glad of the opportunity to point the finger elsewhere.
If you take a metaphysical view of these things, you might wonder if this was an example of the liberal clergy of the parish, uncomfortable with a visit by a well-known exorcist, accompanied by his relics and directing peoples’ attention to the reality of the supernatural, taking the opportunity to trash him and his tour. You might perhaps take it even as an indication that there could be resident demons glad to be rid of an expert in evangelisation and deliverance.
Whatever diagnostic route you prefer, it is clear that instead of considering the father’s rage as perhaps an indication of over-protective idiosyncratic antipathy towards the Church, the parish clergy seem to have used it as a weapon against their visiting colleague.
<em>The Pillar</em> has been upbraided for going to press so swiftly and feeding the fire of misapprehension. Photographs of the parish pastor who wrote the press release, with his own hands on the shoulders of young children, have begun to emerge. They suggest double standards of an unhappy kind.
Leaving aside the possible envy or discomfort of the parish clergy, the rage of a father told somebody touched his daughter’s hair, the speed of the Internet, as well as the danger of a reputation being lost in a nanosecond forever; this cautionary tale suggests a wider dimension.
It is the fault line between those uncomfortable with the supernatural dimension of the Catholic Faith and those who are committed to a life informed by the long-practised spirituality of the Church.
One of the reasons that exorcists are the new celebrities on the Internet may be because of the way in which what they offer are acts that serve as an antidote to the neopaganism of a post-atheist society.
The conversion of the West was achieved partly because the monk evangelists who spread the faith, such as St Martin de Tours, St Patrick, St Boniface, St Wilfred, et al., were so successful at dealing with the demonic oppression that pagan society suffered from.
Now, with the sudden, if unexpected, emergence of contemporary neopaganism, the experience, expertise, authority and impact of priests effective in the ministry of deliverance has a role to play that may well shape the future of the interaction between a post-Christian society and the Catholic Church.
Lawyers have written to <em>The Pillar</em> asking them to help restore the reputation of Fr Carlos by making it explicit that there was no hint of any sexual misdemeanour in the safeguarding over-excitement that cascaded into a crisis without cause.
It might even be the case, as Fr Gabriel Amorth so memorably inferred, that here there has been an instance where the demons found a platform within the Church even more effectively than they do outside it.
In the meantime, look out for a review of <em>The Exorcist Files</em> in the <em>Catholic Herald</em>, and a guest appearance by Fr Carlos Martins in <em><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/podcasts/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Merely Catholic</mark></a></em>, our own podcast.<br><br><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/euthanasia-and-paganism-go-hand-in-hand/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><em><strong>RELATED: Euthanasia and paganism go hand in hand</strong></em></mark></a>
<em>Photo: An Italian priest performs an exorcism on a man who has been placed in a trance (circa 1950). The neck of the sick man is fenced in by the penitent-ring of Saint Vicinius, and a piece of holy cloth is placed over his heart. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images.)</em>
