Writing in Newsweek International, Barbie Nadeau
scoffs at the Vatican’s preservation of its exorcism
rite. But judging by the rise of demonic cults cited in the article
— “Interest in satanic worship has risen sharply across Europe
recently; there are 5,000 Italians involved in 650 active satanic
cults in the country, more than double the number a decade ago” —
the Church’s exorcism rite is needed more than ever. If enlightened
Europe scoffs at Vatican exorcisms, it is not because Europeans
deny the existence of Satan; it is because they don’t want to fight
him.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose, released in Europe in early
October, occasioned Nadeau’s article. The movie is based on a
European legal case from the 1970s involving Anneliese Michel, a
twentyish German woman, now something of a folk hero, who died
after months of exorcisms.
The wholly secularized German legal authorities blamed her death
on benighted exorcists and her reactionary Catholic parents, who
considered post-Vatican II liberalism to be scandalous and stupid.
(According to media accounts, Anneliese agreed with them. Before
her possession began, she was doing penance for the progressive
creeps rapidly filling up the Church in Germany.) If she had only
been left to the ministrations of science and medicine, her death
would never have happened, went the German court’s reasoning, and
the exorcists and parents were convicted of criminal negligence.
The court declared Anneliese, who had requested the exorcists after
medicine failed to help her, the victim of “Doctrinaire
Induction.”
The verdict illustrated secular Europe’s morbid hostility to
religious freedom and Germany’s fanatical attempts to uphold a
secularist culture that blocks out any acknowledgement of the
spiritual realm. Most Germans now, including most Protestants and a
third of Catholics, don’t believe in life after death. And it is an
open question how many Catholic bishops in Germany believe in life
after death. The faithless cowards who populate much of the German
episcopate offered zero help during Anneliese Michel’s trial;
worried that they would appear insufficiently progressive, they
made sure to distance themselves from the Church’s teaching on
Satan and exorcism.
In Hollywood’s very loose but effective adaptation of the Michel
trial (the movie transfers the setting to the American Midwest and
restricts the criminal prosecution to the exorcist), this theme of
Church cowardice is commendably taken up. The movie makes it clear
that the typical modern bishop would rather maintain the good
opinion of the secular world than defend the Church’s doctrine on
Satan. In the movie, consequently, that Emily Rose’s edifying story
gets told at all is not because of the local bishop but in spite of
him. The archdiocese is content to let the honorable exorcist rot
in jail because he refuses to agree to the pinched, cowardly
defense its lawyers prescribed for him, a defense which would
forbid him from talking about the reality of Satan and the Church’s
powers of exorcism.
In the Michel trial, the German bishops actually used its
outcome to call on the Vatican to rewrite the exorcism ritual so
that it would incorporate all the proper secularist assumptions.
The number of exorcists in Germany can be counted on one hand,
thanks to a Catholic episcopate there that is now far, far to the
left of Germany’s historic liberal Protestant reformers. The
Vatican has rightly refused all these calls, which upsets the glib
jackasses at Newsweek who consider satanic possession to
be a punchline to a joke.
But while Newsweek mocks the ancient practice of
exorcism, at least a few people in Hollywood realize that the only
successful movies about Catholicism are the ones that take ancient
traditions like it seriously. While modern church “reforms” are
good fodder for comedy, they can’t command the attention of an
audience for a drama. In The Godfather and The
Exorcist, and now in The Exorcism of Emily Rose,
Hollywood recognizes that in order to rivet audiences it has to
draw upon ancient traditions of the Church, which contain cultural
power because they derive from a comprehension of the reality of
evil rather than the liberal fatuousness upon which modern “reform”
is based.
Europe, according to Newsweek, is too enlightened for
the Vatican’s exorcisms. But it is not too enlightened to host a
growing number of demonic cults. The Devil’s greatest triumph, it
is said, was to convince man that he doesn’t exist. But this saying
needs revision. Europe displays an even greater triumph for the
Devil — not ignorance of his designs but respect for them.
