The Demonic Case for Catholicism

Joe Heschmeyer examines the subject of demonic activity, posession, and exorcism and the case it presents for the truthfulness of Catholicism.

Transcription:

Demonic possessions, miraculous cures, exorcisms. These things play a pretty big part of the New Testament story as Graham 12 tree points out, the academic dean for the London School of Theology. Of all the activities associated with Jesus in the synoptic gospels, Matthew, mark, and Luke exorcism appears to be the single activity that took the greatest amount of his time. Now, you would not know that listening to the way a lot of modern Christians talk about Christianity, there’s no mention of the supernatural of relics or miracles or exorcisms or any of these things. And yet, as 12th tree points out, we know of no historical or literary figure in antiquity who is said to have conducted so many exorcisms. So how do we square this? Well, 12th tree makes the argument that we’re uncomfortable with exorcisms as moderns. We think of this as kind of a superstitious thing that old people believed in antiquity, and he puts it like this. He says, the fundamental problem is the premise on which exorcism is based, that malevolent spiritual beings, demons exist and that they can invade control and observably impair the health of an individual who in turn can be cured through someone purportedly forcing the spiritual beings to leave.

That is not a claim that sits well with modern Christians anymore than it sits well with modern non-Christians, as well as free says for the vast majority of biblical scholars and theologians, this is tantamount to believe in such entities as elves, dragons, or flat earth. I would go further and say plenty of people believe in one of those three things and still bulk at the idea that the demonic exists and that exorcisms are real. So maybe we could put the problem like this in Luke chapter 11. Jesus says, if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. That is the core message of Jesus. The opening words in Mark’s gospel repentant belief for the kingdom of God is at hand. One of the ways Jesus showed that the kingdom of God was at hand was the exorcisms, that the finger of God is among you in casting out demons.

Now we’re going to get back to Luke 11 and take a closer look at that, but I want to just acknowledge that we have to square these two things as Christians. On the one hand, it’s very clear from reading the New Testament that exorcisms are all over the place and that Jesus is doing a lot of what he believes are exorcisms. On the other hand, it’s clear that we now know that many things that may be old people in the medieval era or the ancient world thought of as spiritual problems are medical or psychological problems. So let’s confront that objection head on because I think that’s at the heart of where we get really uncomfortable with the miraculous claims. So let’s talk about miracles in medicine, one of the most common misconceptions is that the ancients, the people in Jesus’ day, maybe Jesus himself, viewed everything as a spiritual problem, and that is simply not true.

In fact, the biblical evidence points to the opposite. In Matthew chapter four, for instance, we find Jesus’s ministry described this way that he was going about Galilee teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted, various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics and paralytics, and he healed them. So notice what you have there. You have different categories of ailment or illness if you want to put it that way. You’ve got on the one hand, people suffering from a physical condition. On the other hand, you have people suffering from a mental or a neurological condition, and then you have acts for suffering from a spiritual affliction. But there is implicit in this the recognition that those are different categories, that there is a distinction between different types of ailment or illness and some of that, but not all of it is spiritual.

In fact, Jesus describes his own ministry as being a spiritual physician. He says those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. What’s implied within that is that there is such a thing as illness for which you need not a priest or a pastor or an exorcist, but a physician. And so Jesus is applying those words metaphorically to himself. He’s not claiming to be an actual medical doctor here. He’s performing spiritual cures with people, but that presupposes that there is such a thing as medical doctors, as physicians. In fact, those words were in the gospel of Luke and we’re told by St. Paul in Colossians that Luke is the beloved physician. So the ancient world, contrary to our modern kind of prejudices against it, understood that not everything was spirits. Not everything was demons. Now maybe they misdiagnosed some things maybe we do as well, but that doesn’t prove the case against the demonic.

I’d give this example. There’s what’s called psychosomatic disorders, psycho meaning like the psyche, the mental state and soma of the body that there are things that can go wrong where your interior distress, anxiety, that sort of thing can manifest in actual physical ailments. Now, a doctor could look at that and they might misdiagnose it. They might mistake a psychological problem for a physical one or a physical one for a psychological one. Plenty of people have these stories about being misdiagnosed that they had a really chronic condition and they went to the doctor and the doctor said, oh, it’s all in your head. You’re just stressed or you’re anxious or you’re neurotic or whatever else, and they really had a physical problem. Or you have people where way around they go and get a bunch of unnecessary procedures when they really needed some sort of mental health care.

So we can make that distinction now and say, look, there’s these different categories, these different buckets, if you will, in the human person. You have the mind and the body. Well, likewise, the soul may be the reason why things are going wrong, not the mind or the body. It may not be a mental problem, it may not be a bodily problem. It may be a spiritual problem. So I hope that distinction is clear. You don’t have to believe that every problem is demons. The New Testament doesn’t claim that every problem is demons. It quite clearly shows Jesus performing physical healings. It quite clearly shows him doing a lot of healings that don’t involve driving out demons whatsoever. And it quite clearly shows contrary to some modern groups like the Christian scientists that medical doctors are good. This is part of God’s plan. You take care of the body.

So given all of that, I would suggest we want to watch out for modern bias, assuming the people in the past were just silly and stupid. In fact, I would go further than that and say, we need to, as Christians take very seriously the argument from the supernatural and the argument. I’m going to look in this case, it’s the argument from the demonic, but you can make a parallel argument for the miraculous. The arguments I’m going to make work in both directions. Whether it’s a supernatural malevolent force or benevolent force is not really the point. The point is that you have these beings that can’t be explained in a naturalistic material way and that don’t make sense on the grounds of atheism. So let’s talk about that. What is the burden of proof? Why should everyone, Christians, non-Christians take really seriously the demonic claim? To just reiterate and to make sure we’re really clear, Christians do not claim that every ailment is a demon or a ghost or a miracle.

We don’t even claim that all purported, demonic or miraculous or ghostly sightings are real. We rather take them on a case by case basis. Plenty of people think that they saw a ghost and didn’t. Plenty of people think they’re sick and it’s in their head. That doesn’t disprove the idea of sickness. It doesn’t disprove the idea of ghosts. On the flip side, atheist, at least what are called materialistic atheist atheists who believe that the world of matter is all there is, there’s no supernatural or spiritual world. They deny definitionally the reality of ghosts, of demonic possessions, of miracles, of any kind of divine or supernatural action prior to judge in any particular case, right? If Ms. O’Grady says, there was this horrible ailment that I had and the doctor said I had 30 seconds to live, and then I said this prayer and then was miraculously cured and left the hospital, Tristan can say, that’s amazing.

That’s a miracle. Or Well, maybe the doctor’s misdiagnosed you. They’re free to do either one. The atheist is not free to do either one without contradicting their priors, their priors foreclose the question. They’ve prejudged it. GK Chesterton makes this in a powerful way. This point in his book Orthodoxy back in I believe 1905, he says, my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all. I believe in them upon human evidence as I do in the discovery of America, right? An Englishman like Chesterton, he hasn’t seen America directly, but he believes in it on the basis of the testimony of others on that kind of evidence, and this is why he’s going to say he believes in miracles. But then he says, there’s a simple logical fact that we have to get straight somehow or other. An extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and unfairly while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma.

In other words, as if Christians are forced to accept these ridiculous, miraculous claims while atheists and agnostics and skeptics are just coldly evaluating on a case by case basis, and he says that gets things entirely backwards. The fact is quite the other way around. The believers in miracles accept them rightly or wrongly because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them rightly or wrongly because they have a doctrine against them. In other words, take the O’Grady example. I can believe or disbelieve O’Grady because of O’Grady, the atheist rejects O’Grady at the outset because her testimony doesn’t fit with his vision of the world. That’s dogmatism and chesterton’s going to call it out for the dogmatism that it’s, and his words, it says, the open, obvious democratic thing is to believe an old apple woman when she bears testimony to a miracle. Just as you believe an old apple woman when she bears testimony to a murder, the plain popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost, exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord, and he points out, look, you could fill the British museum with evidence uttered by the peasant and given in favor of the coast.

If it comes to human testimony, there’s a choking cataract of human testimony in favor of the supernatural. Now, I want to witness to this. I was once at a bar in Lawrence, Kansas, the home of the University of Kansas, and I was supposed to be meeting up with some people, and I was there by mistake an hour early. And so I ended up talking to the bar regulars who were just there on a weeknight at six or seven or whatever time it was, and somehow the conversation got around to the miraculous and to ghosts and to demons, just kind of those supernatural, eerie sort of sightings. And it seemed that every person in that bar, I’m sure it wasn’t literally everyone, but it was one person after another after another, once they had the safety of saying like, oh, okay, this is a place where we can talk about this openly.

One person after another after another had these stories. Now, does that automatically prove that any or all of the stories are true? It does, but it would be a mistake to assume that there isn’t a lot of testimonial evidence in favor of these things. People claim to have seen a lot of stuff that contradicts atheism. And so you can only as Chesterton argues respond to that if you’re going to reject it. You have to do it in one of two ways. You either reject the peasant story because he’s a peasant or because the story’s a ghost story. If you reject the peasant story because he’s a peasant, he says, you deny the main principle of democracy. You’re just kind of taking this condescending view that, well, this person isn’t as smart as me. They must be gullible. They must believe just anything. You can take that view of your fellow men if you want to, or you could affirm the main principle of materialism, the abstract impossibility of the miracle.

But in either case, you are being the dogmatist here, you’re not evaluating the evidence on his merits, you’re rejecting the evidence because it doesn’t agree with your dogmas. And as Christians, we need to do a better job of calling that out. And as atheists, I think you need to do a better job of recognizing that reality and coming to terms with it that no, it is not true, that atheism just logically follows from the lack of testimony about the supernatural. There’s an abundance of testimony about the supernatural atheism rejects it in most cases, entirely out of hand. We’re going to take a look at one of those cases in a little bit here. Chesterton says it like this. He says, it is weak Christians who accept all actual evidence. It is I rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed, but I’m not constrained by my creed in the matter and looking impartially into certain miracles of medieval and modern times.

I’ve come to the conclusion that they occurred. But notice he’s not not forced to accept them, right? He’s free to handle the evidence, follow wherever it goes, but the person who kind of scoffs who says that could never happen, has already judged the case on a thing that they really have no basis upon which to judge it. And Chesterton points out the arguments here are usually pretty absurdly circular. He says, if I say medieval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles, and this is pretty true, right? You look at ancient and medieval documents, you’re going to find taken for granted in there the idea that certain miracles happen and the person there witnessed them. It’s not some sort of controversial claim. It’s not going to get a lot of headlines. It’s just taken as a given. And yet modern historians are going to accept the testimony about the war, but not about the miracle.

There’s a famous example of this in the crossing of the Rubicon by Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar claimed to have gotten a sign like some sort of supernatural sign that he was supposed to cross. Now, historians don’t believe in the sign, but they do believe the crossing of the Rubicon happened just not the way everyone who witnessed it said it happened. That’s dogmatism. That’s not just following the available evidence. So put a pin on that and I’m going to go back to Chesterton’s argument. So he says, if I say medieval documents attest certain miracles, as much as they attest certain battles, they meaning rationalists answer, but medievals were superstitious. If I want to know on what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in miracles. So you see the circularity if you say you’ll only accept miraculous accounts if told by people who don’t believe in miracles, you’re putting not just a thumb on the scale, you’re seemingly judging the case before it’s before you.

Mike was, he says, if I say a peasant saw a ghost, I’m told, but peasants are so credulous, if I ask why credulous, the only answer is, well that they see ghosts. So you can always look at the underclass or the people who don’t have the same degrees as you and say, oh, those people are still booed and gullible and I’m not going to believe their evidence. But it may be that you are just prejudging the case and that they actually are onto something that you are not. And so Chesterton puts it like this. He imagines an argument that just goes, Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it. And the sailors are only stupid because they’ve seen Iceland say they’ve seen Iceland. That’s what you’re doing here. If the medievals are stupid because they claim miraculous stuff happens or they’re credulous because they claim miraculous stuff happens, that is entirely a circular argument where you say, I’ll take any evidence for the miraculous unless it’s given by someone who believes in the miraculous.

What evidence could possibly satisfy that? Alright, so putting it very simply, the burden of proof looks something like this. As I said before, we don’t claim that all claims of demons or ghosts or miracles are true, but rather the materialist atheists deny the reality of all those claims. So even one contrary case disproves, materialistic atheism, that if you can point to even one. So let’s say there’s 10 alleged miracles, there are 10 alleged demonic possession cases, 10 alleged exorcisms, 10 alleged ghost settings, whatever, it’s maybe you can make a really convincing argument that nine of those are hoaxes or frauds or the person was actually suffering from a mental issue that was misdiagnosed or whatever. It was just an old house that happens to be creaky. But if that one turns out to be a pretty convincing account of ghosts and demons and supernatural in whatever form that is, evidence of the Christian side.

So it’s like this. If I believe that there’s a thing called COVID-19, it doesn’t disprove that to say, I think you’re sick and I don’t think you have covid, which I don’t think I do. I think I’m a little sick. I don’t think I have covid. Well, likewise, I’m doing a video on miraculous stuff and on demonic stuff, and I wake up sick, unable to speak clearly, and one answer is Ah, demons maybe, but it could also just be a physical ailment. I was around people who were sick, and so I’ve just downed a liter and a half of orange juice and we power through with a little more gravitas than usual. I hope The point there is that if even one of those claims turns out to be true for the Christian side, that disproves the atheist side. But if one of those claims turns out not to be true, that’s actually completely consistent with Christianity.

It is fine to say my sickness is probably not demonic possession. It might just be a coincidence and it is fine to say this other case might be different. So what I want to do now is look at one particular case. This is one case I have found really fascinating personally, and your mileage may vary. You might find it interesting, you might find it ridiculous, but what I find fascinating about it is the different reactions Christians and atheists tend to have to it. It’s called the Amons exorcism case. So here’s an introduction to the case from one of the priests involved.

CLIP:

The first time I heard about the incident was when just after the boy walked up the wall backwards, there was a F there about people running out calling for the police security, the chaplain, he called me,

Joe:

I’m sorry father, you were called after the boy did what? Walked up the wall backwards. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the strange things in this case. So this case, credit words do Marissa Kowski of the Indianapolis Star broke this case. She later became more famous for breaking the case of Gary Nassar and his abuse of the gymnast for team USA gymnastics. But at the time, back in 2014 when she broke this story, it was by far her biggest kind of breakthrough, and I’m actually going to talk about that a little bit later on because she had to work against some institutional forces to present this really astonishing, and I think it’s fair to say at times incredible sort of case. And I mean that in the literal sense of both amazing, but also hard to believe and some people refuse to believe it, but it has two things going for it as we’re going to see, we’re really hard to explain facts and a number of apparently unrelated and reputable sort of witnesses.

So I’m going to give you just some of the passages from this story, which was picked up from the Indianapolis store star two USA today. She said a woman and three children claimed to be possessed by demons. A nine-year-old boy walking backward up a wall in the presence of a family case manager and hospital nurse. So it’s not just that he’s walking backwards up the wall, it’s that you don’t have to take mom or grandma’s word for it. The people who are checking on him because of these claims of demonic possession are writing about this stuff and official reports. And then she quotes the police captain for Gary Indiana, Charles Austin saying it was the strangest story he’d ever heard. And he was initially skeptical. He’s been a veteran of the police department for 36 years at this point, and he doesn’t originally believe it. He thinks for some reason she must be trying to use this somehow to make money.

But after several visits to the home, he comes away a believer and we’re going to see some reasons why he and particular seemed to have been targeted and has a good cause to come away, a believer. But she says not everyone involved with the family was inclined to believe its incredible story and many readers will find amman’s supernatural claims impossible to accept. And I like that phrasing because I think it gets to that issue that if you’re following this just on the evidence, if this was any other kind of news story, if someone said, there’s been a horrible massacre, it’s unthinkable, and yet here are these police officers and medical professionals and eyewitnesses and everything else who all attest to the same thing, we would be heavily inclined to believe that it was real. But when it’s instead these children were possessed by demons or this house is haunted, well then we don’t want to believe it.

But that’s just an out of hand dismissal. Dogmatically not an evaluation of the evidence. So I like that she calls it just impossible to accept, not hard to believe or anything like that because the claims themselves, if you get rid of the bias, seem compelling. Let’s read on, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. She says, whatever the cause of the creepy occurrences at be fellow family, whether they were seized by a systematic delusion or demonic possession, it led to one of the most unusual cases ever handled by the Department of Child Services. So for those of you not familiar, the Department of Child Services checks in on families. If there’s a reason to suspect a child may be in danger, malnutrition, abuse, neglect, those kinds of things, in this case when you’ve got kids saying, I’m possessed by a demon, DCS is going to get involved, they’re wondering, is this a cry for help because of something going on in the home?

But notice here, again, I really like the reporter’s language that the options really are demonic possession or systematic delusion that you can’t just say, oh, the mom’s crazy, or the grandma’s crazy. You also say the doctors are crazy and the medical professionals and the police are crazy, and department child services, everybody’s crazy. Everybody in Gary is just crazy. Now, you can do that if you want to, but it is less probable every person you have to add to the conspiracy to be able to pass it off as a counter explanation to no, no, the people saw what they saw and are reliable eyewitnesses. But again, I don’t want to get ahead of us. As Maria Kotowski points out, there’s nearly 800 pages of official records between DCS and the police and medical professionals, and there’ve been more than a dozen interviews with police, DCS, personnel, psychologists, family members, and a Catholic priest. That’s a lot of people to be involved in a fabrication for no apparent reason, people that don’t know each other.

Furthermore, she says the family story is made only more bizarre because it involves a DCS intervention, a string of psychological evaluations, a police investigation, and ultimately a series of exorcisms. We’re going to talk about several of those things. Just know I’m not even giving all the details from this pretty astonishing sort of story. You can find it online, but I wanted to start with one of the hardest to explain details. This is from the Grandma Campbell. She runs into the bedroom and her 12-year-old granddaughter and a friend are standing in there and the mom monds and Campbell, the grandma say the 12-year-old was levitating above the bed unconscious. Now, from what I can tell, this family is Protestant. And so their response to this pretty obviously supernatural, demonic sort of thing, the daughter’s floating while asleep is to reach out to their local Protestant churches and most of them refuse to listen.

This is part of that modern bias against the supernatural that I think we see eventually though you get some questionable sort of help. So we’re told that officials at one church told them the Carolina Street House had spirits in it. They recommend the family clean the home with bleach and ammonia, then use oil to draw crosses on every door and window. So I like that they’re aware that holy oil is important or that blessed objects are important, but bleach and ammonia and all of this, this is what you get when you get rid of the traditional spiritual tools of Christianity and then just make new ones up. Now, that’s a much bigger conversation, but needless to say, these kind of DIY Protestant solutions didn’t work at the church’s suggestion. Nevertheless, Amon said she poured olive oil on her three children’s hands and feeds and smeared oil in the shape of crosses on their foreheads.

And so she described getting some short-term relief, but not really. It comes back worse than before. And then she gets worse advice. She then reaches out to two clairvoyants who claim that the family’s home was being besieged by more than 200 demons. And were told this explanation made sense to Campbell and Ammons because it meshed with their Christian faith. And I just want to say here, don’t do that. Don’t mess around with mediums and psychics and ghost hunters and people who are playing around with the occult that don’t have the spiritual authority to do so or are doing it in kind of a flip dangerous and even OC cult-ish black magic sort of way. Now, some of you’re going to hear that and just think like, wow, you are a crazy person. But no, if this stuff is real at all, opening those doors to it is incredibly dangerous.

So needless to say, this also doesn’t work. So then they take the kids to the doctor to see what’s going on, and while they’re there, the sons, remember it’s two boys and a girl. The sons cursed the doctor and demonic voice is raging at him. So fair enough, you can imagine, well, maybe the kids are just doing a scary voice. But then medical staff said the youngest boy was lifted and thrown into the wall with nobody touching him. And this is again in the official DCS report. And again, we’re not just taking the mom and grandma’s word for it. We have the people at the doctor’s office, the medical staff who witnessed this. So at this point, somebody calls DCS the Department of Child Services and they want to find out if there’s any neglect or abuse going on in the home, which look, I applaud this.

This is a smart move. Maybe all of these demonic seeming stuff is somehow related to neglect or abuse. Now, I don’t know how neglect or abuse gets to levitation or kids going and flying into walls, but you want to do things the right way. You want to check to make sure. And so the caller who calls into DCS is afraid that the mom has mental illness because the kids are claiming they have demons, so they’re convinced, oh, she must be encouraging them. So in any case, DCS assigns a family case manager by the name of Valerie Washington to investigate the case. She writes up in her official report that there’s no signs of abuse. The kids appear to be healthy, there’s no marks or bruises, and the mom seems to be of sound mind.

Then you get the weirder stuff. In Washington’s report, she talks about how the 9-year-old had a weird grin, and this story is corroborated by the nurse. The 9-year-old had a weird grin and walked backwards up a wall to the ceiling. He then flipped over Campbell, the grandma landing on his feet, he never let go of his grandmother’s hand. So that’s one of those really striking sort of claims that there’s a reason the priest leads with that. There’s a reason the Indiana Star, Indianapolis star story leads with that. That is a shocking sort of thing, watching a kid walk up the wall backwards. And so they interviewed Ms. Walker about this and she said he walked up the wall, flipped over her and stood there. There’s no way he could have done that. Now later police asked Washington whether he had run up the wall, is this some sort of parkour acrobatic trick?

And she said, no, he glided backwards on the floor, wall and ceiling. This is all in the official report. Again, you’ve got hundreds of pages of this stuff and there’s more. But I want to give just a couple other kind of details. So at one point the officers are investigating the house and on the main floor they see from the Venetian blinds an oil like substance, and they couldn’t figure out why it was dripping. Where is this oil like substance coming from that’s dripping through the blinds? And so maybe the mom and the grandma put it there right earlier they were advised to put oil and weird stuff all over the house, so reasonable to think maybe they’re the source of it. So just to make sure the police clean it up and then guard the room for 25 minutes. So the room’s sealed for 25 minutes and stood nearby.

So nobody’s getting in and out of the room. So nobody’s sneaking in there and just pouring oil for whatever reason on the Venetian blinds, when they go back in, the oil has reappeared. So from somewhere oil is materializing on these Venetian blinds. This is one of those things that seem to be pretty influential and getting the police to take this extremely seriously. But there’s more than that. During the interview with Campbell, again, the grandma, one of the police officers audio recorders malfunctions according to the police records. The power light flashed indicate the batteries were dying even though the officer had placed fresh batteries in the recorder earlier that day. Just kind of the weird sort of like, why is that happening? And again, you can explain that piece of evidence away by itself. It’s not nearly as hard to explain away, I just put batteries in this and it’s dying.

That’s easier to explain away than a kid levitating or walking up a wall backwards. But it adds to a pretty coherent picture. Another officer recorded audio and when he played it back, heard an unknown voice whispering, Hey, creepy again, it’s in the police report. That officer also took photos of the house and when he developed them or well, when he looked at them, there was a cloudy white image in the upper right corner. When they enlarged the photo, the cloud appeared to resemble a face. The police records say the enlargement also revealed a second green image that police say looked like a female. So again, this is not like, Hey, the local guy trying to get his sentence lighter is testifying against his fellow inmate. This is not the kind of stuff where you say, oh yeah, well that person has a really good motive to lie.

I don’t know what motive the police have to come up with this bizarre of a story. But more than that, captain Austin said the photos he snapped with his iPhone also seemed to have strange silhouettes. And he, the radio and his police issued Ford malfunction on the way home. So he’s driving home and the radio doesn’t work, and later on he gets home and the garage door doesn’t work. And then in his own car, the driver’s seat starts to go back and forth. And so I think he’s sufficiently spooked in, is convinced that this is real. So I give all this, not to say this definitely happened, but to say this is a kind of case that I think someone could easily evaluate and say, seems to me more probable than not that there’s an actual demonic occurrence going on here and someone dogmatically dismissing this.

I don’t understand why. Where are they coming up with that? On what basis do you just throw all this information out? So eventually, nine months after the original report, the reporter has a kind of story behind the story piece where she explains how she ended up writing this story and the institutional objections that she faced. And she says this, let me just say that my editors had reservation. None of us was willing to publish a story that could be perceived as purely sensational, nothing more. If the story did not include a level of skepticism, it could undermine her credibility. My editors wanted a skeptical voice, but not just any skeptical voice, someone close to the situation. So did I. Problem was I couldn’t find one that is itself really telling that almost everyone who’s close to this situation comes away convinced this is real demonic possession regardless of their profession, regardless of their level of education.

Now, eventually she finds two, I believe it’s clinical psychologists who are dubious, who think that the kids are just performing and that the mom is putting them up to it. And fine, especially if you’re just evaluating the kids, that’s totally reasonable to a psychologist. Doesn’t have to explain away the levitation, doesn’t have to explain away. Walking up the walls backwards. Doesn’t have to explain any of those things because that’s outside of their purview. And I’m sure a kid acting in a demonic way to someone who’s not open to that possibility. I’m just very easy to say this is just a fake. And maybe it’s, again, as a Christian, I’m not required to believe this is real. I’m inclined to say it’s real, but nothing in the evidence forces me to that conclusion. So I just want to point out here that she is doing this story and she hits, the first obstacle she hits is everyone thinks this thing happened, but I can’t publish the story if we don’t include somebody skeptical of it.

And so eventually she’s able to find two skeptical people. But then she said that after it was published, some people including in the journalism community criticized the star for the way the article was written. They felt that she should have taken a, these people are crazy point of view. And she said, I deliberately wrote it straight, not supporting one side over the other so people could come to their own conclusions. She doesn’t do it as a fun Halloween feature, although this piece where she does the story behind the story was definitely released on Halloween. But the point is that it’s not just like a, let’s pretend this stuff is real for a day and then laugh at people who take it seriously. She’s actually doing reporting and she’s getting criticized by reporters for taking this seriously enough to report the way she would anything else.

And she refuses to say whether she believes in it or not, but she does say it’s worth noting. The many of the details I published came from court records written by officials connected to Amazon’s case and to falsify such records is crime as one official put it, he and the DCS family case managers wouldn’t toss their careers away to perpetuate an elaborate hoax. So I got to say, I think her take is completely sound. I think that is a very reasonable place to end up. It is difficult to see why you would have a systematic hoax being perpetrated by people who have a lot to lose, nothing to gain like DCS is not getting any better or the medical staff or anything. Nobody else is going to profit off of this by lying about it. And they’re testifying to these things that are actually kind of embarrassing In a world that views miraculous and supernatural claims as silly, it’s as if they all testified to seeing an elf or the flat earth that use the earlier examples.

Those kind of things are not going to help you professionally. And so at great expense to themselves, they’re testifying to these things knowing that some people are going to criticize and lambast them. And it was worth reading the comment. Now, I don’t think you can actually read the comments anymore. For whatever reason, USA today and Indianapolis Star have updated their websites. But back when this was originally written, I captured some of the comments of people who had read the articles to see, well, how would atheists respond to this? Because as a believer I’m saying this is a fascinating case and I’m wanting to know how does someone with a different set of priors than mine analyze this evidence? And I was struck by a couple of comments that really captured the kind of tone. So one person said, group hysteria, same way those kornfield preachers heal the sick, devout believers in their gullibility.

Nobody’s really cured in the belief there’s a bearded guy hiding in the clouds and a red dude living under our feets. He says, feats makes these gullible people easily swayed to stupidity. So notice it’s just this incredibly condescending attitude that Chesterton warns about Everyone is dumb, these hicks, these cornfield preachers. Give me a break. You’re the person going out there and saying publicly, you don’t understand Christianity to mean that there’s God is a guy hiding in the clouds and the devil is a red dude living under our feets. That is not any kind of adult Christians’ understanding of heaven and hell. And so I mentioned that to say that you can easily write off this as group hysterics, but it’s really difficult to understand how or why some people made what frankly seemed kind of racially charged comments about how they were probably crack smokers.

I don’t know why they thought crack, but it’s like really? So the police were smoking crack and the people at DCS and people at the hospital. So all that’s to say you can’t just kind of look down your nose at Amons and Campbell because there’s a lot of other people testifying that they’re telling the truth. One more comment from the comments. Someone said, this never happened. And yes, I’m saying that everybody involved is lying. And I just want to point out that that is a ridiculous kind of conspiracy theory if you believe that that is as absurd as the things that you think believing in the demonic is akin to. If you think everybody’s involved in this mass conspiracy theory to lie, that’s literally what it is. It’s a conspiracy to lie about this fact for, again, no apparent cain, it’s just what a baffling kind of conclusion to come to.

And so I mentioned this partly to say, well, if you’re an atheist watching this channel, I thank you for making it this far, how would you square the evidence? Don’t just square some of it. Try to figure out all the different players involved, Amazon Campbell, the folks at the hospital, the folks at DCS, the police officers, and then figure out, well, is there a reason all of them would be wrong about all of this? And I haven’t even gotten into the priest who obviously is a figure that should carry a certain amount of credibility. So let’s turn to him next and look at how the demonic evidence supports the Catholic claim. Now, some of what I’m about to say is going to make less sense to an atheist than to an non-Catholic Christian. So either two, I’ve been focusing more on the fact that I think Christians have a much clearer argument to explain reality like the Amons case than atheists do that rather than being ashamed of supernatural claims, that these are actually something that are much harder to explain away if you’re an atheist and if you’re a Christian because it’s implausible that all of these stories all the time would be delusions or lies or whatever.

Even if some of them are, you can’t extrapolate that to say all of them are. But what I think is underappreciated amongst Christians is the role of Catholics in particular and especially Catholic priests. So the priest in this case remember that oily liquid that was dripping from the Venetian blinds, he told the police that the liquid was a manifestation of a paranormal or demonic presence. And at this point he writes a report to the bishop requesting permission to perform an exorcism. And there’s two things to know. Number one, the bishop in 21 years had apparently not approved an exorcism, at least according to the priest. And two, the bishop initially declined. He refused the ability to do a major exorcism. So the priest is able to do what’s called a minor exorcism because you don’t need Episcopal approval for that. But after that, he then goes back to the bishop and the bishop eventually gives him permission to perform an exorcism on amons on the mom.

And the article very helpfully actually notes that the rituals actually the same as in a minor exorcism, but it’s more powerful because it has the backing of the Catholic church and that this is the way the priest was explaining it. Ultimately, the priest actually does three major exorcisms, two in English and then one in Latin. And after the Latin one, it’s successful. Now I think there’s a lot you could take from that. One of the things you could take from that is something that I had remarked to me recently. Friend of mine who’s a convert from Protestantism was talking about another friend of his who is a Protestant pastor still. And that this friend of his had talked about his admiration for things like exorcism cases that if he got something like this, he would not have any difficulty referring the person to a Catholic priest because he recognized they had a spiritual authority that he as a Protestant pastor didn’t have.

And in this story, none of the Protestant pastors are able to help. They either don’t believe her, they offer bad advice. The Catholic priest, even with a minor exorcism, can’t accomplish this. It takes a major exorcism with the backing of the church. Now you get into the whole English first Latin ones, the Latin major exorcism is the one that’s ultimately effective, make it that what you will. But it’s pretty fascinating. So I think this proves the Catholic case or at least supports the Catholic case. We’ll say in two ways. Number one, well go to Luke 11. Jesus is casting out a demon from someone who’s mute. And when the demon is cast out, the man speaks and the people marveled. But there’s some skepticism. There’s two categories of skepticism. One group says he casts out demons by baba the prince of demons. They’re fine with the demonic, but they’re convinced he’s using demonic authority to do this.

The other group says, give us a sign from heaven. They’re a little skeptical seemingly of this even being real. So you have two skeptical responses. One says, as isn’t real there says this is real, but it’s actually demonic and neither are two of the reactions you get to Catholic exorcisms today. You get the folks who say, that’s not real. This is just a psychological thing or a mental health thing or a physical thing. It’s not really a spiritual thing. But then the other thing you get is you get people who say, yeah, exorcisms are actually proof that the Catholic church is doing evil stuff. Like we don’t do exorcisms as Protestants, and you do as Catholics because you’re messed up with the occult. And that is a frankly baffling sort of position to take because in Luke 11, we see Jesus responding. Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste.

He’s quoting Abraham Lincoln. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I’m just kidding about that. But this is where the house divided kind of language comes from, that a kingdom divided against itself or a house divided against itself is laid to waste. It doesn’t stand. And if Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand for you say that I cast out demons by Bibo. If I cast out demons by Bibo, how by whom? Do your sons cast them out? Therefore they shall be your judges. And then this line that I quoted earlier. But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. So you can’t say that the Catholic priesthood is evil or the Catholic exorcisms are evil without running a foul of Jesus’s argument here in Luke 11.

Now, another way we could apply this is by looking at actual evil. So think about, for instance, black masses. If you’re familiar with these, these are these satanic rituals that mock and parody the mass, and they’ll sometimes steal the host from mass. They’ll steal the Eucharist and just perform unspeakable sacrilege. The fact that the satanists don’t like Catholicism is a tremendous argument in favor of Catholicism because the devil isn’t trying to cast out the devil. You can’t logically say that the masses evil in a work of Satan and also be like and satanists hate it for some reason. Well, if you understand anything of what Jesus just said, bebo is not driving himself out. And so if he hates the mass, that’s a really good sign that the mass is of God and not of the devil. Likewise, exorcisms demons don’t like those. So those things point to the reality and the truth of these Catholic things.

Now, there’s one more thing I didn’t point out there because Jesus says, by whom do your own exorcist drive them out? That there was this practice not super common, but it did occur of Jewish exorcisms. And we have some indication that there might’ve been exorcisms even in the name of Solomon, which is pretty fascinating. But in any case, there’s these Jewish exorcisms. We also know that there are exorcisms outside of the visible bounds of the church. And this becomes a point of contention that in Mark nine, St. John goes up to Jesus since his teacher. We saw men casting out demons in your name, and we verbatim him because he was not following us in Jesus’ response. Do not forbid him for no one who does a mighty work in my name, we’ll be able soon after to speak evil of me, for he that is not against us is for us.

So as Catholics, we don’t want to take the exclusive claim that you can’t have any sort of spiritual deliverance or exorcisms or anything like that outside of the visible bounds of the church. That clearly is not the case even back in the times of the Bible. But I do want to suggest a note of caution because even though Jesus says He who is not against us is with us elsewhere, he says He who’s not with us is against us. That somewhere we have to harmonize those two sentiments that were clearly meant to be read together. And so in Acts 19, we hear about these Jewish exorcists again. So in Acts 19, we’re first told about relics, which I alluded to earlier, and which are related to but not squarely in the middle of this topic, that God is doing mighty miracles by the hands of St.

Paul so that even his handkerchiefs and aprons were carried away from his body to the sick in diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them. So relics are very powerful. They have important roles in both physical and spiritual healing. That’s right there in Acts 1911 and 12. You should have relics. And if your church doesn’t have relics, you’re not following the early apostolic practice. But then the next verse says, some of the Jewish itinerant preachers, ex, excuse me, undertook to pronounce the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirit saying, Iju you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches.

So there are seven guys who are doing this and it doesn’t go well in Acts 19 verse 15. In evil spirit in evil spirit answers Him, Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you and in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, mastered all of them and overpowered them so they fled out of that house naked and wounded. So why do I say all this? That without denying the possibility that there can be some kind of spiritual authority that other Christians possess, it is clearly not to the same degree and to the same level that you’re going to find in the Catholic priesthood. And I think the Amons case amply demonstrates that. In fact, we want to be careful of coming away from this saying, I’m going to just start driving out demons and rebuking them and casting them out because that is not what we’re actually told to do.

In the epistle of Jude, he warns against heretics who take that position. He says in like manner, these men in their dreamings defile the flesh, reject authority and revile the glorious one. But when the Archangel Michael, continuing with the devil disputed about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a reviving judgment upon him, but said the Lord rebuke you. In other words, if you’re saying, I rebuke you, I drive you out, I do all this stuff in your own name as a regular Christian, Judah is saying, stop doing that. You don’t actually have that authority. And he says, these men reil, whatever they do not understand, and by those things that they know by instinct as irrational animals do, they’re destroyed. This is bad. This is spiritually a dangerous place to be. If you have aerated this authority to yourself, this is not your authority.

And we even saw the difference between the minor exorcism and the major one, which needed the approval of the church, that this is not just the priest as an individual driving out demons and the Jewish exorcists who even calling on the name of St. Paul weren’t unable to drive out demons are further witness to this. So I want to give that as kind of a word of warning and caution. So with that said, how should we consider the demonic three basic takeaways? Number one, don’t blindly believe every purported miracle or possession, ghost or exorcism, et cetera, but be open to the fact that some of them are real. Don’t be blindly opposed to all of them, just like you wouldn’t want to blindly accept all of them. Number two, these spiritual realities point to the presence of the kingdom of God on earth. Remember, the figure of God is among us and the reality of both God and demonic forces opposed to him.

You can’t have possession without having the devil, and you can’t have the devil without having God. So the reason God allows these things to exist seemingly is in part because they are in fact a witness to him. Third exorcisms point to the reality of the Catholic priesthood just as black masses point to the reality of the mass, that it’s not just that we have a belief in God in a generic sense, but we’re further given some light to believe in the priesthood and the mass. But then the final thing I would leave you with is one of my favorite passages from Philippians four. We don’t want to obsess about this stuff in an unhealthy sort of way. St. Paul says, have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God and the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there’s anything worthy of praise, think about these things. It is possible to become overly fixated on the demonic and the evil and the wicked. That’s true in a secular sense. You can just obsess with all the bad news going on in the world, and it’s true in a spiritual sense. You can look at all the supernatural evil in the world. I would suggest that’s not healthy for you, fixate on the true, the good and the beautiful because that is your ultimate destiny to be in union with God who is true, good, and beautiful, not to spend your time gazing upon the devil in his works. I hope that helps. I hope it’s giving you something to chew on wherever you are in your spiritual journey. I’m very interested in what you have to say, so please jump in in the comments below. I really appreciate the comments and I do my best to read them and kind of follow them. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.