NO POWER OF HELL: EXORCISM IN THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH
"Christ Conquering Satan." Photo courtesy of the British Museum. Woodwork by Hieronymus Wierix.
Of the ritual books for sale by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, only one must be purchased through a local bishop. Exorcisms and Related Supplications is the official English-language translation of the Roman Catholic Church’s rite of major exorcism. Published in 2017, some twenty years after the Vatican released the first substantial revision of its Latin exorcism liturgy since 1614, the text’s fifty-odd pages of prayers and Scripture readings equip bishop- and priest-exorcists to deliver members of the Christian faithful from demonic possession. In the first of two supplementary appendices, an additional seven pages outline the procedure exorcists are to follow when demonic entities penetrate places and objects or otherwise persecute the Church. And if a lay Catholic feels they are a target of the devil’s assaults, but do not require a proper exorcism, there are resources for this person, too. These take the form of a second appendix containing “Supplications which may be used by the faithful privately in their struggle against the power of darkness,” the only section of the book that is publicly available.
But if a copy of Exorcisms and Related Supplications is uniquely difficult to obtain, a Roman Catholic exorcism is not. By all accounts, in fact, the number of exorcisms is on the rise both in the United States and globally—so much so that, in 2005, the Vatican launched a special course to train would-be exorcists in the theory and practice of combatting malevolent supernatural agents. Generally speaking, the Roman Catholic Church reserves its rite of major exorcism for baptized Roman Catholics who suffer, as the preface to Exorcisms puts it, “with God’s permission, … [from] particular torment or possession which the devil inflicts.” As one Vatican-educated exorcist explained to me, this restriction is both pragmatically as well as theologically motivated: until a person is baptized, Satan has a legitimate claim to their soul and body; and this claim makes it substantially less likely that any diabolical agents possessing them will recognize and submit to the authority the Church exercises in its ministry of exorcism. The Roman Catholic Church has nonetheless acknowledged the ecumenical need for Christian ministers skilled in this ministry, and, in 2019, began admitting members of other Christian denominations to its “Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation Course.”
While minor exorcisms feature in The Episcopal Church’s baptismal liturgy—baptizands are asked to “renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God;” and the Celebrant prays that God would liberate those professing their faith “from the way of sin and death”—Anglicans in the United States have been comparatively less invested than their Roman Catholic counterparts in defining and disseminating protocols for handling cases of possession that transpire after Christian initiation. The Episcopal Church’s Book of Occasional Services (2018) treats of major exorcism in a brief section, instructing those “in need of” the rite to consult a bishop by way of their local priest. “The bishop [is] then [to] determine whether exorcism is needed, who is to officiate at the rite, and what prayers or other formularies are to be used.” In practice, these instructions mean that how Episcopalians handle instances of demonic possession varies materially from diocese to diocese. One bishop I spoke to, for example, favors the creation of bespoke exorcism liturgies to meet the unique pastoral needs of each demon-afflicted person. While another diocese maintains a team of specialists, trained in the identification and expulsion of demonic agents, to deploy as needed.
This patchwork approach has implications for more than just Episcopal pastoral care. The Church’s liturgical rites structure its common life. As such, they are among the principal nuclei around which Christian theological reflection constellates. What’s lost, then, in the absence of a rite of major exorcism à la Exorcisms and Related Supplications is not only a mechanism for ensuring that the ways in which Episcopal clergy deliver the demon-possessed uphold the highest standards of care. It is also a clear reason for Episcopal theologians to take up demonology as an area of study relevant to the Christian life post-baptism, that is, to the lives Christians lead as members of the body of Christ.
Demons do not, after all, cease to exist just because our liturgies ignore them; nor does the harm they cause become less severe. Instead, the current state of affairs simply makes it more difficult for Episcopalians to discern the presence of demonic agents, and to properly attribute their mischief to its supernatural source. Absent liturgical guides to frame our thinking on the subject, we too easily tend to imagine demons in terms colored by Exorcist-esque Hollywood theatrics; or as mere metaphors for nefarious social forces that are, ultimately, of human creation. In the former case, the banality of the demonic—and, for Christians at least, of combatting the same—is lost. In the latter, it is the cosmic scale and metaphysical depth of the demonic’s reach, resources, and preternatural strength. The risk, either way, is not that we will ascribe to the machinations of Satan’s legions too many of the often-terrifying evils that afflict people during the course of their everyday lives, but that we will ascribe too few.
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The Book of Occasional Services is not entirely without its own exorcism liturgy, although it does not bill the rite in such terms. Instead, the text folds exorcistic prayers into its “Celebration for a Home,” a ritualized procession that begins in the living room. Participants gather there for an opening collect; readings from Scripture; and, “when appropriate,” an invocation that calls forth “the mighty power of the Holy God [to] be present in this place to banish from it every unclean spirit, to cleanse it from every residue of evil, and to make it a secure habitation for those who dwell in it.” The presider then guides the home’s inhabitants through the dwelling’s individual spaces, leading them in prayers that God would be present within each one.
This two-step process—of casting out the demonic and inviting in the divine—recalls Jesus’ warning in the Gospel of Matthew. There, he cautions that an unclean spirit, having been driven from a person, will return; and, finding its sometime residence “unoccupied, swept clean and put in order,” will re-inhabit that individual in the company of “seven other spirits more wicked than itself” (Matthew 12:44—45 NIV). It is not enough, in other words, simply to banish the demonic’s personal manifestations if, in so doing, one leaves a place vacant. For the unoccupied space, however clean and orderly its interior might be for a moment, remains a viable site of demonic infestation; and on the demons’ return in greater numbers, “the last state of the person is worse than the first” (Matthew 12:45). One must take the further step of filling the place to which those demons staked their claim with a presence capable of keeping them at bay—which is to say, one must claim the space for the Kingdom of God.
Thus it is for people. And the reason why in Holy Baptism, for instance, asking baptizands to renounce Satan is not an end in itself, but merely a prelude to God’s bringing them into the communion of saints through water and the movement of the Spirit. Thus is it, too, for the homes Christians inhabit, as the service of “Celebration for a Home” affirms by way of its liturgical structure.
In providing for the exorcism of domiciles, The Episcopal Church grants that to be a Christian is no guarantee of freedom from demonic assault; indeed, that it is within the power of Satan’s agents to gain a purchase on that most familiar of places, believers’ homes. But the church concedes as much agonistically, affirming diabolical might so as the better to contest it. For such is the promise of an exorcistic rite, that, in the face of evil’s manifestations, Christians have recourse to the received tradition of their branch of the body of Christ. Provided, of course, that those same believers first recognize their need for such aid; which is to say, recognize as such those situations in which they are dealing with malicious supernatural forces beyond their individual power to overcome.
Insofar as the prescription it offers implies a diagnosis, the “Celebration for a Home” itself guides those familiar with its contents to this moment of recognition. Codifying The Episcopal Church’s remedy for cases of demonic infestation, the text invites Episcopalians to presume with it that such events occur with sufficient frequency to warrant a defined, institutional response. So banal is the experience of encountering, and combatting, demons in one’s home—the liturgy implies—that it does not even warrant a special service. When praying God’s blessing over a home, individual Episcopalians should consequently prepare themselves, as a matter of course, to drive Satan’s legions from the space first; after all, if not they, then a number of their siblings in Christ, have found it necessary to do so.
“Celebration for a Home” in this way creates its own necessity. Be vigilant, it warns; demons might well be occupying your abode. Watch out! They might even be occupying your body, or attempting to—if, that is, the parallelism between home and body is as my reading suggests.
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There is nothing especially mysterious or spectacular about the service of “Celebration for a Home.” Demons register within it, but as seemingly quotidian entities – creatures it is often necessary to dispatch, but procedurally, as a prelude to performing the task ultimately at hand. And, in this case, that task is to call forth—as one of the prayers reads—“the gladness of [God’s] presence.” It is to delight, you might otherwise say, in the glory of God as it manifests in the spaces of our lives; rather than to dwell on those things that will to keep us from doing so.
Demonology is, simply, the science of parsing evil through sustained attention to evil’s personal manifestations. Rites of exorcism advance this work insofar as they communicate the Church’s understanding of the place those manifestations occupy within the world, generally, and the Christian life, particularly. This is so whether those rites come as standalone liturgies, like the ones contained in Exorcisms and Related Supplications; or exorcistic elements within larger wholes, like “Celebration for a Home.” In neither example is there any doubt about whether Christ’s Church, intervening on Christians’ behalf against whatever wickedness besets them, will prevail against the gates of hell: When Christians prayerfully contest demonic power, regardless of the domain within which they do so, their victory—which is, ultimately, God’s victory—is preordained. And it is this understanding of evil, as not simply ubiquitous but as everywhere already defeated, that exorcistic liturgies, major and minor, disseminate amongst the faithful.
The Roman Catholic Rite of Major Exorcism is in this respect exemplary. Beginning softly, with the priest-exorcist offering a quiet prayer to invoke divine protection, the service soon reaches a suitably dramatic liturgical crescendo. When the time arrives for the exorcist to cast the devil out of the possessed person, two sorts of prayers are available. The first, “Deprecative Formulae,” are a mandatory component of the liturgy. Addressed to God, these call upon the Almighty, as one such formula puts it, “to deliver this your servant from all the power of the infernal spirits.” Prayers of the second sort, “Imperative Formulae,” are optional and address the devil directly. “I exorcize you, ancient foe of mankind,” one begins; going on to command Satan to “depart in the name of Jesus Christ, the mighty one who cast you out by the finger of God and destroyed your kingdom.”
There is manifest confidence in these utterances, and reasonably so. For, in exorcizing the demon possessed, the Church acts from a position of strength that is grounded in hope: the hope that, in the end, there are no dark places for the Father of Heavenly Lights.
In the absence of a defined rite of major exorcism, The Episcopal Church is without a clear, common articulation of the manner in which Episcopalians comprehend and enact this hope—not in the abstract, but as it pertains specifically to the lives of a redeemed people whose “adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).
