The Devil and All His Works

On Demons, Deliverance, and Celebrity Exorcists

My dad just died, my husband has Lyme Disease, and the first week of school was an all-around disaster. So, naturally, I thought this would be a great time to write about the devil. Or, more specifically, about why you should not give him (and the exorcists talking frequently and publicly about him) too much attention.

A few weeks back, my friends at The Pillar shared their concern over Catholics’ growing preoccupation with exorcists and demons (see episode 127 of the podcast). On Instagram, I offered a strong “Amen” to their thoughts and encouraged folks to go have a listen. If you haven’t yet, you should. At the time, a good number of people asked me to write more about the topic. Which I promised to do. But a few hours after I shared the podcast, we got the call that my dad was in kidney failure. So, we packed up the kids, raced out the door, and began two of the hardest weeks of my life.

Now that we’re home, I want to make good on my promise to share why I have such strong reservations about anyone—exorcist or not—sharing too much about demons and deliverance work. Before I do that, however, I need to make a few things clear.

The Reality of Evil

First, make no mistake, the devil is real. So are his demons. Satan is not a folk tale, superstitious nonsense, or the personification of humanity’s baser instincts. He is an angelic person, who led a rebellion against God and was cast out of Heaven along with half the heavenly hosts. Since that day, he has worked tirelessly to destroy you and me and every person in existence. Scripture and Tradition speak unequivocally on this.

The Church dogmatically states that Satan is “not an abstraction,” but rather “a person . . . the angel who opposes God” (CCC 2851). She also teaches that he was an instrumental part of man’s primordial fall, as outlined in the book of Genesis (CCC 397). The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, as well as the Book of Revelation, the Second Letter of Peter, and every single Gospel affirm Satan’s existence and the existence of other fallen angels, who stood with Satan when he rebelled against God. Jesus Himself, in the Gospel of John, says, “He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies,” (John 8:44).

Scripture and Tradition are also clear that all around us an unseen war rages between the powers of darkness and the powers of light (Revelation 11-12). Satan has already lost that war. Victory, in the end, will go to Christ. But Satan is determined to go down fighting. He lingers in this world, striving to inflict maximum collateral damage by waging his own guerilla style warfare campaign and picking off souls one by one, in whatever ways he can.

Sometimes, those ways are Ouija boards and crystals, Reiki and tarot cards, Wicca and fortune tellers, Magic 8 balls and seances. Those things are doorways to darkness and should you dare to dabble in them, you will pay a price. A high price. Do not do it. Demonic oppression, possession, and infestation are as real as you and me, and dabbling in the occult or New Age spirituality can be a one-way ticket to experiencing all three. If you have a history with these things, get yourself to a trusted priest right quick to talk about the ongoing healing you may need because of these experiences. Exorcism and deliverance work, when done by a properly trained priest, can be a powerful help for those who truly need it.

But for the rest of us, it is important to remember that Satan does not ordinarily corrupt people through Ouija Boards. Nor does he typically need to possess us to destroy us. Those are extraordinary means and extraordinary manifestations. The reason they are extraordinary is because most of the time they are unnecessary. Satan has far subtler and more effective tools at his disposal. Namely, he has us and our own fallen natures, which he can play like a fiddle if we let him. Which we do. Again and again and again. We let him play on our pride, our vanity, our wrath, our gluttony, our sloth, our greed, and our lust.

We also let him play on the age old vice of curiositas—curiosity—when we let him tempt us to gaze into the darkness and fixate on him.

“Equal and Opposite Errors”

In the preface to his book The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis wrote:

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”

For years, many Catholics fell into the former trap. Modernism and post-modernism tempted us to make a metaphor of the father of lies. We did not see him as real. We did not take spiritual warfare seriously. We did not prepare ourselves or our children to defend ourselves in the battle for our souls.

But now, as is so often the case, we are overcorrecting. A growing number of Catholics (and Protestants) are tilting wildly in the opposite direction, developing an unhealthy and spiritually dangerous interest in the world of demons and deliverance. In Catholic circles, that interest is being fed by a small number of exorcists who, unlike most of their fellow exorcists, are willing to speak publicly about their work—work that is dangerous to talk about and even more dangerous to do.

It is understandable why some exorcists might feel the need to be more public about their work. Exorcists see terrifying things on the regular. They have a front row seat to dramatic displays of evil and its power. They are acutely aware that as our culture falls farther and farther away from God, many people are trying to fill the spiritual void in their lives with New Age practices and the occult. Given all that, it’s natural to want to alert people to the happenings of this unseen world—to warn them against opening doors to darkness and to encourage their faith with the signs and wonders of God.

It is also understandable why so many people pay attention to what these exorcists say. Their stories of oppression and possession can lift the veil from our eyes, helping us to grasp the reality of the supernatural world. For some, the stories can inspire faith. For others, they can motivate repentance.

People also pay attention to these stories because they are desperate. They are desperate to protect people they love, especially their children. They are desperate to make sense of the brokenness of this world. They are desperate to make sense of the brokenness in their own hearts. And when many bishops can barely manage to give clear directions to the grocery store, let alone heaven, the detailed instructions for spiritual combat relayed by the social media exorcists can feel like a welcome help in a confusing world.

Which it can be. Sometimes. For some people. If you are one of those people, I’m glad. Just the same, both those doing the talking about demons and those doing the listening need to exercise caution around this topic. Moreover, all of us doing the listening, no matter how helpful we think this talk may be, should exercise even greater caution about how much space we let it occupy in our thoughts and in our practice of the Faith.

The Glamour of the Extraordinary

I am—obviously enough—a lay woman, not a priest, let alone a trained exorcist. But in the 22 years I’ve spent writing about Christ, His Church, and the life of grace, I have gotten to know more than a few priests who work in the field of exorcism and deliverance. Barely a one of them will ever speak on the record about what they do. Most won’t even speak to their closest friends about their experiences. They choose to keep silent or speak obliquely because they recognize that no matter how good their intentions might be, it is dangerous to direct people’s eyes towards the darkness. It is dangerous to pique people’s curiosity about the devil, who is a seducer—not just a liar, but the actual father of lies.

Remember, Satan convinced Adam and Eve, in all their unfallen perfection, to trust him and not the God with whom they had walked in the Garden. Satan was able to do this because Eve chose to engage with him. Instead of running in the opposite direction, as fast her perfectly agile legs could take her, Eve talked to the Serpent. And, Adam, who had been appointed by God to defend the Garden, listened. Both fell. They fell hard. None of us should ever suppose we will fare any better when we give the devil our attention. Only fools rush in where even highly trained exorcists fear to tread.

When we do rush in—when we start haunting spiritual warfare chatrooms, researching demonology, stockpiling blessed salt, or listening to every podcast interview with an exorcist we can find—we run a legion of risks.

Some of those risks are as big and scary as the tales told by exorcists in interviews. No matter what authority you think you may have to pray certain deliverance prayers or command devils out of your home, it is not always prudent to use that authority. When someone who is spiritually immature, untrained, ill formed, emotionally vulnerable, or in a state of serious sin starts trying to order the devil about, they run the risk of serious blowback. They are opening a door they may not be able to shut.

But most of the dangers of giving the devil a place in our thoughts are far more subtle. They are like slow acting poison, where the harm done is too small to even notice in the beginning, but builds to devastating effect over time.

This, for example, is what happens when we focus so much attention on the devil’s more showy tactics of destruction that we forget about the much more common ways the devil wages war against us. Yes, the devil can use a tarot card to lay claim to your soul if you let him. But he will just as gladly use your envy of your neighbor. In fact, he will more gladly use your envy. Envy is so ordinary. So boring. So easy to ignore. It eats away at the life of God in your soul without any pomp or circumstance. But it can lead you just as readily into hell if left to grow unchecked. Which it will do if you are so focused on the devil out there, in the world, the one who makes people’s heads spin around, that you pay no attention to the devil within, whispering quiet lies to your heart.

Excessive preoccupation with the devil and his works can also prevent us from taking responsibility for our own sins and doing the work we need to do to overcome them.

It is a real temptation to lay the blame for our failings at Satan’s feet…or the feet of some long dead ancestor. This temptation is exacerbated by the theologically tenuous ideas of generational curses or generational demons, that have recently been popularized in deliverance circles (but which are not found in the teaching of the Church and for which the theologian tasked to investigate the matter by the International Association of Exorcists found no basis for belief). It is also exacerbated by those who encourage people to discern the names or types of demons that are hounding them and then attempt to “bind” them up with special prayers.

Most of us, however, don’t need to look into the demonic world to find the source of our struggle with sin. We just need to look in the mirror. The problem isn’t generally Satan. It’s us. It’s concupiscence. It’s our wounded fallen nature. We are the problem. We are the reason we sin. We want the wrong things. Or we want the right things but at the wrong times or in the wrong ways. And reordering those desires is rarely as simple as praying a binding prayer. If it were, the history of the world and the Church would look a heck of a lot different. So too would the Catechism, papal Magisterial documents, and the writings of the saints, which are filled not with guidance on binding prayers or healing ancestral trees, but rather with mediations on grace, suffering, sacrifice, and virtue.

The Church, in her wisdom, knows there are no shortcuts to holiness. Properly ordering our wills to align with God’s will requires grace, time, sacrifice, humility, and a whole lot of hard work. It also requires the clear recognition that you and I are responsible for our own sins. Not the devil. Not generational demons or the Freemasons. Just us. The devil can’t make us choose vice any more than God can make us choose virtue. The devil can tempt us. He can tempt us right good. He can also scare us, mislead us, annoy us, oppress us, and convince us we have no choice but to do wrong. But he cannot make us sin. God has given us free will—the power to freely choose good or evil—and no one, including the devil, can take that from us. Even in cases of demonic possession, free will is not seized by the devil; rather, it’s surrendered to the devil, with the person in question giving the demons some kind of permission.

Too much focus on demons and curses can lead us to forget that. And Satan loves this forgetting. He delights in it. He wants it. For if we think the fault lies with others, we’re far less likely to do the hard daily work of overcoming sin and growing in virtue …which keeps us right where the devil wants us: in a state of sin.

The Dangers of Superstition

The dangers of an excessive preoccupation with demons and certain tools of spiritual warfare, however, don’t end there. They also can make us superstitious, tempting us to think we need a special book or special salt or special water to keep the devil at bay.

But we don’t. What we need is faith.

There is value in some deliverance prayers. They can give form to the prayers of our heart and help us articulate thoughts that can be difficult to express. They also can increase our understanding of God’s power and strengthen our faith in His protection, which in turn can make our prayers more powerful. But they’re not magic. We don’t incant them like a spell, and God’s protection of us doesn’t hinge on us praying any one particular prayer just right.

Likewise, holy water, blessed salt, and other sacramentals can be powerful helps in the fight against darkness. But Satan is not like a vampire, who’s made weak by garlic. It’s not the sacramental in and of itself that keeps him at bay; it’s the faith of the Church and the faith of those administering and receiving the sacramental.

This is one of the fundamental ways sacramentals differ from sacraments. The sacraments work ex opere operato. Regardless of a priest’s own personal holiness, when he celebrates Baptism, absolves a sinner in Confession, or prays the words Christ prayed at the Last Supper, God’s grace is made manifest. Some objective change happens: a person becomes an adopted child of God; a sinner is forgiven; bread and wine become Body and Blood. The disposition of the person receiving the sacrament can, in some cases, affect the graces’ work in us, but the change is still real. The grace is still there. The Eucharist is the Eucharist whether we believe it or not. And that is because of the holiness of God. It is Jesus who gives the sacraments their power. It is Jesus who baptizes, forgives, and confects the Eucharist. The priest is just acting in His name.

Not so with sacramentals. The power of holy water, exorcised salt, Saint Benedict medals, blessed candles and more is not purely objective. It doesn’t work ex opere operato. The power of the sacraments depends mostly on God, but the power of sacramentals depends mostly on us, again both the person administering them and the person receiving them. The greater our faith, the more virtuous our life, and the deeper our holiness, the more powerful the sacramentals become and the more protection they give. In other words, their power is a sign of the closeness we enjoy with Jesus. Our relationship with Him, more than anything else, is what protects us. And our relationship with Him, more than anything else, is what we need to deepen if we want to safeguard our souls and the souls of those under our authority.

Satan wants you to put your trust in salt. He wants you to think a particular prayer will save you. He wants you to think that spiritual warfare is about holy words and holy objects and not about your relationship with the Holy God.

But if you want to ward off the devil, that relationship is your single best protection against his lies. Blessed salt, holy water, and Saint Benedict medals can help. Not a one of those things, however, is as frightening to Satan as a soul filled with the life of God. It is Christ’s life in us that ultimately protects us. He is the one the devil fears. Not salt. Jesus.

Lionizing the Devil

And this brings us to perhaps the greatest danger of paying too much attention to the devil and his business. If we are not careful, we can find ourselves believing that Satan is more interesting and more powerful than God.

When a baptized Christian like you or me, who is in a state of grace, frets about demons and curses, looks for the devil behind every struggle in our life and every problem in this fallen world, or worries excessively about the harm every New Age neighbor on the block might do to us, this is what we are doing. We are giving Satan far more importance and attention than He deserves. We are not recognizing the greatness of God’s power, the completeness of God’s sovereignty, and the fullness of God’s promises. We are forgetting that God holds all evil on a leash, including the Evil One himself.

All faithful exorcists—the loud ones and the quiet ones—know this. They believe it. And they want us to believe it, too. They don’t go around saying that we shouldn’t worry about our own sins or not take responsibility for them. You’ll never hear an exorcist on a podcast say that salt will save us or that Satan has more power than God. Yet that is the message many people—not all, but many and especially the spiritually young or the inadequately formed—take from their talks, writing, and interviews.

This is exactly why talking too much about the devil is such a bad idea. He is a seducer. And he knows us. So he knows how to distract us. He knows we’d rather listen to a titillating story about a demon infestation than a lecture on the necessity of charity. He knows we’d rather think about the sins of our Wiccan cousin than wrestle with the sins abiding in our hearts. And he knows we would much rather pray a binding prayer over our addiction to pornography than do the hard work of growing in chastity and self control. Such is the nature of the fallen human heart. We are easily taken in by the dark glamour of Satan. We are quick to get caught up in the extraordinary and ignore the ordinary. And as we do that, we can end up giving undue weight and attention to the devil, selling God short in the process.

Exorcists are no exception to this human weakness. And those who have unquestioningly embraced the notions of generational sin and masonic curses, despite the theological problems underlying both and the absence of any mention of them in Church teaching (including the 21 papal documents condemning Freemasonry), may be doing the exact same thing as some of their audience. Unwittingly, they may be giving Satan more credit than he is due, letting Satan’s flashy, manipulative ways subsume solid doctrinal theology and attributing to him a power over the baptized that he does not have, a power that their existence would imply is equal to or greater than God’s.

Satan does not have that kind of power. How sin works its way into families down through the generations and how and why demons attach themselves to particular people and families is a mysterious, complicated thing, with both natural and supernatural layers. No one—not me and not an exorcist—fully understands it or can explain it. But the Church’s theology is not complicated: No curse can separate a soul in a state of grace from God. No demon can dwell where Christ abides. No sin of your father’s can prevent you from becoming a saint. The devil’s parlor tricks cannot match God’s love. And God loves you way too much to allow your kooky grandfather’s Masonic membership to interfere with the graces of your Baptism and the power of His life in you.

The Way of Love

If we want to fight in the unseen war raging all around us, love is what we most need to remember. It, along with faith and hope, is what enables us to effectively enter into spiritual combat and protect those under our authority. Faith, hope, and love are our most important spiritual weapons. And we wield them every time we go to Confession and Communion, every time we feed the hungry and clothe the naked, every time we forgive those who’ve hurt us and bear wrongs patiently. If you really want to deal a blow to the devil, go to Confession, then buy lunch for the homeless guy standing outside the Church. That is a one-two punch that will send Satan reeling.

Fear of Hell can have its place in a person’s conversion. But fear won’t make you a saint. Only love and grace will do that. Likewise, God’s grace and our conformity to that grace—otherwise known as holiness—is what protects us from the devil. We don’t become holy, though, by focusing on Satan. We become holy by focusing on Christ and letting Him do His work in us.

Life is short. We each only have so much time on this precious earth. Every minute we spend listening to spooky talks about demonic possessions is a minute we’re not listening to a much more important talk about growing in patience. Every evening we spend reading a book about the names of different demons is an evening we’re not reading about Christ, His mother, or the saints. Every ounce of our attention that we give to the devil is an ounce of our attention that we can’t give to Jesus, who is vastly more interesting, beautiful, creative, intelligent and powerful than some petty old fallen angel who can’t admit defeat when it’s been staring him in the face for 2,000 years.

Don’t waste your time looking at Satan. Never forget the devil is real. Know the dangers of dabbling in the occult or New Age practices. Know that the demons are indeed out there. But so are angels and saints. So are powerful graces and countless witnesses to the beauty, mercy, and love of God. Those witnesses are vastly more numerous and wonderous than the demons. So look for them instead. See them, not demons, around every corner. And most of all, give your attention to Jesus.

Read about Jesus. Meditate on Jesus. Let Jesus fill your thoughts. Let Jesus pour His transforming grace into your heart. Let Jesus make you a saint. And pay the devil no mind. If Satan troubles you in any extraordinary ways, seek the help of the men ordained and trained to deal directly with him. If they give you prayers to pray, pray them. But still hold everything they say up to the clear teaching of the Church. Examine it all in light of both faith and reason. Priests are just men after all. They can be wrong. They can be unwise. They can be manipulated and misled. No priest is infallible. Not even the ones given large platforms by prominent Catholic personalities and institutions.

I don’t doubt the good intentions of these men. I trust they have weighed the risks of talking about their work and decided it’s worth it. The vast majority of exorcists, however, have weighed the same risks and decided the exact opposite.

Either way, what all agree upon is what I said at the beginning of this essay: The devil is real, and he wants you. He wants your soul and your spouse’s soul and your children’s soul. Don’t doubt that for a minute. But also don’t doubt that God wants you more. He wants all of us more. Hold fast to that truth. Hold fast to His love. It’s the most real thing in the universe. And the most powerful, too.

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