It is likely that there are now more books in print on the subject of Catholic exorcism than at any time in history. They range from journalistic investigations, both sympathetic and hostile, to warnings about the power of the devil and instructions on how the laity can participate in casting out Satan and his demonic servants. Exorcism is widely and freely discussed by twenty-first-century Catholics, and the secular media’s appetite for exorcists and stories of exorcism is seemingly insatiable. If the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were ‘the golden age of the demoniac’,1 the twenty-first century is a second golden age of the exorcist. After three centuries of sustained scrutiny and suspicion from within and without the church, exorcism has proved to be a dark yet enduring feature of Catholic culture. Exorcism is in demand as never before, from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, and thanks to the global impact of cinema, the figure of the priest-exorcist has come to be recognized throughout the world.
The contemporary popularity of exorcism raises a historical question. How did exorcism, marginalized for so long, manage a rebirth at the end of the twentieth century? Media events of the last forty years, such as William Friedkin’s 1973 film The Exorcist and the Satanic abuse panic of the 1980s, do not adequately explain the thorough resurgence of an ancient and controversial practice. The historical roots of exorcism are as deep as those of any Christian rite, yet the renewal of interest in exorcism does not so much represent the antiquarian resurrection of a long-dead custom as the re-emergence of an organic, adaptive tradition. The origins of contemporary exorcism lie as much in the apocalyptic spirituality of Pope Leo XIII (1878–1903) and the charismatic exorcisms of Johann-Joseph Gassner in eighteenth-century Germany as they do in twentieth-century events.
To answer thoroughly the question of why exorcism has made a successful come-back, the entire history of exorcism within Catholic Christianity needs to be examined. Many historians are still apologetic when they approach ‘an aspect of Catholic religious culture that has long been considered hopelessly superstitious’,2 but while it is certainly not for the historian to determine what is and what is not superstitious, ‘superstition’ is undoubtedly a subject of historical interest. This book approaches exorcism from the perspective of church history as an aspect of Catholic religious behaviour, concentrating on the development of the theological, liturgical and legal foundations of exorcism rather than the physical phenomena of possession. Sarah Ferber saw religious war, fear of witches and a concern to regulate new spirituality as the ‘predisposing conditions’ of an explosion in exorcism in sixteenth-century France.3 This book endorses that thesis, and applies it in more general terms to the entire history of exorcism. In fact, Ferber’s conditions can be broken down to just two ingredients essential for a flourishing of exorcism: division within the church and fear of an external spiritual enemy. These factors are almost invariably accompanied by an apocalyptic sensibility, as threats to the church are often construed within a Christian religious outlook as signs of the imminent end of the world. Where one or more of these factors have been absent, the practice of exorcism has undergone a crisis, leading eventually to a transformation to suit better the needs of the time.
Periods in which exorcism has flourished include late antiquity, the early medieval era, the late Middle Ages, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the present day (1980s onwards). Whilst no period of church history has ever been without division, the instigation of reform has produced particularly acute questions of identity for Catholics. This occurred in the sixteenth century, before and after the Council of Trent (1545–63), and again in the twentieth century, when Catholics were divided by interpretation of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). The threat of paganism in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages eventually passed, producing a crisis for exorcism between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. A revival of demonology in the thirteenth century, in response to the theological threat to traditional doctrines of evil by the Cathars, formed the background to the late medieval revival of exorcism, aided by an increased awareness of a new threat in the form of witchcraft. The Reformation and a continuing obsession with witchcraft produced perfect conditions for the growth of exorcism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, embarrassed by exorcism in an age when the church’s relations with secular governments were seen as paramount in importance, church authorities discouraged exorcism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In other words, exorcism declined as the spiritual threats of heresy and witchcraft were perceived as less important, at least by elites. The roots of the contemporary revival of exorcism lie in Pope Leo XIII’s conviction that a new spiritual threat, a Satanist global conspiracy directed by Freemasons, menaced the church in the late nineteenth century.
The story of exorcism can be told in many ways other than as church history. Histories of exorcism could also be written from the perspectives of medical history, the history of mental illness, gender studies, religious anthropology and the sociology of religion, to name just a few.4 These histories are undoubtedly needed, but this volume confines itself to the consideration of exorcism as part of the history of the Catholic church. Exorcism in the New Testament and the very earliest centuries of Christianity lies beyond its scope, since its purpose is not to address the ultimate biblical or theological origins of exorcism, but to trace the evolution of exorcism as a practice of the Catholic church. Any attempt to deal with Christian exorcisms before around 150 ce runs into the debate about when Christianity became differentiated from Judaism as a distinct religion. Before the fourth century, when the concept of ‘orthodoxy’ was established, it is all too easy for the historian to impose ‘anachronistic conceptual limitations’ on the material.5 Likewise this study makes no attempt to survey the traditions that emerged from the Protestant Reformation, which have been ably treated elsewhere.6
It is by no means uncontroversial to speak of the Catholic church as a single organization with a continuous history from the fourth century.7 A history of ‘the Catholic church’ is really a history of ‘the Catholic tradition’, and in Chap. 2, I use the term ‘Latin West’, conscious of the ambiguous meaning of the word ‘Catholic’ in the early centuries of Christianity. This book traces the history of a ritual tradition within Latin Christianity, and is thus more than a history of the institutions and regulations of a reified church. The practice of exorcism is as old as the church, and older than most of the institutions within the church that have tried to regulate it throughout the centuries. Failure to appreciate the antiquity and enduring nature of exorcism is a feature of much contemporary scholarship on exorcism in specific historical eras, and a shortcoming this book is intended to address.
Exorcism and Its Histories
An exorcist speaks with the authority of God to cast out demons. Whether or not this invisible drama really takes place behind the outward words and actions of exorcist and demoniac, the Catholic exorcist’s pretensions to authority are grounded not in personal self-assurance but in legal fact. In contemporary Catholicism, exorcists claim to confront the devil not only with the authority of God, but also with that of the church, which they themselves have received by an explicit licence from a diocesan bishop within the strictures of Canon Law. Catholic theology presents exorcism as a political act in the invisible polity, in which the kingdom of Jesus Christ confronts and overthrows the devil’s kingdom of darkness. However, exorcism is also a political act on the human level of church history. The entire canonical process of exorcism, beginning with the authorization of the exorcist and ending in the spoken rite, dramatically brings into focus questions of authority and legitimacy, to a greater extent than any other rite of the church. Furthermore, the exorcist is not the only participant in the drama of exorcism: by means of exorcism the demons speak and are bound to tell the truth, so that their words become ‘suitable and versatile weapons in inner-church conflicts, theological controversies, and church politics’.8 Exorcism defines the ‘other’, that which is opposed to God’s church, and it has been exploited both by the defenders of Catholic ‘orthodoxy’ and dissidents seeking to establish their own claims to authority and authenticity. Individual cases of exorcism, and indeed the question of whether exorcisms should be performed at all, have polarized Catholics for centuries.
For many contemporary Europeans and Americans, including Catholics, the practice of exorcism seems an unaccountable ‘medieval’ survival whose intrusion into the modern world is discomforting and bizarre. However, the origins of exorcism as practised in the Catholic church today, with its diagnostic criteria and attempted safeguards, lie in the early modern period. Indeed, the Middle Ages were a period of crisis and transition for exorcism, in which it was transformed from the charismatic, saint-focused practice of late antiquity into a liturgical rite invoking priestly authority. For many centuries, a strong tension existed between the idea that exorcism was the preserve of especially holy men and women (or their relics after death) and the notion that any priest could command a demon. By the late Middle Ages exorcism was identified as a sacramental rather than a sacrament: unlike the regenerative grace of baptism or the transubstantiation of bread and wine in the mass, the success of a priestly exorcism was not guaranteed, and depended at least partly on the piety and holiness of the exorcist.
Exorcism as officially practised in the contemporary Catholic church is an adaptation of a seventeenth-century rite liturgically rooted in the early church but applied according to early modern criteria of diagnosis and canonical legitimacy. The intense, confrontational and dramatic exorcisms that captured popular imagination in films such as The Exorcist, placing great emphasis on the power of words uttered by a priest, are a distinctly modern phenomenon. The intensity of Counter-Reformation theology imbued the liberation of demoniacs with a new significance in a perceived apocalyptic conflict between the church of God and the synagogue of Satan, in the form of the Protestant Reforma...