Send in the Demons
Only one who has not looked into the state of modern religion can possibly fail to know that the Dark Ages, in many respects, are still with us. To millions upon millions of otherwise sensible people, demons, devils, imps, and various other supernatural critters are quite literally real. Evangelists such as Roberts, Robertson, Grant, Popoff, Shambaugh, Humbard, Swaggart, and dozens more regularly perpetuate this superstition. Oral Roberts has even provided us with a detailed explanation of how he recognizes and casts out demons. He says that he sees demons in the eyes of the possessed. After all, he says,the eyes, as you know, are the windows of the soul. And personally, when I’m in the presence of a person with demons, I can see the leering and gleaming in the eye of the individual.
He also smells out demons “by the breath or odor of the body.” If that fails, he picks up his clue by “vibration” when he touches the afflicted.
The Roman Catholic Bestiary
St. Mathurin, circa 1489, exorcising a demon. It is not only the fundamentalists who wish to stop the acquisition of knowledge at the point it reached in early medieval times. Such supposedly advanced people as educated Roman Catholics also fear these beasties. In 1928, the Reverend Montague Summers translated into English the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, a 1487 book that outlined the official Catholic view of witches, demons, and heresy and was written by two inquisitors. Basing his statements upon this 450-year-old document, and determined to remain in the Dark Ages intellectually, Summers chastised those who adopted an attitude about demons and devils that was more in line with modern thinking:... Those err who say that there is no such thing as witchcraft, but that it is purely imaginary, even although they do not believe that devils exist except in the imagination of the ignorant and vulgar, and the natural accidents which happen to a man he wrongly attributes to some supposed devil. For the imagination of some men is so vivid that they think they see actual figures and appearances which are but the reflection of their thoughts, and then these are believed to be the apparitions of evil spirits or even the spectres of witches. But this is contrary to true faith, which teaches us that certain angels fell from heaven and are now devils, and we are bound to acknowledge that by their very nature they can do many wonderful things which we cannot do.... Because infidelity in a person who has been baptized is technically called heresy, therefore such persons are plainly heretics.
Speaking as recently as 1972, Pope Paul VI affirmed this statementSin, on its part, affords a dark, aggressive evildoer, the Devil, an opportunity to act in us and in our world ... Anyone who disputes the existence of this reality places himself outside biblical and Church teachings.
Perhaps inspired by this declaration, in 1976 West Germany’s Bishop Stangl instructed two priests to perform the rite of exorcism upon a 23-year-old epileptic Bavarian girl, Anneliese Michel. The local newspapers reported that the church had decided her body was being inhabited by various demons, including Lucifer, Adolf Hitler, Judas Iscariot, and Emperor Nero. Anneliese, an epileptic, died in the process of being exorcised, and the autopsy showed she suffered beating and starvation. Her parents and the two priests were convicted of negligent homicide and given suspended sentences. Significantly, when Bishop Stangl died during the trial, his death was attributed to a stroke, not to demonic possession.