Exorcism: The devil once more with feeling

EXORCISM is alive in the country. It is in fact getting a structure that will house the St. Michael Center for Spiritual Liberation and Exorcism in the city of Manila. It is touted to be the first of its kind in Asia and maybe in the whole world. The center is expected to provide training for priests in the art/ technology of driving away demons from bodies of humans. The center is also seen as the venue to conduct said rites and houses the Commission of Extraordinary Phenomena and the Ministry on Visions and Phenomena.

I am excited about the news. The last time I felt this giddy sensation was when the book The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty was released, a response heightened when a film based on the book became the boxoffice sensation of the decade.

Before the book and the film, the notion of Evil was just that, a notion. The Devil was a strong metaphor for everything that ran counter to society’s general idea about the good and the truthful. In our Religion class, it was almost embarrassing to talk of the Devil as the horned creature. Our teachers by then had evolved and the Devil, or the Evil in our lives, was an element that obstructed our destiny to do good. Even as we believed in a benevolent, supreme being, there was this element that did not fulfill the straight, the pure, the unblemished. That was the Devil, a name whose provenance in the Hebrew language and culture connoted “bent” or “deformed.” It also pointed to something that went astray.

Then the book and the film came and the Devil became once more a being, a material person perhaps disfigured but someone who could touch you and throw you out of the window. He did not only tempt human beings; he killed them, as in murder them, or cut off their head in the most gruesome manner that we could only say: Only the Devil can do this.

The Devil could also be difficult to defeat. He was unbeatable. In the film and in the book, the priest with a past fell for the mind game of the

monster inhabiting the young girl’s body. Then a most original idea was foisted by Blatty and that was the condition that only priests who are spiritually strong and clean could battle it out with the Devil.

The Exorcist, if we are to believe the book and its imagination, is one whose soul in its terrifying cleanliness can counter It, which is gold and most rare in defilement—the Devil. Not everyone can be an exorcist; only a few priests with sterling character can exorcize. While my source at this point of my position was fiction and cinema, it must be said that such a position is indeed tenable. How can a priest drive the devil from some human vessels if that person claiming spiritual ascendancy is himself not only flawed but constantly consorts with the Devil. The contradictions and the deceit that naturally come from the same are the warm beds for the horned being.

There can be no exorcist within a mile of my parish then, if these are the preconditions for that task. No center can ever train a priest to; other centers—seminaries, wellness venues, meditation sites—can mold priests to be good, humble, upright. Then the Devil and all his (is he always male?) cohorts shall think twice even when a good priest fumbles with his Latin.

We thus read the news about this Center of Exorcism and began to cast doubt on this new enterprise. In various press releases, we encounter bits and pieces for the reason why the Church has found the moment for this endeavor. One point raised is how the pandemic has brought about stresses, which include the spiritual kind, that provide the preconditions not for psychosis but possessions.

To Fr. Jose Francisco Syquia, the chief exorcist, has also been attributed the statement about how the center sees itself as ministering to those “in bondage to the devil’’. The statement speaks of those afflicted by evil possession as belonging to the poorer class.

I am not certain if the chief exorcist really spoke those words but if he did, there now seems to be another site for the Devil to thrive and that is the home of the poor. Poverty, which has been accepted by social scientists as social evil, is really the domain of the Devil. But how does one drive away hunger and lack of food from the table by ancient rites and by language that victims may not even understand? If this is economic evil, should we not employ economic methods? That instead of holy water, we could, perhaps, ask if there is water supply in the area—a presence of which is an indicator of economic well-being?

Along the way, news about this center for exorcism brings in thoughts about witchcraft but nothing about enchantment. I am comfortable that church authorities now believe in this truth: in our country —in cities and far-flung villages— individuals who start acting strangely are not necessarily diagnosed as being possessed by the Devil as defined by the Roman Catholic religion but enchanted by unseen beings. In this case, exorcism has no use. What we need to look for is a man or a woman with negotiation skills, who could offer to the Unseen One a gift so that he could return to the world of the Living—the world of malls, bad politics and polluted air—the mind of that person their prince, princess, soldier, handsome villager, took a fancy of. Shall we have a Center of Enchantment then?