"Exorcism" - part III

Ice-skating and Christmas party, tonight.  Meet at Newman Center at 5:30 pm.  Ice-skating at National Gallery of Art, dinner, games, and a movie.
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Part III of “Exorcism”…excerpts (pp. 193-197) from the book, “Exorcism and the Church Militant” by Fr. Thomas Euteneuer:


Session Four (October)

After several months, due to a severe family crisis and much prayer, Angie decided to return to the exorcism process because she saw the need for it again. This was a great grace. This session however, proved to be frustrating and inconclusive due to Angie’s ongoing distrust of the process and reluctance to cooperate interiorly with the exorcism…


Session Five (The Following Day)

In this two and a half hour session, the power of prayer was evident… At least three members of the team heard the words, “It is finished,” at the end.

Session Six (Mid-December)

This session lasted three hours and was the most discouraging of the six exorcisms up to this point… It was also the most violent of all the sessions up to that point… In the end there was no expulsion, but the exorcism had at least brought her some peace in her difficult moments.


Seventh and Last Session (February, one year to the day after the first session)

Undoubtedly, this was the most grueling of all seven exorcism sessions. The exorcism lasted four hours and required the full strength of six people to hold Angie down from the violent actions of the final, possessing demon…

Suddenly, at about the two hour mark, Angie had what can only be described as a “vision” in the course of the exorcism. We were not sure if it was from the Lord or from the demon so I rebuked the spirit of deception several times, and the vision continued for another fifteen to twenty minutes. Angie was actually “seeing” as if on a screen in her mind, a clear and shocking picture of all the evil that had been perpetrated on her and had pervaded her life for so many years… In fact she was seeing her life for the first time as the Lord saw it. She said that she now understood “what” exactly happened to cause all this and “how” it happened; she never understood these things so clearly before…

As the exorcism continued, the demon began to react with more violence: continuous attempts at biting us; writhing around, pushing back, jumping up and forward, swinging arms violently… The demon was grabbing and breaking the crucifix; grabbing and crushing the exorcism ritual book… There were also many insolent words from the demon such as his constantly yelling at me, “shut up!” and taunting such as “you can’t do anything” and “I am strong, I can take it,” even in the midst of the worst pain that the ritual was causing her. He even called me “kiddy” and “child” numerous times, to which I always responded “yes, I am a child of God,” to deflect his arrogance.

The final expulsion came when Angie herself made a valiant attempt to forgive her uncle in her heart and also to forgive God for permitting her to go through all this pain and sorrow. That was a crucial moment and sticking point in her faith life. The Satanists had attacked her very relationship with God, and the spiritual abuse was the worst damage of all. She also made an attempt to die to her “old life” and live a new life in Christ in a concrete act of faith. After the third or fourth repetition of this act of faith, Angie “snapped to” instantly and was surprised to see that she was on the floor. She remembered virtually nothing about the exorcism except her vision and the final act of faith that she had made consciously. The violence was over and her peace returned.