46- POSSESSED?

Jesus christ denies diabolic possession.

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RACHEL This is Emisoras Latinas, with exclusive coverage of the second coming of Jesus Christ to earth. Today our microphones are located very near the El Aqsa mosque, with its beautiful golden dome.

JESUS In the old days the stables of the famous King Solomon used to be here.

RACHEL Well, let’s continue our talk about that other famous king, the Prince of Darkness.

JESUS The prince of darkness!

RACHEL You laugh about the devil, but in the catechisms, the theology books, the churches’ prayers, Lucifer always appears. You say he doesn’t exist, but denying the devil’s existence could earn you excommunication. Aren’t you worried about that?

JESUS No, Rachel. I was excommunicated for contradicting many of the beliefs of my religion. The priests in my time threw me out of the synagogue.

RACHEL Jesus Christ excommunicated! That’s an idea that will surely shock our audience, just like the one you proposed in our last interview, when you, Jesus Christ, dared to deny the existence of the devil. Do you still maintain that position?

JESUS Yes, I maintain it.

RACHEL One listener was so scandalized that he sent us this e-mail “How can he say that he doesn’t exist, when he himself expelled demons?”

JESUS That’s a very good question our friend asks.

RACHEL I checked the facts. Once, in Gerasa, you drove out of a man not one, but a whole legion of demons. There were so many that they entered into a herd of swine and then threw themselves off a cliff into the sea. Do you remember that?

JESUS Let me explain, Rachel. My people didn’t know much about the causes of sickness, so they imagined that it might be the devil who was tying the tongue of a mute person or blocking the ears of a deaf person. And there were things that were even worse. When a man had a seizure and was foaming at the mouth, we used to think that the devil himself had entered into his body.

RACHEL An attack of epilepsy …

JESUS With mentally disturbed people, it was the same. We thought they were possessed by unclean spirits.

RACHEL And what did you do with them?

JESUS They used to remove them from their homes, tie them up, and hide them away someplace. I remember that poor guy in Gerasa. They had him bound in chains, living in a cemetery, naked, without food… If he wasn’t crazy to begin with, they certainly drove him to madness.

RACHEL And what could you do for him?

JESUS Calm him down. Peter and James between them took the chains off him. I spoke with him. The only real demons around were his neighbors. They had him tied up like an animal.

RACHEL So, you didn’t drive out any demons?

JESUS I couldn’t drive out what hadn’t entered.

RACHEL So are we to conclude that demons don’t enter into people’s bodies?

JESUS No, because they don’t exist.

RACHEL And the herd of swine that threw itself into the sea?

JESUS That was something that the Gerasenes must have added to the story later. Besides being preposterous, they were very superstitious. But those are things of the past, because we didn’t know much about medicine in those days.

RACHEL I don’t think they’re so much of the past, because practically every day a new movie is coming out about diabolic possessions. Did you see “The Exorcist”?

JESUS No, I missed it.

RACHEL It’s a scary picture about a girl who’s possessed by a demon.

JESUS There are many demons who take possession of girls, but they are demons of flesh and blood – those are the ones that really should burn in Gehenna.

RACHEL What about all those people who have seen the devil, what about the satanic cults and the exorcisms? In the Vatican there is a school for exorcists. Do you know that?

JESUS Those are Samaritans’ tales.

RACHEL And so we can sleep in peace? There are no demons roaming about?

JESUS If God loves us as a mother loves her children, do you think he’d let wicked spirits roam about the world doing harm to people?

RACHEL Hold on a minute, we have a call … Yes, hello? … It’s the same guy as the other day.

MAN Tell that false prophet you’re interviewing that the devil’s best trick is making us believe that he doesn’t exist. Tell him that.

RACHEL What do you think of that opinion, Jesus?

JESUS I believe just the contrary. The best trick is making us believe that he does exist.

RACHEL Why do you say that?

JESUS Because the devil is a business.

RACHEL How do you mean, a business?

JESUS Yes, talking about the devil and preaching about the devil has always been a great business. But let’s talk about that tomorrow, okay?

RACHEL You’re the boss. You may not be the boss of the demons, but your are the boss of us journalists! This is Rachel Perez, Emisoras Latinas, Jerusalem.

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ANNOUNCER Another God is Possible. Exclusive interviews with Jesus Christ in his second coming to Earth. A production of María and José Ignacio López Vigil, with the support of the Syd Forum and Christian Aid.

*More information about this polemical topic…*

The demoniac of Gerasa
Gerasa was a city situated on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. It formed part of the “Decapolis”, that is, the League of Ten Cities, a territory that was considered by the Jews to be Gentile country since its inhabitants practiced Greek customs. The narrative of the demoniac who was cured by Jesus appears in the three synoptic gospels (Matthew 8,28-34 and parallels). The story is based on an oral legend that was later made into a catechetical lesson.

“Possessed” people who were actually just sick
In the time of Jesus the causes of most sicknesses were unknown. There are many ailments that we now realize have a psychic or neurological origin; they include epilepsy, convulsions, madness, and various mental disorders, as well as some cases of deafness and muteness. In ancient times, however, they were often thought to be caused by the presence of demons in the affected person’s body; they were signs of diabolical possession. The “demoniacs” who are cured by Jesus in the gospels were certainly people suffering from such ailments. Besides their physical and psychological sufferings, they also had to put up with social discrimination, rejection by their compatriots and condemnation by the religious authorities.

The demoniacs of today
A great many films have contributed to the popularization of the topic of diabolic possession. Prime examples were Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) and Richard Donner’s “The Prophecy” (1976), but the best known was William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” (1973). This was the most popular horror film of the 1970s, and all subsequent movies tried to emulate it and its sequels (“The Exorcist 2, 3, etc.”). Such a flurry of films was bound to result in the appearance in many places of people claiming to be possessed and requiring the services of exorcists.
In response to all this mass media hype and in fidelity to official doctrine, the “Regina Apostolorum” Pontifical Academy of the Vatican has been offering since the beginning of the year 2000 a special course for priests who want to learn to wage war on the devil. After taking a course that prepares them in all aspects of Satanism (biblical, theological, historical and legal), the priests graduate from the academy as exorcists. Not surprisingly, the academy is under the direction of the Legionnaires of Christ – one of the most conservative of Catholic religious congregations, founded by Marcel Maciel, a pedophile priest. Moreover, some Catholic theological faculties that adhere closely to the official thinking of the Vatican, such as the University of Navarre in Spain, allow students to specialize in Demonology.

How to “expel” demons
According to the Roman Ritual of Pope Paul V (1614), which was in use for centuries, the three clear signs of diabolical possession in a person are the ability to speak in foreign languages, the ability to inform about secret events, and the ability to exercise superhuman physical force.
The Ritual explains that a possessed person may speak in a special tone of voice, may produce garbled speech, or may ridicule Latin, as it does everything “sacred”. It also states that a possessed person often has access to secret information; for example, he or she may know when another person is committing a sin. As regards strength, the Ritual explains that the traits of possessed people are changed, and this is noted especially in their physical power or in a strange look in their eyes.
In 1999 the Vatican revised and updated the rite for exorcism. Now the exorcist begins with prayers, a blessing and a sprinkling of holy water. The formula for exorcising begins, “I order you, Satan,” and the devil is denounced as “the prince of this world” and “the enemy of human salvation”. The exorcism ends with the order, “Get out, Satan!”

An exorcist speaks
The Italian priest Gabriele Amorth is one of the world’s best known exorcists. He is founder and honorary president of the International Association of Exorcists and is author of the book, An Exorcist Tells his Story (Ignatius, 1999). Amorth claims that there are four reasons why people fall “into the clutches of the devil”: first, because such falling is for the person’s benefit (this is the case of many saints, according to the expert); second, because one persists in sin; third, because one has been the victim of an evil spell deriving from a pact with the devil; and lastly, because one practices the occult arts.
Amorth explains that he cannot give precise figures regarding the number of possessed people that he has known and treated. He explains: The cases of true diabolic possession that I attend to are numerous, but that’s because I receive the most difficult cases, the ones that can’t be resolved by other exorcists. And he admits: In the first years of my activity, when I accepted everybody who came to me, most of them were people with psychic ailments; there was no demon involved.

Our demons
The word “demon” (“daimon” in Greek) literally means “broken off”. A psychological understanding of “demons” views them as the shadow side of our own consciousness or what is known as the “neurotic component” of our personality, the hidden face of our psyche. If we reject or repress these “shadows”, they will end up pursuing us, and we will imagine that some wicked Being external to us, a Demon or a Devil, is responsible for aspects of ourselves that are simply weaknesses, limitations, dark spots. When we act this way, we cease being genuinely responsible for our own actions.
We must learn to struggle with our own “demons”. The more we deny them and reject them, the more power they will have over us. A Zen maestro says: Become friends with your fury; it forms a part of you; it is your vital energy. Don’t cut off your finger when it hurts. The less we accept our shadows and the less we recognize them, the more we will project them onto other people: people of a different race or a different culture, homosexuals, immigrants, women…. In this way we “demonize” our fellow human beings: we make “others” responsible for what goes wrong and throw all the blame on them.
In these “demons”, the one inside us, we can indeed believe. But we should not believe in supernatural devils or demons, who enter into our bodies and control our lives, who roam about the world seeking to do us harm. That is an unchristian belief, quite contrary to belief in the God that Jesus came to know and told us about.