The Exorcist Files - The Discernment of Spirits with Fr. Barton Geger

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

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We have a few little announcements and some housekeeping we want to talk to you about before we get started with today's incredible episode on the discernment of spirits. With me, virtually is the one and the only Father Carlos Martins. Father Martins, where are you broadcasting from today? I am broadcasting from Spokane in the great state of Washington. All right, so you're still on tour. Father, how much longer is this tour going on? The tour is going to go until December, at which time St. Jude will be returning back to Rome.

Wow. How long have you been on the road? Has this been over a year, Father? It has, yeah. Last month it marked a full year. And so now we're in the 13th month. Wow. Well, I wish AAA was a sponsor.

We know Father's put some serious mileage on his vehicle. Before we get started today, though, we have a couple announcements. First off, Father, I just do want to get a quick reaction. We got a few spicy emails on the last case file. I'm going to guess that you are not surprised at some of the pushback we got for, you're talking about a case with yoga. Yeah, I wasn't surprised at all. People, many people have strong feelings about yoga because it is so prevalent in society. I've gotten messages, emails and so forth stating there's, and even from some theologians stating that, look, there's nothing

inherently evil with the poses of yoga. And I never claimed that there was. What I stated, though, is that the poses are yoking one, and that's the very word yoga, two, Hindu spiritual practices, Hindu deities and the Hindu cosmology. In particular, the kundalini spirit. And this itself is advocated, is asserted by Hindu gurus and Hindu, like the most renowned Hindu practitioners. So what I'm doing is merely repeating what they are saying. but as an exorcist, I shared with you an account of someone who became possessed by practicing yoga. So if you don't want to acknowledge there's anything spiritually dangerous with it,

that's fine. That's your prerogative. You can go do your own research if you wish or just ignore what I said. That's fine. But it doesn't take away from the truth of what I said. And so my every one of these cases that I share is a public service announcement. And you can do with it as you wish. But I am sharing with you the truth of my experience, and we related it all to the content that spiritual gurus themselves promulgate. So, Father, would you say it's probably just safe to again characterize from your perspective that in the West, many people view yoga as a physical exercise that happens to have a little bit of spiritual benefit, but your take is that it's actually, you're pointing out it's actually a spiritual exercise.

and it may have some physical benefits. And one last note, could you just give a little encouragement not to be afraid if you practiced yoga or something? Yeah, if yoga was something that you did in the past and you're anxious about it, just move forward from it. You can do stretches. You know, humans stretch, athletes stretch. There's nothing wrong with stretching per se. The poses of yoga are religious in nature. So don't do that.

I just do do different posing. If you are anxious about, hey, have I opened myself up to something? Well, just eliminate it from your life, move on. And you can do your own renunciations of it. Lord Jesus, in your name, I renounce having done X, I renounce having done Y. I renounce having done Z. And just move forward living in the freedom of being God's children. And there's no need to worry about it.

You know, you don't need an exorcist unless you need an exorcist. And the vast majority of persons don't. So live in the peace and tranquility of being a son or daughter of Christ. Well said. All right. Two more quick announcements. Father, in other exciting news, you have a book coming out. Now, it bears the same title as our show, but it's actually quite different.

Tell the fans about what they can expect from the Exorcist Files book. Yeah, so the book has the same title as the podcast, but it is markedly different. So what I've done is shared 11 case files. And the case files, there are some of them that are already covered in the podcast. But what happens in the book is I go much deeper in them. I go much more deep into the demonic aspects, the psychological aspects, the wounding aspects of the case. In particular, for example, the case of Lena, the disappearing eighth grader. So there was an awful lot of input from a psychologist who helped get her into a place of healing.

And that, of course, helped the whole spiritual enterprise. So in this book in particular, I want to focus on, among other things, the distinction between mental oppression and spiritual oppression. How do you know that something isn't just a mental health issue? How do you know that it is spiritual in nature? Those among other topics are something that I tackled full force. It is a book that has been years in the making that has been reviewed by numerous exorcists, numerous mental health professionals, physicians, and so forth.

And this project is, as I feel great about it. It's the greatest work that I've ever done. So, folks, if you're interested in getting a copy of Father's Book, please do pre-order it that really helps us out. You can go to exorcistfiles.tv, and you can pre-order now. And for those who donated to the Kickstarter as well, we have a special surprise and our vault members. You can get a free chapter as well.

Go to exorcistfiles.tv. It really helps us out. Before we get to our conversation today about discernment of spirits, I do want to let the fans know. We promised you in the Kickstarter, some wonderful bonus. episodes, which the discernment of spirits is one of them. So we're going to be bringing you a couple of these bonus episodes while we work on our next case file, which is fantastic. So very much excited for

that. But Father, would you tell the fans a little bit about your dear friend who joins us today and maybe just a very quick synopsis of why you wanted to do an episode on the discernment of spirits? Yeah. So Father Bart Geiger is a dear friend. I met him years ago at an exorcism conference. He's an absolutely brilliant human being. He's the type of guy that when he starts talking about something, all of a sudden you feel three times smarter than you did when he began. He has the ability to take complex ideas and simplify them in a way that makes it really easy to understand them. But he also has a great tenacity.

He works at understanding something. And when he encounters something that he doesn't understand or that is a bit of a conundrum, he works at it until he cracks it. He specializes in the spiritual theology of St. Ignatius Leola, to whom the church owes a great debt, because St. Ignatius was the first thinker to systematize the act of discerning spirits, the act of discerning the sources of the content that come to us in the spiritual realm, that come to us in our thinking, and to trace back, look, what is the source of, of this? What is the source of that? And Ignatius did this by reflecting back on his own life and how

these movements occurred to him. And he became aware at different times that, look, the evil spirit is acting me at this time, even though what I am doing is an act of love of God. It's a religious act. But I've picked something to do that is not what God's will is. I've been led to this in order to keep me away from what God really wants. And so he began to reflect on these different movements that come to us. And he came up with an absolutely brilliant manner of discerning the sources of our insights, our ideas, our moods, and the motives by which we are led to act. So everybody is in for an amazing treat with Father Bart. Before we start today's episode, I want to give a special shout out to one of our sponsors. Deliverance, the board game. This is the highest

rated Christian board game of all time. It's basically a game that is the theme of spiritual warfare. And if it's perfect for Game Night, it's a lot of fun. You can get it on Kickstarter right now or go to Playdeliverance.com. It's actually a great conversation starter to have fun, talk about angels, demons, and just raise the topic of spiritual warfare for Game Night. It's really fun. So head to Playdeliverance.com. Check it out. That's the only place you can get the game and on to the show. Hello, Exorcist Files, listeners. We are bringing you one of our special bonus episodes today. So we are here today welcoming a friend and colleague of Father Carlos Martin's, Father Barton Geiger, who is a professor at Boston College, is joining us on the show today.

Father, thank you so much for being here. Could you give us a little introduction of yourself and how you know, Father Carlos? I'm a Jesuit priest, which means that I belong to a fraternity of Catholic priest that was founded 500 years ago by St. Ignatius Loyola. And I teach graduate theology at Boston College. And I also do research and writing at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, mostly on St. Ignatius. I have a doctrine in theology from our Jesuit University in Madrid called Kumias. I have a master's degree in philosophy from St. Louis University and a licentiate in theology from the Western Jesuit School of Theology, which used to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I met Father Carlos about, oh, I guess it was 10 years ago in the

context of the exorcism ministry. And I had some questions for him. And so a mutual friend put us in contact with each other. We've been friends ever since. And I just find him an amazingly, amazingly wise and holy man whom I consult very frequently. Well, first off, if you had to try and put into words, your level of just excitement about the show The Exorcist Files, is there even language that could express your enthusiasm? Oh, absolutely. The simple fact is that in the ancient church, one of the reasons why the Christian faith spread so quickly is that the pagans noticed that the Christians were especially effective at the ministry of exorcism because they were invoking the name of Jesus.

Jesus. The church fathers are very clear on this, that many people were entering the Christian church precisely because of that witness. And so in that sense, what you are doing here with Father Carlos is opening up the eyes of people to the reality of the spiritual world, spiritual combat, and the power of Christ. And so this is an amazing witness. Well, let's get down to some of our topics we wanted to discuss today when I had asked him about the gift of the discernment of spirits, which obviously plays a critical role in his work and the role of exorcism. He said one name only and it was yours. So could you give us a little bit of background on your journey to sort of being an expert's witness in this topic itself?

Okay. I kind of fell into the subject by accident, to be honest, because I was asked by my Jesuit superiors to get a doctorate in theology with a focus on the spiritual doctrine of San Ignatius Loyola. And traditionally speaking, he is one of those saints, one of those spiritual writers most famously associated with the subject of the discernment of spirits. So he wrote a spiritual classic called the spiritual exercises. And it's a manual, essentially, for helping a Christian go monk for a month, a whole month of intensive prayer, four or five hours of prayer a day, and guiding a person through that process for the sake of experiencing a profound. a spiritual transformation. And in that book, the spiritual exercises, he provides numerous rules, what he calls rules, but we would say tips, guidelines, criteria for discerning,

how do I know that this thought that I'm experiencing in prayer, this desire, this emotion, is this God trying to tell me something, or is this my own simple human way of thinking? or is this possibly what Ignatius called the enemy of human nature? Is this the enemy trying to deceive me in some way? Because in Christian theology from the very beginning, we have held that our interior movements, our thoughts, our feelings, our desires can be influenced by one of three sources. God and the holy angels can communicate to us.

We have our own human ways of thinking, of course, and feeling. the angels and the demons are also capable of influencing our interior movements with the permission of God. And so trying to discern or distinguish between those three. And so you fell into this a little bit. Do you ever feel that perhaps this was an anointing or a charism that you had, that you've discovered that you had maybe a special clarity or something that God had given you to be able to kind of have a heightened awareness about this? To be perfectly honest with you, I like to joke with people that I don't have a gift per se for discernment. I like to joke that I'm as dense as a brick. But in the tradition of the church, there are two ways that you can practice the discernment of spirits. And St. Paul talks about this. So there are those Christians to whom the Holy Spirit gives a gift for the discernment of spirits, a supernatural gift in which they can literally sense in some way, the presence of something divine or demonic present in a certain situation. But for those like my who don't have the gift. We can study the spiritual masters, going all the way back to St. Augustine

and John Cashin and whatnot, St. Teresa of Avila in the 16th century, St. Ignatius Loyola, all the spiritual masters who taught what kind of evidence, clues do you look for in a certain situation using your common sense and your reason and your knowledge of the faith and approach it from an intellectual point of view and discern whether you believe that God is present or not in what this person is saying or doing, what have you. So when we look at the gift of the discernment of spirits, could we walk through a few biblical examples of how that plays out? The first one for me that comes to mind is when the woman who is the medium who is following

Paul as he travels through the book of Acts, and then at one point he turns around and rebukes and the spirit comes out of her. Was that a gift of discernment where Paul just knew, okay, you know what? Obviously, this is clearly demonic, and so I'm just going to take authority right now. Is that the gift of discernment of spirits in action? To be honest, I don't think the evidence is clear based on the story itself, whether Paul is working from a spiritual gift or he's simply using his reason, you might say. Because from the rational point of view, she could be undermining his ministry,

because you remember in the story, she is making money for her handlers by predicting the future and things like that, but she's possessed by demons. And so she is saying out loud to anyone who will listen that Paul hears the man who is sent from the most high God. So at first glance, it sounds like great free public advertising for Paul, right? But instead, he sees this as a problem. Because you remember Jesus, too, the demons would very often say, you are the Christ, the son of God, and he would silence them, right? So the question remains, well, why would he silence them? Because that wasn't the right time in place for that message. Jesus's time had not come yet. And similar here, I'm just speculating, but it's possible that this woman was in very poor repute with a large amount of the public. And so Paul might have been thinking, the rational level, if she goes around saying this about me, it's actually going to damage my credibility in the eyes of many people of the public. Another possibility is that what she was saying was very broad or vague. You are a messenger of the one true God. Well, that could mean anything to a lot of different pagan people. So that didn't necessarily mean the Christian God. And so perhaps

because of being vague and potentially confusing, Paul realizes that this is something demonic and not from the Holy Spirit. Gotcha. Okay. What is the sort of textbook definition of the discernment of spirits? Right. The way that I think it is most commonly defined, because the word discernment comes from the Greek deacresis, which means to distinguish to separate.

So the classic definition of discernment of spirits is the analysis. analysis of thoughts, emotions, desires in order to determine whether they are being influenced by the good spirit, meaning God and the Holy Angels, whether they are simply coming from the human spirit, whether that tends to the good or the bad, or they're being influenced by the evil spirit. The discernment of spirits also includes various methods, tips, and tricks for responding to those thoughts, kind of cleaning house, so to speak, mental hygiene. Okay, I've recognized now that there's a thought in my head, which is being instigated by the enemy. Now, what do I do with that? How do I respond to that? Just to use a perfect example, because Jesus, of course, is the revelation of

God par excellence, the quintessential revelation of God. And so notice that in the Gospels, the Jews and the pagans have to discern the spirits about Jesus of Nazareth. Because on the one hand, he looks and sounds like so many of the prophets who came before him. But on the other hand, he's saying things that are radically different. He's saying, I have a relationship with God like no one has ever had before and will never have again. And well, Moses might have told you this, but I'm telling you this, which would have been incredibly audacious to their ears. So the Jews and the pagans have to discern the spirits about Jesus of Nazareth. And notice that in the Gospels, they have three very different reactions to him. Some of them conclude that he is out of his mind, or they conclude that he's diluted or he's

got a political agenda of some kind. Well, in all of those cases, you could say that they're claiming that he's simply acting from the human spirit, from his own human thoughts. God is not involved. But then there are others who say the man is possessed, is it league with demons and league with Beelzebub. Remember that Jesus himself has to sit there and try to explain rationally to the people why it couldn't be possible. You know, how can Satan be at war with Satan? Then there are people like Nicodemus who come to Jesus and say, there's no one who could do what you do or send from God. And so you find all three spirits at work and how people are discerning Jesus of Nazareth. Gotcha. So let's get into the ordinary kind of the day. For those of us who are not

Jesus, is it generally accepted that any sort of thought, say it's particularly lustful or what we would consider an immoral thought, is that automatically determined to be from the enemy, or is that also just the fallen nature that could also do that. And then does it matter? Because either one is inappropriate. Right. That's a very good question. So in the tradition, human nature has been wounded or corrupted by by original sin. We all agree that the relationship between thoughts and emotions and desires do not function in perfect harmony the way that God had originally intended. that in that sense, sin acts like a disease which wounds us. And so, at least coming from the Catholic perspective, we would say that what that means is

we still have holy desires. We have desires for God. We have desires for love and meaning that remain intact that God had instilled in us from the beginning. We are hardwired, so to speak, to seek God to want God. And so many of those desires that we have then, in that sense, are true. coming from the good spirit. But because of that concupiscence, we also find ourselves inclined to choose evil, even to know that it's evil, even when we know it's wrong, have you ever had

that experience from looking at something and saying, I know I don't want to do that. I know if I do it, I'm going to regret it. I'm not going to be proud of myself. And then you go ahead and you do it anyway. You know, St. Paul talks about that too. I don't do the good that I want to and do the bad that I don't want to, right? So when we talk about a thought coming from the human spirit, it could be good, it could be bad, it just depends on the context. Scripture says to that humans are pretty much without excuse, right, because we know, due to our original sin, or accountable, because we know what is right or wrong. Is that accurate statement? Well, I think so, sure. I mean, at the end of the day, we are all responsible

for our actions, right? And there's that basic sense of right and wrong. which St. Paul said was instilled even when the pagans, we've all got it. There are many, many sins that we commit, many bad decisions that we make, that the culpability of which might be mitigated very much by context and, you know, all kinds of things. Precisely because every human being is capable of choosing love, every human being is capable of sinning. By definition, the two must go together. Now, walk me through this. So I understand how the Holy Spirit can impress upon our minds things in the sense that believers have the Holy Spirit in dwelling within them. I've never understood entirely how angels and demons can, but at least on the angelic side,

it would make sense to me that because they're still in communion with God and the Holy Spirit, that somehow they would have a direct line. But how is it that evil spirits would be able to somehow insert thoughts, sinful thoughts into our psyche? Okay. Well, there's two different questions that were included in that question there. So the first one is, demons are not able to predict the future. They do not know the future any more than we do. Only God knows that. This was discussed by the church fathers and Augustine and Cash and I'll talk about this. On the one hand, we must remember that demons, like angels, have been around since the beginning of creation. And they have seen human beings from the very beginning. And they know human nature

very, very well. So they can make a very educated guess as to the way that individuals are going to act in a certain situation based on that experience, right? However, I know this is going to sound very strange, but this is the experience of exorcists, that the risen Christ does impart information to demons at times, things that he wants them to know for various reasons. So for example, if an exorcist is praying silently for a demon to leave, the demons, strictly speaking, cannot hear those prayers, but the risen Christ allows the demon to hear those prayers for obvious reasons. Now, the second question, I'll be perfectly honest with you, that question is far above my pay grade in terms of the metaphysics says, I don't claim to understand at the metaphysical level how that would work.

but I do like to remind people that it's not as strange as we might seem. You and I having this conversation are influencing the way that each of us think and feel right now as we're having this conversation, right? And so at the invisible level, angels and demons would be able to do the same, but I wouldn't claim to know the metaphysics of it. It would make more sense, though, right, that angels would have an easier time. I heard Father Basil Cole say that, you know, suggestions might come from his guardian angel. And I thought, well, I guess that makes sense

because the angel spirit kind of aligned. What I don't understand is if demons, somehow they are constantly being around you, like in some spiritual sense, it always seems to have been taught, right? And correct me if I'm wrong, but demons do not have access to your thoughts. Correct, they do not.

They don't have any kind of access to any kind of spiritual faculties like that. One way to explain it, you know, we'll say that a possessed person has demons in them, strictly speaking that's not correct. Angels and demons by virtue of being immaterial cannot be said to be here or there in a location-specific sense. We feel their effects as being here or there, but they themselves cannot be said to be in a specific location. And a way to understand this

is even science talks about we experience four dimensions of space-time. height, width, depth, and time, right? Even modern physics recognizes the reality of multiple dimensions that we cannot perceive with our bodily senses, which raises the obvious question of what's in those other dimensions, right? And so a similar thing is perhaps at work here in terms of how spirits interact with our world. It's funny because obviously demons are not omnipresent, but to our faculties, we might misperceive them as being everywhere.

When I think of the movie The Exorcist and the demon seems to, quote, jump from one person to another, I'm assuming then based on what you're saying is that it appears to be jumping because my faculties can't comprehend something existing in both places simultaneously. So a demon doesn't necessarily travel from Regan to Father Karas. There's just this somehow extra-dimensional connection there, and so it's instantaneous for them. but for us and my limited human faculties, it appears to be that it has gone from point A to point B. So that seems like a reasonable way to look at it. That film, the Exorcist, I think, has been both a blessing and a curse in some ways.

You know, William Peter Blattie, who wrote the novel, was very consciously trying to awaken Christians' eyes to the reality of the devil, and this is in the early 1970s. And so Catholics and a lot of other Christians were inclined to throw belief in the devil right out the window, right? So he deliberately writes this novel to kind of counteract that. But in a way, he was too successful because the film was so frightening and made such a public sensation that now people are afraid to talk about the subject in any kind of a confident, faith-filled way. The subject terrifies so many people because that's their image of what the ministry is all about, when in reality it's a very beautiful, very consoling ministry. Well, since we're kind of starting to dip our toes

into the exorcistic waters. It seems like the church has done sort of waxing and waning when it comes to the topic of demons. It seems like early off, it started with a bang because, hey, like, who is this carpenter who can drive out demons that would not listen to us? And then other people can easily just use his name and they still respond to it. It's that powerful. And then the church is fueled by this growth. And then at some point, you had suddenly all these differing traditions around as the church

expanded, how you dealt with demons started to take on all these different forms, and the church recognized, okay, we probably need to put out like best practices for how to deal with this. And then at some point, as you mentioned, the 70s, the idea of demons having any sort of day-to-day effects seem to become more controversial. So could you give us kind of a high level of how this has evolved over time? Sure. Two things jump out at me. And the first one is about the fourth century after Christian faith has been legalized and has gotten traction in the Roman Empire. What we must remember is that, theologically speaking, anybody can do an exorcism. You do not need to be a priest or minister. You don't even need to be Christian. Romans and Greeks and

the pagans, they had their own exorcism rituals, right? And as Christians, we believe that, to a certain extent, God's going to respect that because they're operating out of the lights that they've been given. But in the ancient world, what they noticed is that the Jewish exorcists who were invoking very real angels like Gabriel or Michael or what have you and invoking the one true God, of course, were particularly effective in doing exorcisms. And then the Christians come along. And they're even more effective, as I said before. All of the Christian faithful, not just the clergy, were doing these exorcisms. But a problem arose, and it's still a problem today, to put it bluntly, there was a great deal of scandal and embarrassment that was happening for the early church because a lot of exorcists were, well, to put it kindly eccentric or misbehaving. And so the early church was getting embarrassed by a lot of public scandals. And so what happened was the church started to restrict the ministry of exorcism. And I think this started about the 4th century, if I'm not mistaken, maybe the 5th. The church started to restrict the ministry of exorcism to ordained clergy as a form of kind of damage control.

if you will, making sure that those who were doing it had formal training in the ministry and were approved by the bishops, that kind of a thing. But again, theologically speaking, anyone can do an exorcism. So that reality of exorcism with the drama, the flare, the temptations, the scandals, that's been a part of the ministry from the very beginning. Now, the second thing is this, as you noted, in the 1960s and 70s, Christians in general, certainly Catholics, but Christians in general, because of the Enlightenment, Western culture in general was taking a much more scientific, rationalistic approach to all of reality, including how we look at our Christian faith. And also in the 1960s and 70s, there was a feeling in the Catholic Church

that we had become too cynical and the way that we look at the world around us, the world outside the church, that we had taken too much of a circle-the-wagons mentality where the holiness and the fullness of truth is with us and everyone else is from the devil. And so Pope John the 23rd, the Second Vatican Council, that was the big meeting of all the Catholic bishops in the 1960s, deliberately decided that they were going to take a more optimistic and positive way of looking at the world, that people of other faiths, certainly other Christians, that we are all pilgrims of goodwill and we're on this journey together. So trying to emphasize those common bonds. Well, from that perspective, if you start talking that way, it gets really difficult to say, oh, yeah, the devil's that work in this particular culture or in this particular person or in this particular belief system, you can't really use that language anymore because it becomes alienating, becomes dividing. And so I think that was a principal reason why, at least for Catholics, they became very uncomfortable with using that kind of language in their engagement of others. Certainly, too, there was an increased awareness of all the people with mental illness, for example, who had been wrongfully classified as possessed. And so all the abuses that have occurred to mentally old people

and things like that over the centuries. Psychology and psychiatry were becoming formal sciences of their own in the 20th century. And so that was another reason why I think Christians in general were just happy to dismiss anything that happens as psychological in nature. And did this sort of moving away from demonic activity in the day-to-life, was that also a broader trend? Or, trend of the idea of miracles and God, like, healing. Well, you remind me of a great story about eight years ago. I was teaching at a different Catholic university, and Word was getting around that I was involved in this ministry.

And I had a conversation with one of the administrators who was himself a priest. And he said to me, Bart, you know, I'm concerned about what the faculty here at this university are going to think if Word gets out that you're doing this kind of thing, or you're teaching this subject in the classroom, you know, demons. And I thought to myself, isn't it funny? I can teach that Jesus was born of a virgin, was raised from the dead, was both fully God and fully human, walked on water, and that the bread and wine become the body and blood of the Lord.

But if I talk about spirits, that that's over the top. That's weird, right? And so I don't really think people are even thinking when they have problems with that particular aspect of our faith. when in reality the miraculous undergirds everything that we're about. And also, we've had Dr. Richard Gallagher on here, too, is a very prominent and brilliant psychiatrist. And he pointed out, too, that it's funny to say,

if you're going to deny the existence of a spiritual life in general or spirits, you're going against the entire weight of pretty much human existence. You go around the world, and you're far more likely in most countries outside the Western European and American to say, oh, yeah, like evil spirits, of course they're real. and we have prescriptions for how to deal with them. That's right. You know, if there's one thing that probably all cultures have agreed on

since the beginning of human history, it's been the reality of good and evil spirits in one form or another, right? And so I think it would be takingly, breathtaking hubris to dismiss that kind of human experience, right? I ask my students very often, I will say, if there really were an evil spiritual entity that was intent on disrupting, ruining your relationship with God, would you want to know that? And everybody raises their hands, regardless of whether they believe in the devil or not, everybody raises their hands, right?

And I say, now think about that for a minute. What that means is you recognize that this is an important subject. This subject profoundly impacts how we understand the cosmos and the history of the relationship. between good and evil, right? I can understand, of course, if an atheist denies the existence of the devil, he or she is simply being consistent. But when Jesus and St. Paul and every single one of the New Testament writers and every single one of the church fathers, several church councils, and countless, countless saints and mystics have reaffirmed over the years the existence of good and evil spirits, To me, it would seem breathtaking hubris to deny them then is to deny what we've just agreed is a very important point and something that has been universally and consistently affirmed by all the sources of our faith.

I just consider it outstandingly illogical to deny the existence of the devil. Amen. Father Martin's here. I want to do a quick plug for one of the most powerful tools I've seen for breaking free and growing closer to Christ. Exodus 90. The Exodus 90 challenge begins this year on January 20th, but this isn't just a 90-day program. Exodus 90 is a spirituality for modern men that is built on three ancient pillars, prayer, self-sacrifice, and fraternity. We all long for something more. We long to be the men God created us to be, sons of a loving father. Father. It's time to turn away from our idols. It's time to break free from the pharaohs that hold us in bondage. If you're ready to make a fresh start and embark on a journey to uncommon freedom in Jesus Christ,

then download the Exodus 90 app today. This is your chance to break free, refocus, and rediscover who God is calling you to be in the new year. It starts January 20th. So go to Exodus 9,000, 90.com slash X-Files to learn more about Exodus 90. That's Exodus 90.com slash X-Files to join tens of thousands of men from all over the world for Exodus 90. Again, it begins Monday, January 20th. God bless you. Now, has this interest remained solely in the realm of academic for you, or do you have any personal experience that would lead you to conclude, like if someone said, hey, look, I don't know

about your theology on this father, but could you say, hey, look, I have stories and I know too many credible people who are under no pharmaceutical assistants that have bore out this experience or witness things in your own life. Well, the analogy I like to use in that regard, and I think I might have gotten this from C.S. Lewis, but I'm not sure. We look at the existence of germs, microbes, right? There are two opposite extreme errors we can make. One would be to deny their existence altogether, because that's a recipe for getting sick. But the other is to acknowledge their existence and then to become a hypochondriac, to be obsessed with them, to see germs everywhere and to constantly be obsessed with that idea. Rather, the proper attitude is to be aware of

their existence, take reasonable protocols to keep yourself clean, and then nine times out of ten, you're not going to have a problem, right? Or St. Augustine, use this example of an angry dog tied to a stake. He can't hurt you. He's not dangerous as long as you acknowledge his existence and you stay outside of his perimeter, right? But if you ignore him and walk into his zone, then you're in trouble. You're asking for trouble.

And so one of the reasons why this ministry suffers in the form of public opinion or public perception is not only those who deny the existence of the enemy, but those who believe and then just make this the entire focus of their spirituality or just have an unhealthy obsession with it. Because, I mean, it's tempting to do that, right? It's sensational in so many ways, or at least it's perceived to be. We do get quite a few emails from people who are concerned about, you know, demonic affliction in their own life. You know, we never want to be fearmongering in this show, etc. We want to raise awareness. And we leverage the entertainment side to region audience that may not find their way into a pulpit, or a pew, I should say. So I definitely don't want people to be

afraid. But in other hand, I know many people who saw The Exorcist and they're like, you know what, I'm still uncertain about Jesus, but in the off chance this is real, I'm going straight to church. And I said, well, the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord. And hey, a little fear is not a bad thing to have in some cases. What I get asked to do very often by the Archdiocese of Boston, is that people will contact the archdiocese saying that they or someone they love is afflicted by demonic realities. And so I'm asked to take what I know about discernment of spirits. And I take a couple colleagues with me who are psychiatrists and psychologists and we'll go sit with a person and talk to them at length and do all kinds of prayers and whatnot. You would be surprised how often.

This very often happens, for example, when parents are calling on behalf of their children. child. And the child might be autistic or bipolar or something like that. And the parents, to put it bluntly, they really want to believe that it's something spiritual. Why? And it's understandable, because if it's spiritual, that implies that it can be fixed, that it can be gotten rid of. And so I have actually overheard parents saying when they thought that I couldn't hear them, I really hope that Father Bart tells me this is spiritual for my child, because I just can't bear the thought otherwise. And so it breaks your heart. But that's an example of how the discernment of spirits is relevant. Given that you obviously lean on professionals and medical assistance in this kind of ministry,

do you have any personal testimony that would say, hey, to a skeptic, I'm telling you these things are real. And the stuff that the church talks about, rare as it may be, is a reality? Well, I mean, I have certainly been present to any number of exorcisms. And I have seen extraordinary things. Now, if someone really wanted to be dogged about it, there's nothing that I've seen or heard which couldn't absolutely be said to be not, you know, within the realm of human possibility. I have not seen anybody levitate. Now, some of my exorcist friends say that they have, and I take their word for it. I have not seen anything like that. However, I have seen a priest place a crucifix on someone's forehead, and then they immediately lean over and vomit,

and pints of this obnoxious fluid. I've seen them bend over backwards to a degree that, boy, if they weren't a yoga master, I just don't know how they could do something like that. I can't say it's outside the realm of physical possibility, but when you see this kind of thing over and over again, and as I started to help out more and more with these kinds of things, I was getting pushback of my own in an attempt to kind of scare me away from any further involvement in this ministry. Was that pushback from church and I actually? academic sense or pushback spiritually? Both in one sense.

Getting involved in this ministry can make a lot of people nervous for various reasons. But I was referring to spiritual pushback. I'm debating about how much to say here. This is actually probably the number one question that Father and I get is if I listen to your show, will I be targeted more by the enemy? Because I don't want that. This question frustrates me to no end. Because if you believe what we're saying is true, that God is the creator of the

universe and he sent his only son. and his victory. You've already won. This battle is won. And to learn about your enemy and to endanger you, what an insidious lie that he could get you to avoid. And secondly, Father would never ask you to do something that's going to put you in harm's way. And thirdly, if you're living a righteous and moral and upright life, I always tell people like, are you trying to be a good spouse, raise good kids, like live a quiet fragrance of Christ in the world? You are already in the bullseye of spiritual warfare. That's right. For those who are getting involved in the exorcism ministry for the first time, it is very common for the enemy to do things. And again, I must stress over and over that they cannot

do anything without the explicit permission of God. So, for example, a very traditional thing that happens to rookie priests is that they will suddenly find horseflies in their chalice when they're saying Mass. And sure enough, it was Christmas Eve about 10 years ago. And I had recently started the ministry. And I looked down, it was middle of winter, obviously, freezing outside. And before I consecrated the wine, I found a horsefly in the chalice. Now, that might have been just a one-off thing. Now, that has never happened to me in all my years before being a priest. And I've said masses and jungles and all kinds of things, right? This never happened. The very next week at Sunday Mass, it happened again. I looked down and there's another big horse fly in the chalice, right?

And you can call that a coincidence if you want to, but I knew that it wasn't. And then it happened again a third time a few weeks later. My priest friends had told me to be on the lookout for that kind of a thing. And it's just a subtle acknowledgement from the enemy. I see what you're doing and I don't like it. And also an attempt to denigrate the sanctity of what's going on at the mass. I would start getting phone calls. I remember one day, I was in my office, and My landline rang and I picked it up and then it clicked off. You know, someone was on the line and then hung up. And then about three minutes later, my cell phone rang.

I picked it up and then it clicked off, right? And then a few minutes later, I was walking past another landline in the ministry office. And it rang and I picked it up and there was a pause and then I clicked off again. It's that kind of little thing. And there's small things, but there are ways of trying to frighten the person away from the ministry. On one occasion, I was just getting started, and I had about five or six relics of saints, those little pieces of bone or hair of the saints, which are very effective for this kind of ministry. And I had used a couple of them when praying with a person. And the very next day when I went back to my office, all the relics were ripped off the wall and scattered on the other side of the office.

If not, if they had simply fallen off the wall, they couldn't have gotten to the far side like that. That was just a little warning that, hey, we're here. One thing I want to stress, demons are very legalistic, just like little children are, because little children in front of mom and dad have absolutely no power over a mom and dad at all. All they can do is hold mom and dad accountable to what they said. So, for example, if mom tells her little girl, you can stay up until eight, And then at 755 she says, okay, time for bed. What's that little girl going to say?

You said, hey, you said eight. I got five minutes left, right? That's the only thing she can do is hold mom accountable. And in the same way, precisely because the demons have no power over God whatsoever, but God is going to allow them to do certain things for our spiritual benefit, God is going to get very, very specific with them about what they can and cannot do. And so even the fact those horse flies in the chalice before the consecration or the relics being thrown across the room, all of that was done with the permission of God. And so there is no reason to be afraid. Once you just embrace that, that God's not going to let anything happen to you that you can't handle.

He's going to let you be tested a little bit for the sake of your spiritual good. But there's nothing to fear. And that's the main thing the enemy always wants to instill in us. You bring up a good point I want to ask you about, which is one thing that has always been a struggle for me, and I'll do a classic Ryan three-part question here, given that when we're talking about a formal exorcism, we're talking about an extreme case, possession, etc. So in those cases, Father talks often about issuing commands, and every time he issues the command, the demon is looking up going, do I have to do that? And they resist. Perhaps you can help us walk through this tension of when a priest in an exorcism issues a command as an official, representative of the Church of Christ, and yet it will still sometimes be like, you know,

there's a few dynamics at play here, right? There's the victims of going. You have to want to be liberated. But assuming they do, what is happening when someone issues a command and a demon is being worn down? You mentioned this dynamic of asking God, do I have to obey that, asking for these permissions? And I know this is in the realm of conjecture, but do you have any thoughts on what could be happening with this sort of partial obedience. We hear from Exorcists where they have to keep issuing and hammering, tell me your name, and finally the demon gives in. Right. There are so many different factors involved in this kind of a question. It becomes complicated very quickly. But to begin, just to preface what you said earlier, but I think among Exorcist, there's a general

change of belief or theorizing, you might say, where the common conception today, is that you might have people who are demonically afflicted in some way. And then here's this invisible line that you cross. And then they're officially possessed with a capital P. There's some kind of specific criterion, which defines what it means to be possessed, right? And we're rethinking that. We don't think that's a helpful way of looking at it. We prefer to think of it now as kind of a spectrum where the demonic activity becomes increasingly overt and intense, you might say.

to the point where it might take over the person's consciousness, maybe for just a minute, maybe for 30 seconds, and then the person comes back, and then as it gets worse, it'll take over the person's consciousness for maybe four or five minutes until you get to the point where it might take over the person's consciousness for 12 hours or something like that. Well, in that kind of a situation,

I think Father Carlos would agree with me, where you could say that the person was possessed, quote, unquote, for one minute at the beginning. beginning and then possessed for five minutes later, where the definition of what we mean by possessed is simply has the enemy taken over the person's consciousness for a while, if that helps. Personally, my gut instinct and my experience tells me that's a more helpful way to look at it. Now, to go back to your second question, there's a couple factors at work.

And one is, as you well know, when a priest or a minister is doing an exorcism, strictly speaking, the demons are not scared of us. They're scared of the presence of Christ in us, the authority that Christ has given us by virtue of our baptism. And then, you know, if we're clergy, by virtue of our ordination. And so they are always, like you just said, during an exorcism, Christ will actually tell the demons, you have to leave now, or I want you to stick around for a little bit, for whatever reason. One thing to keep in mind is that Christ, of course, can command a demon to leave any time he wants. So theoretically, no exorcism should have to last more than a second. But in reality, the typical exorcism lasts anywhere from six months to two years, believe it or not, for serious case.

Remember, though, in Legion, the Demos, the Demoniac, when the demons were saying to Jesus, what have you to do with us, son of the most I God? And then Luke says, Jesus had been saying to the demons telling them to leave. And they're still sticking around to ask Jesus questions. So even in that story, instantaneous. There was that conversation that had to follow between Jesus and the demons before they left. And the reason is simply this, 90 times out of 100, if a person has got a serious demonic affliction, it is because the person has been very wounded in some way, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. You have a lot of people who are victims of abuse. They're suicidal. They have been engaged in very serious habitual sin for a long time.

I mean, to put it simply, the enemy likes to kick us when we're down, right? He goes after low-hanging fruit. Demons are inherently lazy. Now, what that means is, if the person is going to be delivered of this problem, it's not simply a matter of commanding the demons to leave. The person also has to do some real spiritual growth. They have to get their act together spiritually and religiously and get it to the point, where Christ feels that they're ready to have the spirits leave.

If they leave too soon, the person has to own the process, you might say. I run into this frequently enough where a person with a real demonic affliction will say something like, Father, just say your prayers so I can go back home and go back to my life the way it was, and I'll say, well, it doesn't work like that. We're going to have to talk about the healing that you need, and we have to talk about the way you're living and the friends that you're choosing to hang out with and all kinds of stuff for this kind of healing to take place, you would be amazed how many times they say, thanks, but no thanks, and they leave. They would rather live with a spiritual

problem and not change their lives. Well, we profile that. That's a real thing I know. And so you are saying, so then basically that in a formal exorcism, by the time my bishop approves it, this is such an extreme case. There's probably self-selects for cases of most likely extreme occult activity, I'm going to guess that most big cases of full-blown possession that would warrant Bishop approval for an exorcism. They're not like, I said a bad word. It's got to be, I'm assuming, usually in Catholic theology, it's got to allow for probably serious mortal sin of some sort and something that's gotten, you know, to that place. It is a great debate among exorcists. So even we disagree about this. I mean, we're all sinners, obviously. But someone who has not done anything

overtly wrong could still be possessed, still be afflicted, like a child, for example, before the age of reason, could a child be possessed or something like that? Does it always have to be some kind of explicitly or implicitly on the part of the person before that severe affliction occurs? There are many exorcists who will say, yes, there's got to be some kind of an explicit, yes, invitation of some kind. But there are others who say, no, in my experience, children and others who have not done anything overtly wrong or sinful can still be seriously afflicted for various reasons. Well, it's like free, I mean, we have several cases we profile where spirit-filled, baptized Christians, not in any sin, Father has found to being highly demonized, and they're very rare, but highly demonized.

In fact, we share a testimony in season one from someone who's a pastor's wife who had a great, great-grandparent who was involved in an extramarital affair, and that affair was with someone who happened to be a witch doctor, who then placed a curse on the family and said, every firstborn female would have chronic illness or death. She thought it was crazy because she'd been sick for 20 years. They thought it was Lyme disease or MS or something. And so they just happened to indulge this, went down the family tree and saw that each firstborn female for like four generations had chronic illness or death, had an exorcism and was instantaneously healed. I appreciate because you're right, the idea of a four-year-old, even if they aren't going to bed at 8 p.m.

having serious demonization issues that doesn't seem, quote, fair. But in the context, we're all part of original sin. And so there is a framework for how we are held accountable. I did not eat the fruit in the garden. I've committed many other sins. But like, the thing that broke the universe, like I wasn't there. And yet we're still very much accountable for it. So I know many exorcists who talk about generational curses, the effects,

this freemasonry. Does a parent have authority to curse their child? We have several cases where parents dedicate their children to demons. And to be fair, I don't think the parents are doing it nefariously. And most they think they're, you know, they're asking for protection, like in Santa Ria. You know, they're asking an Eresia to bless their child. Are those permissions from parents enough to overcome any lack of age of reason? To be honest with you, this was the one thing when I began this ministry that I had the hardest time wrapping my mind around, the hardest time believing.

and that is the reality of curses and the idea that the decisions of our ancestors can have profound spiritual implications for their descendants. But in my own experience, I came to realize and understand that this is true, like you just said, it really does happen. And in the case of people who are leading a generally virtuous and prayerful life, who do end up having a severe demonic affliction of some kind, it is almost always that I can think of a result of something that their ancestors had done, especially people who have spiritual authority. So a godparent or a parent, something like that, a parental blessing, we see that in the Old Testament all the time, right? Abraham and Isaac Jacob blessing their children.

A parental blessing is very, very powerful. And I encourage Christian parents to bless their children because they have very real spiritual. authority over their children, not just parental human authority, but spiritual authority under the divine and natural law. But by that same token, that authority could be horribly perverted if someone wanted to do that, right? And use that kind of authority for nefarious sense. Like in our story that we share, Tammy was like, all right, well, I break this. Like, they went through an exorcism. It was like, I break this off. As owner of my family line now, right, I renounce that generational curse and break it off. She was instantly healed. In a case of

a person who you mentioned who has a extreme occult activity in the past. So in a case where it's four years, how do you kind of walk us through the long time? I think it took about two, two and a half years before we finally determined that that was the principal cause of what happened. I'm oversimplifying the story tremendously, to be honest. I mean, it was what we call a perfect storm of three or four factors that led to her dilemma. But that was by far the most prevalent cause. Like I said, there are so many factors. Another factor is this. I know this is going to sound silly, but it's very true, and you've probably heard this already. But in any possession case, there's always numerous demons at work, right? And they have

their own hierarchy, just like the angels exist in a hierarchy. Some are more intelligent than others. Some are more powerful or beautiful than others. And so in any possession case, it's almost like a business. You have your low-level grunts. You have your middlemen. And then you have your chief, if you're CEO or something like that, right, who's kind of in charge of that case. What happens is the demons that you will initially encounter during an exorcism are the low-level guys, all right? They're the weakest ones, and they usually, they will literally not know why they're in that person, because whoever's in charge of the case will tell the lower-ranking ones, we need to be afflicting this person over here. And so there have been cases where I asked the demons, why are you?

here, and they literally said, we don't know why we're here, we were told to be here. You have to ask our superior, okay? That kind of a thing. I know that the reason why they do that is that it's damage control, right? So it's like the lower ranking ones aren't given that information so that they don't give up the goods too quickly during an exorcism. The way we'd like to explain it is that demons ultimately have to obey you, whether they do it quickly or not quickly. That's Christ's decision, right? So you have two kinds of authority that you can bring into an exorcism, the baptismal authority that all Christians the possess. And then from a Catholic perspective, the apostolic authority that comes from being ordained a priest, that special authority,

which Jesus gave the 12 apostles and St. Paul, and then kind of gets handed down of the bishops, the clergy. And so all else being equal, that's a very important phrase, all else being equal, someone who is apostolic authority is going to be more effective at doing exorcisms than someone who does not. However, a lot of subjective factors involved. You might have a Christian layperson who's a profoundly holy person or who has a gift for the discernment of spirits or exorcism, and maybe the priest isn't so holy or isn't as prayerful. Well, in that kind of a situation, the layperson might be much more effective. It can be a very humbling thing in our ministry where one exorcist might be working with a person

for three or four months and not get anywhere. And then they invite a second exorcist to come in and he says just a few prayers and they're gone. That could be the Lord's way of trying to humble the first one. Or it could be the fact that that second priest had a particular gift. What we notice too is that individual demons are radically unique like snowflakes. And what St. Thomas Aquinas said is that every angel and every demon is the only member of its own species. So imagine there's just one rabbit on the earth, then that one rabbit is the only

member of the species rabbit. And so every angel and every demon is like that. And in the middle ages, if you look at medieval art, like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, when they paint something like the temptation of St. Anthony, and he's being tormented by all these demons, when you look at the way those demons are painted in art, you will notice that each one of them is very, very different. And these artists were well aware of that theology. So what that means is each demon is going to react very differently to different kinds of prayers, different sacramentals, the mention of different saints. And so in a way, I like to joke that when you first start working on a case,

you remember the game Battleship when you played when you were a kid? You just fire randomly, right, until you finally hit something, and then you start firing all around that little area wherever your initial hit was, In a way, that's kind of what the ministry is like. You have to do a lot of different prayers and sacramentals and whatnot until you kind of get a sense of where this particular demon is coming from. You know, the reason why it's there, it's character. And so that can be a time-consuming process. Wow.

No, that's utterly fascinating. I want to make sure we get you out here in time. We've got a couple more questions and we'll get to an optimistic note. We spent a lot of time on spiritual warfare and demons. I did want to ask, and I mean this question. This is something that came up because I played one of our episodes to a friend of mine who's a dear friend and devout layperson who's got a significant gift for discernment of spirits and has a really successful deliverance ministry. When they heard some of these episodes, and they mean it from a very intellectually honest standpoint, right? We were interviewing someone and the priest said, well, part of the reasons I know the Catholic Church is, you know, there's many reasons why I believe.

believe it's the true interpretation, but I've had demons say, go back, you don't have your bishop's approval. You can't do anything. And we both were talking, and we thought, you know, it would be very interesting, is that if a demon knows that both sides play, that they have self-imposed regulations, could not a demon to try and delay it stay longer? And this would apply to both Protestants. I'll say, both sides. Could a demon not say, fine, if bishop approval is actually a man-made tradition and the demon's going to exploit that to prop up a Catholic interpretation of exorcism and drag it out saying you need all these lengthy prayers and um and you know formulas for lack of a term and vice versa on the protestant side it's also to be intellectually honest you could

say a demon might say yeah I'm going to come out really quickly here uh in this case to prop up a lesser version of the of the fullness of the truth of the gospels has that ever crossed your mind because when people say their experience, you know, validates their interpretation. This question comes because I know many Protestant deliverance ministers who have extreme success with their ministry, and so they have a tough time reconciling the right of exorcism. So any just thoughts on that? Well, yeah, you're putting your finger on a very real and sensitive subject. And part of the reason why so many Catholic intellectuals, I think, struggle with re-embracing the exorcism ministry, because you may or may not be aware that Pope Francis has really been emphasizing the need for the Catholic Church to really kind of get back

on the horse with regard to this ministry, which strikes a lot of people as odd, because on the one hand, he seems quote-unquote liberal, oh, we're going to embrace the world, all that kind of stuff, you know, reach out to the sinners. And yet, on the other hand, he's talking about the devil being alive and active in people and places, right? And so a lot of I think Catholic academics are really struggling with this duality. And one of the reasons why I think, and I think there's some justification for this, is remember what I said about the ancient church, one of the reasons why it spread so quickly Christianity is because people saw how effective exorcism was. For that very same reason, it can be very, very tempting to exploit and manipulate the ministry to prove

your own points like you just said, right, to come to conclusions too hastily or to read the evidence based on your own theological framework, that kind of a thing like you were suggesting. Well, it could just be God's mercy. Exactly. Exactly. And so the dilemma that you have articulated is very real. Now, I do think certain truths do come out. You know, the old saying, if you lie long enough, the truth comes out, right? You know, one of my favorite stories, stories, and maybe this is a good place to end it, because I want to end on an edifying note. I have never appreciated more deeply the real power of prayer and the real presence of Christ in us and with us every single day. I have never appreciated the power of the sacraments, the power of

the priesthood more than when I began this ministry. And it has been so incredibly edifying to see the healing that it brings not only to the afflicted but to their families. And I remember one story in particular. It was one of my very first serious cases. A young man about 23 years old, and he was engaged to be married. And he had a very serious affliction. The exorcism took about a year. And during the course of the exorcism, he was just disgusting. I mean, he was vomiting, drooling. Eucous running out of his nose. He would be urinating in his pants. Normally you don't see all that in a case. This was really unusual in terms of just how gross it was. And to my amazement, his fiance,

just I keep thinking to myself, this is going to squirrel, scare this poor woman off, right? You know, to my amazement, she just sat there for several months while this is going on lovingly wiping it all up, giving him a kiss on the cheek. I was deeply, deeply touched by this. And then during the the course of the exorcism, they had been present in this young man for about six or seven years before they finally showed themselves. And I asked them, why now? Why did you show yourself now? And I was stunned by their answer. They said, because he's getting married soon. And if he gets married and experiences that sacrament, that spiritual bond between him and this woman is going to weaken our hold on him. And so they were deliberately trying to make him as repulsive as possible

to scare her off, right? And at that moment, I appreciated the power of the sacrament of marriage in a way that I never had before. And now I'm happy to say they're happily married and have three young kids, just a beautiful family. But it's things like that, the blessings in the ministry that make it all worth it. That's wonderful. And then before we wrap up here, are there any just burning really cool stories that you think would edify or encourage? I mean, that last one was beautiful. But is there anything else as far as making the reality of God? Because we do try to address the skeptic in the show, both on the demonic spiritual warfare, but also the reality of God being so much bigger. Well, there's nothing I can share that would convince a skeptic, but I have had experiences in

my life that were very, very powerful. I think the risen Lord has appeared to me twice. The first time he was in disguise, the second time he was not. And both of those impacted me. and when I share these stories with other Christians, I am amazed how many of them also have similar stories to share. I think this kind of thing happens far more often than we realize that the risen Lord, he didn't simply appear to the faithful 2,000 years ago. For whatever reason, he appears to some of us, and I think is wanting us to share those stories with others.

And so that has been one of the great blessings of my life.