Deliverance:
Parish Teams
Exorcist:
Trained Teams Needed in Parishes to Fight Evil Spirits
By
Chai Brady
Ireland urgently needs trained
teams of people to lead so-called ‘deliverance ministry’ for people who feel
they are oppressed by evil spirits, a leading priest-exorcist has warned.
Fr Pat Collins CM, who
has worked in this ministry for many years, told The Irish Catholic that the need is pressing and that while a
number of Irish bishops have been “responding quietly but positively”, trained
psychologist Fr Collins warned, “The demand is much greater than the supply”.
“As Ireland has
secularised, there is a crisis of truth, and a crisis of meaning – people are
getting into all kinds of things they wouldn’t have got into before. As a
result, people are more open to spiritual forces that can be negative.
“I think there is
growing need for deliverance, undoubtedly, this needs to be acknowledged”, he
insisted.
While the Church
reserves exorcism to priests who have special permission from a bishop, deliverance
ministry is prayer for the person experiencing distress with the desire to heal
the emotional wounds leading to their feelings of being oppressed.
Fr Collins told The Irish Catholic that he is convinced
the Church in Ireland needs “teams where there are sympathetic psychiatrists
and psychotherapists working with people who are in deliverance ministry, and
they are working holistically together so that diagnosis is better than it is
at the moment”, he said.
He warned, “Just when
we have fewer priests than ever, and priests are overburdened, this new need is
coming along. I still think the bishops need to address it”.
The Vincentian priest
said several dioceses have been running ‘Unbound’ courses which can help
lay-people and priests train in deliverance ministry which he says is
“excellent”.
Extreme cases which
require a solemn exorcism can only be conducted by a priest, according to canon
law, but these are rare the exorcist says.
“Most cases that
present are not in need of a solemn exorcism, but what would be called simple
exorcism, or what we call now ‘deliverance’. Anyone who is baptised can pray
for deliverance”, Fr Collins said.
“My big impression with
loads of people contacting me is that an awful lot of mental health issues are
now masquerading as to do with spirits, and when you talk to these people and
say it might be psychiatric or emotional, they just don’t want to hear it and
they are utterly convinced”, he said.
More often than not there
is a natural explanation to behaviours and experiences that people are
reporting, Fr Collins explained.
To formalise
deliverance ministry teams, Fr Collins said there must be guidelines and
protocols to safeguard because it is currently “wide open to abuse”.
He is offering to
produce protocols and a code of ethics for the bishops, saying: “It strikes me
as amazing that the bishops don’t see this and they could end up in the courts.
Say somebody was doing a so-called exorcism – that is how it would be put in
the press – and they had no training, no knowledge and did more harm than good,
that the person would be claiming damages”, he said.
Fr Collins said the aim
would be to protect clients and make sure “total amateurs are not getting
involved who know nothing about abnormal psychology”.
He added: “It needs to
be professionalised so that competent people are only allowed to get involved
in the ministry”.
In the instructions to
the priest in the Roman Ritual, the priest is warned to not too readily believe
that a person is possessed and to consider whether they are suffering from
mental illness.
The Church requires
that an investigation be made to ensure that the symptoms cannot be explained
by mental or medical illness and that at least some of the signs of possession
also present.
Irish Catholic 9.6.22
