Father Carlos Martins, Spiritual Warrior

A Terrific New Book By A Catholic Exorcist. And: UFOs & The Catholic Imagination

Father Carlos Martins

If you’re like me, then you are a big fan of The Exorcist Files, the electrifying podcast featuring the work and commentary of the Catholic priest Carlos Martins, an American exorcist. What’s great about the podcast is not only that it’s dramatic (they feature dramatic recreations of events from Father Carlos’s case files, but also bring on Father to explain in practical terms how to interpret the event (e.g., how the person opened himself up to possession). It’s an exciting podcast, but it’s also pastoral. You can listen on the link above, or find them wherever you get your podcasts.

Well, good news: this week, Father Carlos has released his first book, The Exorcist Files: True Stories About The Reality Of Evil And How To Defeat It. It’s really, really good. I read an advance copy, and blurbed it:

I really want to emphasize how practical this book is. Yes, there’s lots of scary stuff, but Father is most interested in helping readers become aware of the reality of the demonic, and also giving them Scripturally sound instructions on how to avoid it and, if necessary, defeat it. In a world that is becoming fast re-enchanted — and not always by the Holy Spirit — you need to have this book. Many people understandably hate this stuff, and don’t want to acknowledge it. Believe me, I get that. But you need to understand, as Father Carlos explains, that you might not be interested in demonic evil, but demonic evil is most definitely interested in you. The Catholic Church has been dealing with this stuff for 2,000 years. It has learned a few things. Excerpt from the book:

Between these two goals—tempting man and gaining him for eternity—there is another evil desire that the Devil aims to satisfy: the possession of his victim. Possession is the state where the victim is under demonic control from the inside. The demon takes over the body of the one he possesses. During possession, a victim’s consciousness is suppressed, and the demon animates his body as his own. 

Given that demons exist outside of time and space, how can a demon be “inside” someone during demonic possession? While a demon’s lack of physicality frees him of the limitations to which physical objects are subject and gives him access to everything in the physical universe simultaneously, he does not have power over all things equally. When the Devil possesses a victim—and is now “inside” him—the Devil has gained legal jurisdiction over him in such a manner that he can bully and manipulate the victim from the inside. The legal control a possessing spirit has is so great that the body he possesses appears to be his own. 

Possession, Father Carlos says, is rare — but there are all kinds of lesser states of demonic activity. Indeed, to my great surprise, I believe that I was delivered back in September from some minor but still painful form of it, when Father Nectarios Treviño, an Orthodox exorcist and close friend of Father Carlos’s, prayed deliverance prayers over me in a Chicago hotel room. Nothing happened in the moment, but I woke up the next morning in a very different world — a world of liberation! I texted Father Carlos about it, and he said, “It feels great to be free, doesn’t it?” Amen!

Many Protestants believe in the demonic, but also believe that they cannot possess or otherwise attach themselves to Christians. If only that were true. Father writes, from experience:

It is not uncommon for me to encounter a victim who still possesses robust Christian faith and who has accepted Christ as sovereign Lord. But a demon has attached itself to the victim because of choices that stray from God’s standards. The demon has every right to continue to possess him and there is nothing I can do to free him until he repents of the moral failure through which the demon entered him. 

We are all subject to temptation. However, by making Christ the center of one’s life, one can overcome it. We cultivate this discipleship through daily prayer, reading Scripture, studying the Faith, engaging in fellowship with the Christian community, and doing works of charity. 

Again, I am absolutely convinced that happened to me.

How does one get free from this oppression, possession, or what have you? Father writes:

Most people think the task of an exorcist is to cast out demons. That is a dreadful understatement. 

The job of the exorcist generally involves six steps: 

1) He must diagnose whether demons are present or the issue is due to some other cause (mental illness, physical sickness, an overactive imagination, or simply fraud). 

2) If demons are present, he must uncover the rights they have gained over the victim. 

3) He must guide the victim to revoke those rights. 

4) He must lead the victim to conversion. (Scripture warns in Matthew 12:30 that no one can be “kingdom neutral.” One either belongs to Christ, or one is against Him.) 

5) Using the Church’s authority, he must cast out the demons, who have now lost their right to possess. Depending on the intimacy of the demonic hold, this process may necessitate multiple exorcisms. 

6) He must provide ongoing pastoral care to the victim to prevent the enemy’s return. 

If one has been freed, one cannot think the struggle is over. As Father puts it, citing (as he does throughout the book) a particular case he worked on:

I reminded Jeremy that the demon will re-enter him if he fails to live his Christian identity. Having claimed the victory of Jesus, he must have Jesus as the center of his life. It was clear from his demeanor that he was eager to do just that. 

To me, the most fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is the legalistic one. Every experienced exorcist will tell you that the demons are extremely effective lawyers. More:

An exorcist must focus not on the demon but on why the demon is present. Stated differently, if a demon inhabits someone, he has been granted the right. Demons live and breathe legalism. As long as the demon enjoys the legal right to possess, he is not required to leave because he is inside a dwelling that is his. Just as someone who owns a deed to a property cannot be evicted from it, an exorcist cannot evict a demon from a victim over whom he has gained the right to possess. 93 

Uncovering demonic rights is challenging and can be the most difficult part of an exorcist’s work. A victim himself often does not know how he has acquired demons. In the case of Jeremy, this was not the case. He knew exactly why he had a demon: he had agreed to a pact with him. But it is often not that easy. An exorcist will probe a victim’s experience, personal history, and psyche to locate the legal claims a demon may have. The demon will do everything he can to remain hidden. 

So, what are some of the common ways they come to possess or otherwise attach themselves to a person? Father writes:

• Engaging in impure sexual activity: fornication, adultery, pornography, masturbation, contraception, homosexual acts, perversion, etc. 

• Lying, deception, breaking promises, oaths, contracts, covenants, etc. 

• Irreligiosity (refusing to practice religion as God desires it; excusing oneself from observing the precepts of religion and morality; relegating oneself to being merely “spiritual”). 

• Hardness of heart (refusal to forgive others, refusal to forgive oneself, prolonged rage, prolonged sadness, entertaining suicidal thoughts, etc.). 

• Use of blasphemous language. 

• Enjoying profane or perverse entertainment. 

• Practicing Wicca, sorcery, witchcraft, black magic, white magic, voodoo, divination, etc. 

• Casting spells, sending curses, etc. 

• Practicing Freemasonry, New Age, Reiki, etc. 

• Using Ouija boards, horoscopes, tarot cards, etc. 

• Consulting “healers,” curanderos, mediums, fortune-tellers, psychics, practicing necromancy, etc. 

• Engaging in role-playing games and violent or sadistic video games. 

• The effects of past trauma—e.g., excessive fear, rage, arrogance, vengefulness, etc.—which often leads the victim to make poor choices. 

If a victim is unsure why demons are harassing him, I will typically show him this list of dysfunctions and ask if any apply. If any do, I begin the next step. 

The thing is, if one really wants to be free, one has to make this sacrifice:

Every exorcism is done in Jesus Name. Jesus is the one mediator between God and man (1 Timothy 2:5), the one who came to destroy the Devil’s labors (1 John 3:8). He is the victor who will reign forever (Revelation 11:15). His authority is supreme. 

But for an exorcism to be effective, the victim must accept Jesus Christ’s victory and place himself under Christ’s Lordship. He must decide to move from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. 

… Not everyone who requests exorcism believes in Christ. Many of them—perhaps even most—do not. Thus, proclaiming the Gospel to the victim is the exorcist’s first task. I do so by assuring the victim that Christ has already triumphed over evil, and His victory is immediately available. We merely need to accept Christ as Lord and Savior. I invite victims to do so by repeating the following or similar words: 

I choose Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. I choose to be His disciple and follow Him as my Lord. I claim the life He offers me and give my life completely to Him. I ask that His grace and power set me free from all evil. Amen. 

Demons cannot attach themselves to you without your consent. The problem is, very few demonically harassed, oppressed, or possessed people consciously agree to this — yet it happens:

Demons are legalistic. They look for ways to attach themselves to someone, gaining the equivalent to a legal right to demonize, harass, and oppress. Demons have a voracious appetite for gaining those privileges and will do anything to preserve them. 

Attaching himself to a host is a demon’s first step. A demon cannot thrive and flourish merely by attaching himself to a host. For that, he must parasitically infest his host’s wounds. So, he will manipulate and exploit his host’s wounds: taking advantage of whatever in his host is unhealthy, dysfunctional, injured, or hurt. 

As, a biological organism needs a habitat to thrive, so a demon needs a habitat in the spiritual realm. Wounds provide demons the conditions to thrive. 

In my own case, I believe — though I can’t know for sure — that whatever attached itself to me did so in my youth, through the psychic wound of my father rejecting me. “Trauma alters one’s view of reality,” writes Father Carlos. “It causes us to see things in a false and distorted way.” Of course there are ordinary effects of this trauma I experienced, and I had presumed all my life that the constant feeling of shame and unworthiness dogging me was merely psychological. Yet I am now certain that in addition to the psychological, there was a spiritual, demonic component.

When did I give permission to the thing to enter my life? It could have been during that short period of time when I was eleven or twelve, and messed with a Ouija board. Or perhaps it was looking at porn when I was that age. I really don’t know. I think it is also significant that my father, like his father before him, was a Freemason. But really, I can’t know. The fact that all it took was one prayer session with an exorcist to free me of this thing indicates that it wasn’t a deep, serious case. Nevertheless, it was bad enough that for all my adult life, I suffered greatly from thoughts of self-hatred and unworthiness, and even had much of the time compulsively suicidal thoughts, though by God’s grace I never seriously considered harming myself. Still, the thoughts were there, and the only thing that rid me of these hateful things was an exorcist’s deliverance prayers.

(I am embarrassed to confess all this to you, but I am willing to be thought of as a complete weirdo if it leads some of you suffering in a similar way to seek out a priest with the authority of the Church to set you free. I tell you all this out of gratitude to God for delivering me from all that torment.)

The Exorcist Files book is full of stories that illustrate the theological truths that Father teaches. I found this one compelling; if you have read my book Living In Wonder, you will recall the story of Nathan and Emma, and how when Nathan joined his possessed wife and me on the balcony of their Manhattan high rise, with a holy relic hidden in his pocket, Emma cut her conversation with me off mid-sentence, dropped her chin to her chest, looked up with a face contorted by hatred, and told Nathan, “I told you never to bring that [curses] thing around me!”:

A most remarkable ancient account comes from St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan († 397 AD). Ambrose had built an enormous basilica, but he lacked relics to place beneath its altar—a practice observed since Apostolic times. In a dream, he was shown the location of the graves of the city’s first two martyrs—St. Gervasius and St. Protasius—who were murdered some two centuries prior. 

Ambrose set out to uncover their bodies. Knowing only the graves’ general location, he was unsure of the martyrs’ precise burial places. Ambrose, however, made provision for this. Along with his excavation team, he brought along a possessed demoniac whose presence he was sure would provide a miraculous sign to disclose the relics’ location. When the demoniac came near the grave, he was seized and thrown to the ground in a gesture indicating the Saints were immediately present, a fact that excavation confirmed. 

The two martyrs were moved inside the basilica, and multiple demoniacs were liberated in their presence. Ambrose has left us a detailed account of the torments the relics inflicted. 

We have today heard [the demons] say, that no one can be saved unless he believes in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; that he is dead and buried who denies the Holy Spirit, and believes not the almighty power of the Trinity. … The evil spirits said today, yesterday, and during the night, [to the relics] “We know that ye are martyrs … Ye are come to destroy us.”

Especially noteworthy is the claim that the demons spoke to the relics as if they were speaking to the Saints themselves. In the exorcisms I have performed, I have always encountered this phenomenon. When I apply a relic to the demon, he will often turn to it and say, “I %&$#n hate you!” Sometimes, even before I take a relic out of the case, the demon will yell out, “I hate that one! Leave him in there!” 

I have never seen a demon regard a relic as mere “matter” but as the Saint himself. Countless times I have heard them testify that sacred relics are formidable weapons that cause them injury. 

In Milan, you can visit the church that St. Ambrose founded, and that bears his name, and view the bodies of Ss. Ambrose, Gervasius, and Protasius. I took this photo there a few years ago. Ambrose is wearing a bishop’s mitre, while either Gervasius or Protasius flanks him in red (the other of the two saints lies on Ambrose’s other side):

We do live in a world of wonder, friends, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not. These realities exist!

I could go on and on about Father Carlos’s book, but I hope I have given you enough to grasp how important it is, and to have convinced you to buy it. One more thing, though. Father begins Chapter Seven with a terrifying, don’t-read-it-at-night account of demonic infestation that occurred through young men messing around with a Ouija board. I believe he once discussed this case on the podcast.

He says in the book that so very many of the cases he deals with began with victims goofing around with a Ouija board. In another instance recounted in the book, a group of teenage girls became haunted after the mom of one of them bought a Ouija board for her daughter and her friends to play with at a slumber party. The mother thought it was just a game, and that there was nothing truly spiritual about it. Big mistake:

Shortly after the girls began asking the board questions, the planchette spelled out, “Hello.” They replied hello in return. At that moment, the family’s three lounging dogs stood and growled as they gazed at the space above the board. Walking backwards, the dogs lifted their gaze continually higher as though they were seeing something emerge from it. Each released a high-pitched whimper and bolted from the room. None of the dogs ever entered that living room again. 

The dogs’ reactions should have been enough to make the girls stop. Unfortunately, they were not. The girls asked the board foolish questions, the answers to which haunted them for years. These included queries about their past, such as “What happened on my twelfth birthday?” or “Where was my mother’s maternal grandmother from?” The board always responded accurately. Two asked, “How will I die?”—“suicide” was the reply to one and “murder” to the other. For years, each suffered terribly about whether she would die as the Ouija board claimed. It worried one so much that she required two stays in a mental hospital before finishing high school. 203 

Another asked, “When will I die?” The planchette reported back “18.” From the day she turned eighteen, she experienced terrible anxiety about whether that day would be her last. She detested being alone, hated being inside a vehicle for fear it would be in an accident, and was terrified of the dark. Many days she was too anxious even to go to school. For a year, until she turned nineteen, fear of dying was the dominant motive behind many of her decisions. 

While this case lacks the external phenomena of the case of the Ouija Board discussed above—cockroaches manifesting in glasses of water, a piece of the board refusing to burn in a fire, etc.—it is evident the girls were demonized. Their experience with the board left them with more than just psychological marks. The demon established a relationship that enabled him to manipulate and increase the girl’s anxieties. While none of the girls became possessed per se, the demon’s machinations left them bereft of peace. 

The book is The Exorcist Files: True Stories About The Reality Of Evil And How To Defeat It. The author is Father Carlos Martins, a prominent American Catholic exorcist, whose website is here.

UFOs And The Catholic Imagination

My friend Robert Duncan, a Catholic filmmaker who is also the journalist friend I mention in Living In Wonder who first convinced me that I needed to pay attention to the UFO phenomenon as a serious spiritual and religious matter, has just made available online a short movie he made in which experts discuss the issue of UFOs in a theological mode. It was shown at the University of Notre Dame recently at a conference. Watch it; it’s really good:

That’s all for today, y’all. I’m writing this from a train to Prague, where I’ll be appearing at a conservative event this evening. I sure will be glad when all this travel is over. I need to sleep. I’m sending this post out today to all subscribers, including those who aren’t paid ones, because I want everyone to know about Father Carlos’s book and Robert’s film. Only paid subscribers can comment, though. Why not become a paid subscriber? You get a new post from me every weekday, and sometimes one on the weekend. It’s only six dollars per month.

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