'The Maledict Option'

Can Christians Ever Curse People? How Do Curses Work, Anyway?

St. Peter curses Ananias for lying to God (Acts 5:1-10)

An extra post today, because I just finished listening to an unusual and compelling podcast co-hosted by my European Conservative colleague Sebastian Morello, an English Catholic. The episode is titled “The Maledict Option,” and it’s available on Spotify here. The podcast itself is called The Gnostalgia Podcast, and it’s available on Apple podcasts here.

The episode mostly concerns the subject of Christian curses. I had not much thought about them, and I bet you hadn’t either. Sebastian and his co-host talk about how they actually exist in Christian history and teaching, and even point out how St. Peter cursed Ananias and Sapphira for lying (they died). I am not motivated to cursing the enemies of Christ, but I have to say I support their call to pray the imprecatory psalms against political leaders who permit evil deeds, such as (to use Sebastian’s example) forbidding prayer near abortion clinics. (I should emphasize that the hosts say a curse should be towards calling down judgment for the sake of promoting repentance — a medicinal curse, in other words, that evil may not prosper, and the evildoers would repent). To be clear for those who won’t listen to the podcast, they are saying that imprecatory prayers should only be used by those who have purified themselves and prepared extensively. They also lament that in today’s world — as Catholics, they particularly fault the post-Vatican II church — Christians have lost the sense that this kind of prayer is licit and useful for confronting great evil.

One thing that jumped out at me, as the author of Living In Wonder (which Sebastian generously reviewed here), is Sebastian’s statement in the podcast that the church itself must cast aside the Cartesian (I would go back further in history, and say nominalist) metaphysics, which views matter as a dead thing. As Richard Weaver said of the destructive impact of late medieval nominalism:

The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism.

In the podcast, Sebastian points out that blessing metaphysically changes matter — and so does cursing. This happens because in traditional Christian thought, spirit and matter interpenetrate. Listening to this, I thought at once of my friend, the Orthodox subdeacon Wesley J. Smith’s holy water flowers — a story he told in First Things. He had put some flowers in normal water, and another bouquet of flowers in holy water, not trying to prove anything, just by happenstance. Excerpt:

The flowers to which Mark referred were identical inexpensive bouquets from Safeway brought by an elderly parishioner before the December 23 liturgy. I had personally cut the stems, put them in water, placed them in their current locations, and given them no further thought.

I did now. After four weeks, one bouquet was, not surprisingly, withered. But its twin remained almost as fresh as when I first put it in the vase.

“What’s that all about?” I asked as we stood there marveling.

“On Theophany, I put my old holy water in the vase with the fresh flowers,” Mark replied, giving me an amazed look. (Theophany commemorates Christ’s baptism. In Orthodox churches, a service is held in which the coming year’s holy water is blessed and then distributed to the faithful.)

As far as I knew, neither bouquet had been touched. Both bouquets had absorbed most of the tap water in their respective vases, but the stem bottoms remained immersed. The only apparent difference was Mark’s holy water.

When I brought the contrasting flowers to the attention of the parish during the announcements, all were just as amazed.

That was Sunday, January 20, 2013. The “holy water flowers” were still fresh when I took the photo accompanying this article on February 3. They finally withered after an astonishing eight weeks.

Cheap, grocery store-bought flowers don’t last that long no matter how well they are cared for. Had we witnessed a tiny miracle?

Here they are:

Sebastian’s discourse made me realize how long I’ve been living in a world of wonder, such that of course blessings and curses are real, because spirit and matter interpenetrate. When a priest gives a blessing, it is not merely a statement of good wishes for the people or objects blessed. It changes the thing somehow.

Cursing does too. If you know anything about exorcism, you will know that exorcists deal all the time with demonic curses. The Catholic exorcist Father Carlos Martins’ podcast The Exorcist Files talks about this stuff. (Father Carlos, a friend of mine, has a new book coming out in November about his work; pre-order here.) Father Gabriele Amorth, the late chief exorcist of Rome, who trained my confessor, the Orthodox exorcist Father Nectarios Treviño (because there is a shameful lack of this training available for US Orthodox priests), is also very strong on the subject of cursed objects, and curses in general. Father Amorth has several books out. You might think this is nonsense … until it happens to you, or you sit down with exorcists or people to whom it has happened.

Indeed, the story of “Nathan” and “Emma” in Living In Wonder is a story of a curse. The possession of Emma, a sophisticated Upper East Side Catholic, happened in large part because her grandfather back in Europe had been a high-level occultist, and had consecrated his descendants to the Devil. She was ultimately delivered, but not until after years of spiritual struggle. I visited her once during this fight, and the demon manifested through her in front of me.

In the podcast, Sebastian talks about how both angels and demons hold spiritual power over certain geographical territories. Again, if this sounds silly to you, then that only shows how far you have departed from the understanding of both Scripture and Tradition of how the spiritual world works (e.g., St. Paul warning us that we are struggling primarily against “powers and principalities”).

This week Kamala Harris condemned Columbus Day, and all the evils the Europeans brought onto the natives of the New World. It is certainly true that colonization brought many cruelties to bear on the natives. But that is far from the whole story. Here’s a passage from the electrifying book The Devil’s Best Trick, published earlier this year; the author is Randall Sullivan. Here he talks about the arrival of the conquistadores in what is now Mexico:

The Spaniards’ new residence was directly across from the spectacular pyramidal temple of the Hummingbird Wizard. The temple had been dedicated just thirty-two years earlier by the man regarded as the architect of the Aztec Empire, Tlacaelel. The highlight of the ceremony was the greatest human slaughter in the history of the Mexica—eighty thousand sacrificed, according to a sixteenth-century Aztec historian; the lines of those who would die stretched for miles, he recalled, and the killing went on without interruption for four days and nights. The Aztec nobility were provided with seats in boxes covered with rose blossoms intended to mask the smell of drying blood and rotting flesh. The stench was overwhelming, though, before even a thousand were dead, and by the second day nearly every one of the boxes was empty.

Yet the eighty-nine-year-old Tlacaelel remained the entire time, personally observing each and every sacrifice. It was Tlacaelel who had instituted Aztec worship of Huitzilopchtli, the Spaniards would learn, and who had invented the “Flower Wars”—contrived conflicts with neighboring tribes that were intended only to take prisoners for sacrifice to the Lover of Hearts and Drinker of Blood.

… For Christians, Catholics in particular, it was for hundreds of years an article of faith that what Cortés and his men confronted at Tenochtitlan had been the Devil’s own empire. As the Catholic writer Warren H. Carroll observed of fifteenth-century Mexico, “Nowhere else in human history has Satan so formalized and institutionalized his worship with so many of his own actual rites and symbols.”

The first priest who began to instruct me in the Catholic faith was an elderly Irishman in Baton Rouge, Father Dermot Maloney. That was back in late 1991, I guess, or early 1992. As we were getting to know each other, I asked him about how he came to the priesthood. At one point, he told me that he joined an Irish missionary order, and was sent to Nigeria. When he arrived, an older priest of the order asked Father Maloney to join him as he made his rounds. They went walking in the bush towards a certain village. As they neared the village on the road, they slammed into an invisible wall.

“There was nothing in front of us that we could see, but we could not pass through it,” said the old priest. “It unnerved me, but it didn’t shake the older priest. He just took holy water out of his satchel, blessed the place in the road where the wall was, and we were able to pass through.”

Father said they preached to the village, and the people converted. They found out later that the village shaman had known somehow that they would be coming, and cast a spell to prevent them from approaching the village. But the priests’ “magic” was stronger. Father Maloney said that growing up in Ireland, he had never dreamed that things like that were possible. Serving in Africa for a few years taught him that not only was it possible, but that it was also not rare.

Here’s an excerpt from Living In Wonder, based on an interview I did with a Vatican exorcist I call “Don Cipriano”. He grew up in rural Ireland, but unlike the Dubliner Dermot Maloney, Cipriano had supernatural experiences in his family home in the west country:

Just before he left home to go to the university, an inexplicable demonic scream tore through his family’s rural house. Years later, when he entered seminary, “it was clear that not all was well spiritually. There were manifestations in my room at night.”

One quiet Friday evening, the seminary’s spiritual director, who was involved in exorcism ministry, sat down with Don Cipriano and asked how he was. “I feel strange,” the seminarian told him.

“He just picked up a crucifix, held it in front of me, and said something like ‘I command you to reveal yourself!’” recalls the priest. “I went nuts! I was screaming at him in a language that I now call the demonic tongue, because I recognize it. I don’t remember very much. I remember him saying to the demon, ‘You are a liar and have been a liar from the beginning!’”

The suffering seminarian was taken to the care of a group of local Catholics who prayed over him all weekend long. The demonic manifestations kept coming. Don Cipriano said he had been cursed by ancestral occult activity (derived specifically from a great-grandfather) and by other events that now led him to believe he was “demonically oppressed, maybe bordering on obsession from time to time.”

“I got back to the seminary from that prayer weekend,” he remembers. “There was a nun in the seminary, and she said, ‘You look like a walking corpse.’” True—but he was alive, and he had discovered through that ordeal an important part of his priestly vocation.

“As I approached ordination, I sensed that the Lord was calling me to be a spiritual warrior,” he says. “I don’t mean that in a macho or gung-ho sense, but just the fact that I know the demon, and the demon knows me. I know I sin. I know I fall. I know that I could stray perilously back toward his territory. And so I chose as my ordination verse for my prayer card ‘Blessed be the Lord my God, who trains my hands for battle, who puts my fingers to war.’”

After his ordination, Cipriano went to Rome to study patristics and then later to one of the world’s great universities for his doctorate. His work in the patristics field has focused on the role of spiritual warfare in the early church.

“These were centuries where the demons just overran the human race, and then Christians arrived to push the demons back,” he says. “Tertullian says in his Apology that more people converted to Christianity in Carthage because Christians were able to deliver them from the demonic.”

This is what accounts for the unprecedented demand for exorcism ministry today in the post-Christian West—and why Don Cipriano has joined the battle. “There is no such thing as a vacuum in human nature. As Christianity retreats, the evil things creep back,” he says.

When we spoke, the priest, ordained only six years, had not yet been involved in a full-blown ritual exorcism. His work to that point had been limited to minor exorcisms called “deliverances.” Demons had left those people over whom he had prayed.

“And then I’ve had the more extraordinary experiences of physical manifestations,” he says. “The noises, and the smell of rotting flesh. That’s the worst. It will only come when you’re asleep. You’ll wake up to this sweet, cloying smell of rot. It’s nauseating, and you’re terrified. You’ll jump out of bed. Two seconds later, it’s gone. You get back into bed and, forty-five minutes later, it happens again. That can be frightening.

“The devil frightens me. I mean, he’s a fallen angel. I’m not gung ho and stupid about these things. I know he’s ultimately only allowed to operate within the boundaries that the Lord has set, but as a human being, I’m frightened of this supernatural intelligence far beyond our capacities.”

Note well that this curse — for that was the effect it had on him — came from an ancestor’s fooling around with the dark side. Note also Don Cipriano’s observation that we have not had to deal with these things to the degree that people in other parts of the world have, because we been Christianized for so long. Now that we are de-Christianizing, the darkness is returning in force.

Living In Wonder — pre-order here for delivery in less than a week — is mostly a book about hope, and how, in a practical sense, to learn how to make yourself more open to God’s palpable presence — spiritually, through beauty, and other ways. But it is also about getting yourself into a mindset capable of understanding the ways in which the world is rapidly changing. Re-enchantment is coming, whether you want it to or not, and at a certain point, materialist denial — whether atheistic or from the fearful reaction of Christians who prefer to live in a world that is less mysterious because it is more controllable — is not going to be tenable.

I’ve made this post open to anyone, so please forward it to anyone you think might find it interesting. If you are in or around Birmingham, Alabama, I hope to see you at Samford in six days at the book launch (free to all, but you need to register here). Eighth Day Books will be on hand to sell copies the night before they hit bookstores, so come on out and get yourself a signed copy. If you can’t make it, you can pre-order a signed copy from Eighth Day Books’s website