Wow Medical Doctors and Professor say Demonic Possession is Real and #Exorcism by Priests is Necessary
Gallagher says demonic possession is real. He's seen the evidence: victims suddenly speaking perfect Latin; sacred objects flying off shelves; people displaying "hidden knowledge" or secrets about people that they could not have possibly have known.
"Whenever I need help, I call on him," says the Rev. Gary Thomas, one of the most famous exorcists in the United States. The movie "The Rite" was based on Thomas' work.
Possession, he says, is rare -- but real.
"I spend more time convincing people that they're not possessed than they are," he wrote in an essay for The Washington Post.
Dr. Gallagher was convinced by meeting a Real case of Possession.
She was a middle-age woman who wore flowing dark clothes and was also part of a satanic cult.
She called herself the queen of the cult, but Gallagher would refer to her as "Julia," the pseudonym he gave her.
The woman had approached her local priest, convinced she was being attacked by a demon. The priest referred her to an exorcist, who reached out to Gallagher for a mental health evaluation. "She was conflicted," Gallagher says. "There was a part of her that wanted to be relieved of the possession." She ended up relieving Gallagher of his doubts. It was one of the first cases he took, and it changed him. Gallagher helped assemble an exorcism team that met Julia in the chapel of a house.
Objects would fly off shelves around her. She somehow knew personal details about Gallagher's life: how his mother had died of ovarian cancer. He was talking on the phone with Julia's priest one night, he says, when both men heard one of the demonic voices that came from Julia during her trances -- even though she was nowhere near a phone and thousands of miles away.
He says he's a stickler for the scientific method, that it teaches people to follow the facts wherever they may lead. He grew up in a large Irish Catholic family in Long Island. When he kept seeing cases like Julia's as a professional, he says, his views had to evolve."I don't believe in this stuff because I'm Catholic," he says. "I try to follow the evidence."
Being Catholic, though, may help. Gallagher's two ways of giving back -- helping the mentally ill as well as the possessed.Catholicism doesn't see faith and science as contradictory. Its leaders insist that possession, miracles and angels exist.
The Rite of Exorcism was first published in 1614 by Pope Paul V to quell a trend of laypeople and priests hastily performing exorcisms on people they presumed were possessed, such as victims of the bubonic plague, says the Rev. Mike Driscoll, author of "Demons, Deliverance, Discernment: Separating Fact from Fiction about the Spirit World."
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A line (in the rite) said that the exorcist should be careful to distinguish between demon possession and melancholy, which was a catchall for mental illness," Driscoll says. "The church knew back then that there were mental problems. It said the exorcist should not have anything to do with medicine. Leave that to the doctors."Gallagher says the concept of possession by spirit isn't limited to Catholicism. Muslim, Jewish and other Christian traditions regard possession by spirits -- holy or benign -- as possible.Dr. Mark Albanese studied medicine at Cornell and has been practicing psychiatry for decades. In a letter to the New Oxford Review, a Catholic magazine, he defended Gallagher's belief in possession.
He also says there is a growing belief among health professionals that a patient's spiritual dimension should be accounted for in treatment, whether their provider agrees with those beliefs or not. Some psychiatrists have even talked of adding a "trance and possession disorder" diagnosis to the DSM, the premier diagnostic manual of disorders used by mental health professionals in the US.
>There's still so much about the human mind that psychiatrists don't know, Albanese says. Doctors used to be widely skeptical of people who claimed to suffer from multiple personalities, but now it's a legitimate disorder (dissociative identity disorder). Many are still dumbfounded by the power of placebos, a harmless pill or medical procedure that produces healing in some cases.
"There's a certain openness to experiences that are happening that are beyond what we can explain by MRI scans, neurobiology or even psychological theories," Albanese says.
Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, a psychiatrist who specializes in schizophrenia, arrived at a similar conclusion after he had an unnerving experience with a patient.
Lieberman was asked to examine the videotape of an exorcism that he subsequently dismissed as unconvincing.
Then he met a woman who, he said, "freaked me out."
Lieberman, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, says he and a family therapist were asked to examine a young woman who some thought was possessed. He and his colleague tried to treat the woman for several months but gave up because they had no success.
Something happened during the treatment, though, that he still can't explain. After sessions with the woman, he says, he'd go home in the evenings, and the lights in his house would go off by themselves, photographs and artwork would fall or slide off shelves, and he'd experience a piercing headache.
When he mentioned to this to his colleague one day, her response stunned him: She'd been having the exact same experiences.
"I had to sort of admit that I didn't really know what was going on," Lieberman says. "Because of the bizarre things that occurred, I wouldn't say that (demonic possession) is impossible or categorically rule it out ... although I have very limited empirical evidence to verify its existence."
The tragic case of the real 'Emily Rose'
If you want to know why so many scientists and doctors like Lieberman are cautious about legitimizing demonic possession, consider one name: Anneliese Michel.
Michel was a victim in one of the most notorious cases of contemporary exorcism. If you have the stomach for it, go online and listen to audiotapes and watch videos of her exorcisms. It sounds like somebody dropped a microphone into hell.
Michel was a German Catholic woman who died of starvation in 1976 after 67 exorcisms over a period of nine months. She was diagnosed with epilepsy but believed she was possessed. So did her devout Roman Catholic parents. She reportedly displayed some of the classic signs of possession: abnormal strength, aversion to sacred objects, speaking different languages. The church will not compromise the privacy of a person suffering from possession just to provide film to skeptics. Another psychiatrist, Dr. M. Scott Peck, the late author of "The Road Less Traveled," conducted two exorcisms himself -- something Gallagher considers unwise and dangerous for any psychiatrist.
"It's deepened my faith," Gallagher says of the exorcisms he's witnessed. "It didn't radically change it, but it validated my faith."
Inevitably, there will be others. His phone will ring. A priest will tell him a story. A team of clergy and nuns will be summoned. And the man of science will enter the hidden world of exorcism again.
"Truly informed exorcists don't tend to get discouraged," he says, "because they know it is our Lord who delivers the person, not themselves."
Edited from CNN- Images added Google Images
Powerful Prayers Against Evil
Glory be to the Father, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end. AMEN
Jesus, have mercy. AMEN
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