LifeSite April 3, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – A malevolent force kept by my side when I was dying in a hospital room in 2009. Repeatedly, though, Fr. William Spacek chose to walk into the lengthening shadows of my neuro-ICU room. As many as three times a day, the hospital chaplain held the Eucharist above my head. He told my wife demonic forces had come into my room.
I used to see my daughter Gabby caught up in the ceiling tiles, drowning in a shallow flowing stream of water. When I attempted to save her and found that I couldn’t move due to my restrained arms (tied to my bedside by nurses), I was mocked by revolting forms that had taken up hallucinogenic real estate in the undulating tiles. I vividly recall, in particular, one gyrating multi-headed demon sweeping his translucent hand toward my drowning daughter, taunting,“What of it? Gonna save her or what?”
My brain aneurysm caused intense headaches, which negated sound sleep. When I did fall asleep, demons entered. I remember one dream (I remember many) that seemed as true-to-life as the blooming tree outside my window right now. My son Sean and I were at a carnival when he began to choke on something lodged in his throat. When I tried to dislodge it, a revolting creature swung a metal pipe into the back of my head. Each time I rose from the pavement, he swung, full-force, and sent me to the ground. I watched Sean choke to death on the ground in front of me, and a chorus of demons began to roar riotous Hallelujahs.
When six months later I returned to the hospital to thank Fr. Spacek for his resolute care, I asked about the oppression in my room. “Demons were there. I could sense it right when I walked into your room,” he said. “I’ve looked into the face of Satan. I know how he operates.”
Satan’s work
Satan’s work does seem to have a primitive simplicity: he divides a soul from God and works to destroy it through his duplicity. And when the soul is in its most vulnerable state, the scale and ferocity of his work seems to intensify.
So when a few weeks ago because of health concerns bishops began to shutter American churches like a piecemeal extinguishing of Tenebrae candles, I began considering the Evil One, whose cackle these days, one might imagine, barks as grotesquely as the chorus on that Good Friday morning: “Crucify him!.”
I started to consider the black talon of Satan’s pointer finger, and where it was directing his demons now that reception of the Eucharist has mostly vanished and absolution of sin seems harder to receive than riding a bicycle to the moon.
I recalled what one of the world’s leading exorcists told me a few years ago when he began to travel to American seminaries throughout the 1980s.
