Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  Yves never noticed any sign of his father's agonizing scrupulousness; and he did not realize until much later in life that the marital love of his parents had cooled very early in his childhood. Both parents were outwardly very loving in every way.

  By the time Yves reached his teens, Sybil had become a kind, intelligent, and healthy woman. While no longer attached to what she called the mechanisms of sexuality, she was very aware of her love and sensuality, very graceful in her life, creative, but beyond ambition. Romain was a doctor known for his devotion and skill as well as for his sense of community duty. Father and mother had an unwritten pact of close companionship and intimate care for each other. It created a personal world of utter trust and undisturbed peace.

  All in all, the atmosphere in which Yves grew up and in which he felt secure was an adult one permeated by values he felt more than he understood.' Home life was inspired by sentiments he perceived and reproduced but which did not deeply express his own tastes and inclinations. Life with Sybil and Romain gravitated around unseen things that the immature Yves knew best by intuition but could not identify. There was an integrity of person and a graceful style in their living. There was strength of love and a solidity of judgment. But the viewpoint was narrow, too narrow.

  Within that family Yves' values and personal ties—his parents, his school, his parish ambient, his friends—were held in place by solid moorings. He went to parish schools until he was eighteen. In retrospect, and as far as anyone can remember, there was no difference between him and the other boys of his acquaintance. He was excellent at sports and a very good dancer; he dated local girls, and moonlighted with another boy until they had put enough money together to buy a secondhand car.

  He had only a few serious scrapes with the school authorities. It was never a matter of study-at that he was consistently beyond reproach. But now and then Yves would turn on one of his teachers in full view of the class in a fit of verbal abuse and uncontrollable rage.

  He was always apologetic later, and his obviously sincere regret and winning smile generally had their effect; the school authorities forgave him easily. It probably did not hurt that his father was quite a prominent citizen, and that his mother was an active member of the parish, and that Yves won a state prize every year for his English essay, thus bringing honor to the school. He had a way with words and a touch of the poet that was beyond the ordinary. It helped him in his studies and in his scrapes.

  By sixteen, Yves was an amateur painter, was writing poems to commemorate events at school and at home, was chosen to be his class valedictorian, and genuinely loved literature. By the time he was seventeen, he had decided to become a priest.

  A final school essay written by Yves at the end of his last year reads today like a terrible prediction. In a precocious study of Shelley, Yves wrote: “But with all this beauty, no one can say what it would have done to the poet and the man had he lived beyond the age of thirty. Shelley pioneered a fresh idea of godliness. But it might-we will never know-have been a trap sprung by Job's Satan or Dante's Devil.” Yves carried the essay around with him for many years, because he felt that in writing it he had perceived something very profound.

  He owed his decision to become a priest largely to his parents' influence. Priesthood had been his father's first ambition in life; and he transmitted this frustrated wish to his son-not as a command or an obligation, but as an ideal. Yves knew from the age of seven that, in his father's eyes, the priesthood was the best, the highest, the most honorable profession. This is what his father conveyed by look, word, and attitude. His mother's influence was not so positive. It was more that, by looking down on any other occupation as secondary, she highlighted priesthood as the ideal and the goal.

  The seminary Yves attended was the same one to which two years later Father David M. was posted. Yves was one of many seminarians and did not arouse any particular attention on David's part. His studies were, as usual, excellent. He had a very fine voice for chanting. He cut an impressive figure in ceremonial robes: over six feet in height, blond-haired, blue-eyed, with hands that were both masculine and beautiful. He was marked by a winsome grace and symmetry of movement; and, above all, he possessed a pair of eyes that radiated a striking luminosity and that had an almost hypnotic effect on people around him.

  For all these reasons, Yves was the ideal actor in the liturgist's manual and the type for which every preacher's handbook was written. His knowledge of English and his good writing style helped him in the practice sermons he composed and delivered at the seminary.

  In view of these talents, his interest in art and poetry was forgiven. In the atmosphere of any seminary during the 19505, there was always a general suspicion of anyone interested in painting and literature—especially poetry. Roman Catholicism of that time regarded such things as “dangerous.” The Church always had had difficulty in governing poets and painters; they sometimes were unwelcome prophets and discomforting commentators.

  But Yves used his gifts well. He kept within the seminary mentality. He was careful, always careful.

  One incident during his seminary years did disturb the authorities briefly. It was 1961. As always with Yves, he quickly overcame it. The occasion was Yves' final theological examinations, oral ones, conducted by three of his professors and presided over by a fourth, who would, if necessary, step in to arbitrate a dispute or cast a deciding vote in the assigning of grades. Generally, the moderator—as the fourth member of the examining board was called—had no part in the examinations and used the time to read a book or catch up with his correspondence.

  This time the moderator was David. At one point in Yves' oral examinations, a heated dispute developed between one of the examiners, Father Herlihy, and Yves. Father Herlihy was questioning Yves about the nature of the seven sacraments (baptism, confirmation, marriage, etc.), and he appeared to David to be angry. But it was Yves who drew David's closest attention—the handsome face drawn and haggard, mouth pulled tight in an obstinate grimace, perspiring forehead, eyes empty of their usual winsomeness. The change, so complete, so rapid, startled David and worried him. He could see none of the accustomed light, but only bitter resentment in Yves' eyes.

  Yves finally was able to mumble out some sort of answer to Father Herlihy's questions, and ran quickly from the examination room as soon as time was up.

  In his concern, David went along after the examination to Father Herlihy's study to discuss in greater detail exactly what had happened between him and Yves.

  Apparently Yves had insisted at one point that all the sacraments were no more than expressions of man's natural unity with the world around him. According to accepted doctrine, this is heretical. The sacraments are believed to be the supreme means of union with God. Yves' words had implied that, after his death, Jesus had gone back to nature; and therefore the sacraments were our way of being one with Jesus in the earth, the sky, the sea, and the wide universe.

  With his customary attention to detail, David wanted to know Father Herlihy's exact impression from Yves' words. “That was the funny part,” Father Herlihy answered—and David never forgot his next words—“what he said was just foolish; but it was the peculiar sense he communicated to me; I seemed to be listening to something not quite human-I know it sounds foolish.”

  Afterward, David had deep qualms about the whole matter. In part, he blamed himself: he felt that his own lectures on creation and on the origin of man had something to do with Yves' reaction. Yves could have wrongly interpreted the Teilhardian doctrines David taught. With only a thin and fragile line between Teilhard's view and a total denial of divinity in Jesus, Teilhardian concepts were delicious mental playthings that could—David saw clearly for the first time—be used to exalt man as an animal, to make his world into a gilded menagerie, to reduce Jesus to the status of a Christian hero as grandly noble and as pitifully mortal as Prometheus in the Greek myth, and to picture God as no more than the very bowels of earth and sky and the spatial distances of the univer
se with all its expanding galaxies.

  The incident continued to disturb David. Yves had conveyed merely by his looks during the exchange with Father Herlihy a sort of inner savagery and hate that David felt was out of kilter with Yves' normal demeanor. David had an instinctive suspicion of such sudden and dramatic breaks in the normal patterns of behavior. Perhaps it was merely a bad moment—and everyone has such moments. But if not, then that winning exterior and compatible behavior Yves ordinarily displayed must mask something else, some inner condition of spirit and bent of mind that no amount of seminary training had touched.

  However, there the matter rested. The end of the school year was on them. Three weeks later Yves, with eleven others, was ordained to the priesthood. David himself was scheduled to leave for a vacation at home on the family farm, and then to proceed to Mexico City for an international conference of anthropologists. The incident was quickly forgotten for the time being.

  When the summer was over, Yves was posted as assistant to an outlying parish of Manchester. He was near his hometown and within calling distance of his parents. For Yves' mother the new appointment was providential. Early in the new year, Yves' father, Remain, died suddenly from a heart attack. She would have been quite alone if Yves had not been posted to Manchester.

  Yves' memory of the time span between September 1960 and January 1967 is clear and full of details. His recollections of 1967 are incomplete but still helpful in reconstructing what happened to him. From April 1968, when David made a first attempt to exorcise the evil spirit possessing Yves, until March 1970, when David concluded the exorcism, Yves' memory has large gaps. But his recollections, the notes and memories of David, together with the transcript of his exorcism contribute mightily to create a whole picture, a photomontage of how satanic possession started in one individual, gained ground, progressed continuously, and finally became as total as we can imagine it ever to be.

  Possession by the spirit of evil proceeds along the structure of day-to-day life. In Yves' case, it used the priestly structure of his life, appearing first of all in the way he administered the Sacrament of Marriage, then in the way he said Mass, and finally in all his priestly activities.

  In the Sacrament of Ordination, it is the whole man who is “priested.” He does not simply acquire an extra function. He is not endowed with merely a new faculty or granted a rare permission. Rather, it is a new dimension of his spirit which necessarily affects all he does bodily and mentally. Any deformation of that dimension by the introduction of some antipathetic or utterly foreign element spells disturbance and trouble. The dimension of priesthood cannot be removed or replaced; it can be degraded, neglected, distorted.

  Yves took up his duties in St. Declan's parish with apparent gusto. The work was not overwhelming. He had plenty of time for his own occupations. The parish bordered on the countryside; he had a view of the southeast from one window of his study and of the west from another. He rapidly became popular as a preacher in the parish, as a counselor for its younger members, and as a welcome visitor in the homes of the parishioners. At no time was there ever any question of his probity; he had no desire to accumulate wealth; he drank seldom; and those who knew him have always asserted that there was never in him the slightest deviation from his vow of celibacy. “A grand young priest” was the general judgment and impression.

  When, after a couple of months, he had established a daily routine and found out what amount of time was needed for his official duties as an assistant, he started again to cultivate his two principal hobbies: painting and English literature. Once he made a trip to New York to talk with a publisher about a study of the poet, Gerard Manly Hopkins, and he returned home full of enthusiasm for the project.

  It was toward the end of 1961, a little over a year after his arrival at St. Declan's, that the first traces of change became apparent in him.

  On an average, Yves performed ceremonies of marriage three to five times every month. He seemed to add a special note of solemnity, joy, and celebration by his mere presence. His sermons on these occasions were beautifully delivered. And it thrilled everyone present to see this handsome and graceful young priest celebrating the love of the newlyweds within the purlieu of the Church's holiness and God's purity, and the Lordship of Jesus. For these were the themes on which Yves preached again and again in modulated tones and poetic language.

  As time went on, however, Yves became more and more dissatisfied with the marriage ceremonial as prescribed in the Roman Ritual, the official handbook for priests that contains detailed instructions on how priests are to celebrate the various sacraments. He felt that the words and gestures assigned to the priest in performing a marriage ceremony were not merely outmoded, but that they did not convey what modern men and women thought and felt about marriage.

  Above all, Yves found the actual words of the marriage vows more and more repulsive and irrelevant. Here he was, standing in front of two young people about to embark on a marvelous union and life together; and, as official representative of the Church, all he could tell them to do in the name of God and religion was to “stick it out,” to stay together no matter what happened, until they were parted by death. Was that precisely what marriage partners promised each other? he asked himself.

  In the beginning, he made no change in the words of the actual vows. But in his sermon at each marriage, he began to outline what the marriage partners did really promise to each other.

  In the first sermons he insisted that the partners were giving each other what Jesus gave his Church. Jesus was the supreme model. Then, as he developed this theme, he began to say more explicitly what it was Jesus gave his Church.

  Consciously now, Yves was drawing on what he had heard Father “Bones” say at the seminary and what he had thought out by his own reading of Teilhardian doctrines. Mixed with all he said were lines of poetry about Jesus which he applied to the bridegroom and the bride.

  In these sermons Jesus was pictured by Yves as the summit of human development, the great Omega Point. He made all nature beautiful, including the bodies and the love of married people. Jesus was so dedicated to perfecting the material world that he was evolving as that world's peak of perfection. In the same total way that Jesus gave himself to this human world even to the point of dying like every living element in it, so the marriage partners should, Yves pointed out, adapt themselves to this world. They would find perfection primarily in each other, secondarily in other people around them, then in nature, in life, and finally in their dying and death.

  All this was, of course, far from the normal teaching of Yves' Church, according to which Jesus does not depend on the material world in any way, and marriage is a sacrament which enables the partners to live their lives with supernatural grace and to achieve eternal life in heaven after death.

  But the change in Yves' beliefs was not the strangest or most dramatic thing about this early “enigmatic stage” of his possession. What is relevant and striking is that Yves constantly found his thoughts and words “coming” to him. Sometimes, having spoken to the congregation in the church, he woke up to the fact that he had said this or thought that without having willed it or even been conscious of what he had done. It was not that his mind had wandered. It was a sort of “remote control.”

  In fact, Yves' first clear idea of what was happening within himself did not come because his clerical colleagues in the rectory and a few parishioners objected to some of his thoughts and expressions. They did, but this of itself did not bother Yves very much. He still relied on his charm and his words to get him out of any incidental difficulties.

  That “remote control” which was to increase in him until it became paramount in his life—this was the first sign to him of something alien within him. It had become apparent to him at first during his free hours.

  In his free time away from the church and his parish duties, Yves tackled painting and writing much as any other artist. He would be in the mood for painting or poetry. He would have some p
erceptions of color, line, form, or spatial dimensions. The perceptions burned in his imagination and inner sensibilities for some period of time. He would sit down to paint, for instance, while he thus burned inside with images, imaginings, flights of fancy and inner landscapes.

  While doing initial drafts on canvas or paper, motivated by that not unusual activity of his imagination, he normally experienced a special inner perception which was always pleasurable. It was, Yves said, his mind and will gathering in and enjoying the fruits of his imagination. And there poured back into his imagination freshly burnished forms of what originally had entered through his senses.

  It was these burnished forms he tried to depict on canvas or to express in his poetry. But even as he painted or wrote, he found his memory of past things reviving and lighting up like a panel, pouring assonances and shadings into his imagination. And his general effort suddenly expanded and became richer as he tried to reproduce the new form his experience had taken.

  It was this rather normal creative routine that began to take a peculiar turn; and it was always in strict relationship to some exterior trouble or difficulty Yves had as a priest.

  The most important occasion which he clearly remembers hinged upon a bit of unpleasantness with the senior assistant in his parish. In late September 1962, he had preached at a marriage. Afterward, the senior assistant of the parish, who had been present at the ceremony, admonished Yves about his sermon. “You are making marriage a merely human thing,” he argued. “It is a sacrament, a channel of supernatural grace. The Lord Jesus is not going to evolve out of the earth or a woman's body or from gases in the upper atmosphere.”