—Luke 10:17–22
The Fate of an Exorcist
Michael Strong—
Part I
When the search party reached the disused grain store known locally as Puh-Chi (One Window), the bombing of Nanking was at its height. The night sky was bright with incandescent flares and filled with explosions. Japanese incendiaries were wreaking havoc on Nanking’s wooden buildings. It was December 11, 1937, about 10:00 P.M. The Yangtze delta all the way down to the sea was in Japanese hands. From Shanghai on the coast to within two miles of Nanking was a devastated area on which death had settled like a permanent atmosphere. Nanking was next on the invaders’ list. And defenseless. December 13 was to be its death date.
For one week the police of a southern Nanking city precinct had been looking for Thomas Wu. The charge: murder of at least five women and two men in the most horrible circumstances: Thomas Wu, the story was, had killed his victims and eaten their bodies. At the end of one week’s fruitless searching, Father Michael Strong, the missionary parish priest of the district, who had baptized Thomas Wu, sent word unexpectedly that he had found the wanted man in the barnlike Puh-Chi. But the police captain did not understand the message Father Michael had sent him: “I am conducting an exorcism. Please give me some time.” *
The main door of Puh-Chi was ajar when the police chief arrived. A small knot of men and women stood watching. They could see Father Michael standing in the middle of the floor. Over in one corner there was another figure, a young, naked man, suddenly ravished by an unnatural look of great age, a long knife in his hands. On the shelves around the inner walls of the storehouse lay rows and rows of naked corpses in various stages of mutilation and putrefaction.
“YOU!!” the naked man was screaming as the police captain elbowed his way to the door, “YOU want to know MY name!” The words “you” and “my” hit the captain like two clenched fists across the ears. He saw the priest visibly wilt and stagger backward. But, even so, it was the voice that made the captain wonder. He had known Thomas Wu. Never had he heard him speak with such a voice.
“In the name of Jesus,” Michael began weakly, “you are commanded…”
“Get outa here! Get the hell outa here, you filthy old eunuch!”
“You will release Thomas Wu, evil spirit, and…”
“I’m taking him with me, pigmy,” came the voice from Thomas Wu. “I’m taking him. And no power anywhere, anywhere, you hear, can stop us. We are as strong as death. No one stronger! And he wants to come! You hear? He wants to!”
“Tell me your name…”
The priest was interrupted by a sudden roaring. No one there could say later how the fire started. An incendiary? A spark carried by the wind from burning Nanking? It was like a sudden, noisy ambush sprung by a silent signal. In a flash the fire had jumped up, a living red weed running around the sides of the storehouse, along the curved roof, and across the wooden floor by the walls.
The police captain was already inside, and he gripped Father Michael by the arm, pulling him outside.
The voice of Wu pursued them over the noise: “It’s all one. Fool! We’re all the same. Always were. Always.”
Michael and the captain were outside by then and turned around to listen.
“There’s only one of us. One…”
The rest of the sentence was drowned in a sudden outburst of flaming timbers.
Now, the glass rectangle of the single window was darkening over with smoke and grime. In a few minutes it would be impossible to see anything. Michael lurched over and peered in. Against the window he could see Thomas’ face plastered for an instant of fixed, grinning agony. It was a horrible picture, a Bosch nightmare come alive.
Long, quickly lashing tongues of flame were licking at Thomas’ temples, neck, and hair. Through the hissing and crackling of the fire, Michael could hear Thomas laughing, but very dimly, almost lost to the ear. Between the flames he could see the shelves with their gray-white load of corpses. Some were melting. Some were burning. Eyes oozing out of sockets like broken eggs. Hair burning in little tufts. First, fingers and toes and noses and ears, then whole limbs and torsos melting and blackening. And the smell. God! That smell!
Then the fixity of Thomas’ grin broke; his face seemed to be replaced by another face with a similar grin. At the top speed of a kaleidoscope, a long succession of faces came and went, one flickering after the other. All grinning. All with “Cain’s thumbprint on the chin,” as Michael described the mark that haunted him for the rest of his life. Every pair of lips was rounded into the grinning shape of Thomas’ last word: “one!” Faces and expressions Michael never had known. Some he imagined he knew. Some he knew he imagined. Some he had seen in history books, in paintings, in churches, in newspapers, in nightmares. Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Korean, British, Slavic. Old, young, bearded, clean-shaven. Black, white, yellow. Male, female. Faster. Faster. All grinning with the same grin. More and more and more. Michael felt himself hurtling down an unending lane of faces, decades and centuries and millennia ticking by him, until the speed slowed finally, and the last grinning face appeared, wreathed in hate, its chin just one big thumbprint.
Now the window was completely black. Michael could see nothing. “Cain…” he began to say weakly to himself. But a stablike realization stopped the word in his throat, just as if someone had hissed into his inner ear: “Wrong again, fool! Cain’s father. I. The cosmic Father of Lies and the cosmic Lord of Death. From the beginning of the beginning. I…I…I…I…I…”
Michael felt a sharp pain in his chest. A strong hand was around his heart stifling its movement, and an unbearable weight lay on his chest, bending him over. He heard the blood thumping in his head and then loud, roaring winds. A dazzling flash of light burst across his eyes. He slumped to the ground.
Strong hands plucked Michael away from the window just in time. The storehouse was now an inferno. With a tearing crash, the roof caved in. The flames shot up triumphantly and licked the outside walls, burning and consuming ravenously.
“Get the old man away from here!” screamed the captain through the smoke and the smell. They all drew back. Michael, slung over the shoulder of one man, was babbling and sobbing incoherently. The captain could barely make his words out:
“I failed…I failed…I must go back. Please…Please…must go back…not later…please…”
When they got Michael to the hospital, his condition was critical. Apart from burns and smoke inhalation, he had suffered a minor heart attack. And until the following evening, he continued in a delirium.
Before the fall of Nanking, he was smuggled out by the faithful police captain and a few parishioners. They made their way north-westwards, barely escaping the tightening Japanese net.
On December 14, the Japanese High Command let loose 50,000 of their soldiers on the city with orders to kill every living person. The city became a slaughterhouse. Whole groups of men and women were used for bayonet and machine-gun practice. Others were burned alive or slowly cut to pieces. Rows of children were beheaded by samurai-swinging officers competing to see who could take off the most heads with one sweep of the sword. Women were raped by squads, then killed. Fetuses were torn alive from wombs, carved up, and fed to the dogs.
All told, over 42,000 were murdered. Death enveloped Nanking as it had the entire Yangtze delta. Animals and crops died and rotted in the fields.
It was as though the spirit that Michael had tangled with in the microcosm of Thomas Wu’s grisly charnel house in the suburbs of Nanking—“the Cosmic Lord of Death”—had been let loose over all the lands. In the world-shaking events of the war years, some special viciousness had been given free rein, had impressed itself on hundreds of thousands with the sting of absolute and irresistible authority. Death was the strongest weapon. It settled all disputes over who was master. And eventually it claimed all as its victims, putting everyone on an equal level. In war, where death was the victor, you tried to have it on your side.
B
ack in Hong Kong, where Michael was finally brought in the late summer of 1938 after a considerably roundabout journey, the realists knew it was a matter of time before the Japanese winners took all.
On Christmas Day 1941, Hong Kong became a Japanese possession. During the years of occupation Michael lived quietly at Kowloon, teaching a little in the schools, doing some pastoral work. He was slow in recuperating.
During that time, everyone was under a strain. Food was scarce. Harassment by the occupying Japanese was extreme. And all lived with the sure knowledge that, barring miracles, if the Japanese had to evacuate the city, they would massacre everyone; and if they stayed on, they would eventually kill all they could not enslave.
Still, Michael took all the physical hardship with greater ease than those around him. He suffered two more heart attacks during the Japanese occupation, but they did not diminish his spirit in any way. He did not feel, as his colleagues did, the intolerable uncertainty, the strain of waiting for death at Japanese hands or for liberation by the Allies. As some of his acquaintances noticed, his sufferings were not chiefly in his body or his mind or his imagination. He had come from the interior of China broken in a way neither rest nor food nor loving attention could mend.
To the few who knew his story, it was clear that he had paid only part of his price as an exorcist. He frankly told them of that price. And of his failure. Both they and he realized he would have to liquidate his debt sooner or later.
His waiting creditor fascinated Michael, was always on his mind. For instance, toward the end of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, he and a friend were watching a flight of American bombers progress imperturbably like enchanted birds through a rain of Japanese antiaircraft fire. They deposited their bomb loads, and then departed unharmed over the horizon. As the explosions and fires in the harbor continued, Michael muttered: “Why does death make the loudest noise and the brightest fire?”
Some weeks later, a man-made light brighter than the sun mush-roomed over Hiroshima. A new human record: more people were killed and maimed by this one human action than by any other ever recorded in the story of man.
I was not to learn of Michael for some years—or of the special price he paid day by day until his death, for his defeat in that strange exorcism at Puh-Chi.
A Brief Handbook of Exorcism
The recent vast publicity about Exorcism has highlighted the plight of the possessed as a fresh genre of horror film. The essence of evil is lost in the cinematographic effects. And the exorcist, who risks more than anyone else in an exorcism, flits across the screen as necessary but, in the end, not so interesting as the sound effects.
The truth is that all three—the possessed, the possessing spirit, and the exorcist—bear a close relation to the reality of life and to its meaning as all of us experience it each and every day.
Possession is not a process of magic. Spirit is real; in fact, spirit is the basis of all reality. “Reality” would not only be boring without spirit; it would have no meaning whatsoever. No horror film can begin to capture the horror of such a vision: a world without spirit.
Evil Spirit is personal, and it is intelligent. It is preternatural, in the sense that it is not of this material world, but it is in this material world. And Evil Spirit as well as good advances along the lines of our daily lives. In very normal ways spirit uses and influences our daily thoughts, actions, and customs and, indeed, all the strands that make up the fabric of life in whatever time or place. Contemporary life is no exception.
To compare spirit with the elements of our lives and material world, which it can and sometimes does manipulate for its own ends, is a fatal mistake, but one that is very often made. Eerie sounds can be produced by spirit—but spirit is not the eerie sound. Objects can be made to fly across a room, but telekinesis is no more spirit than the material object that was made to move. One man whose story is told in this book made the mistake of thinking otherwise, and he nearly paid with his life when he had to confront the error he had made.
The exorcist is the centerpiece of every exorcism. On him depends everything. He has nothing personal to gain. But in each exorcism he risks literally everything that he values. Michael Strong’s was an extreme example of the fate awaiting the exorcist. But every exorcist must engage in a one-to-one confrontation, personal and bitter, with pure evil. Once engaged, the exorcism cannot be called off. There will and must always be a victor and a vanquished. And no matter what the outcome, the contact is in part fatal for the exorcist. He must consent to a dreadful and irreparable pillage of his deepest self. Something dies in him. Some part of his humanness will wither from such close contact with the opposite of all humanness—the essence of evil; and it is rarely if ever revitalized. No return will be made to him for his loss.
This is the minimum price an exorcist pays. If he loses in the fight with Evil Spirit, he has an added penalty. He may or may not ever again perform the rite of Exorcism, but he must finally confront and vanquish the evil spirit that repulsed him.
The investigation that may lead to Exorcism usually begins because a man or woman—occasionally a child—is brought to the notice of Church authorities by family or friends. Only rarely does a possessed person come forward spontaneously.
The stories that are told on these occasions are dramatic and painful: strange physical ailments in the possessed; marked mental derangement; obvious repugnance to all signs, symbols, mention, and sight of religious objects, places, people, ceremonies.
Often, the family or friends report, the presence of the person in question is marked by so-called psychical phenomena: objects fly around the room; wallpaper peels off the walls; furniture cracks; crockery breaks; there are strange rumblings, hisses, and other noises with no apparent source. Often the temperature in the room where the possessed happens to be will drop dramatically. Even more often an acrid and distinctive stench accompanies the person.
Violent physical transformations seem sometimes to make the lives of the possessed a kind of hell on earth. Their normal processes of secretion and elimination are saturated with inexplicable wrackings and exaggeration. Their consciousness seems completely colored by the violent sepia of revulsion. Reflexes sometimes become sporadic or abnormal, sometimes disappear for a time. Breathing can cease for extended periods. Heartbeats are hard to detect. The face is strangely distorted, sometimes also abnormally tight and smooth without the slightest line or furrow.
When such a case is brought to their attention, the first and central problem that must always be addressed by the Church authorities is: Is the person really possessed?
Henri Gesland, a French priest and exorcist who works today in Paris, stated in 1974 that, out of 3,000 consultations since 1968, “there have been only four cases of what I believe to be demonic possession.” T. K. Osterreich, on the other hand, states that “possession has been an extremely common phenomenon, cases of which abound in the history of religion.” The truth is that official or scholarly census of possession cases has never been made.
Certainly, many who claim to be possessed or whom others so describe are merely the victims of some mental or physical disease. In reading records from times when medical and psychological science did not exist or were quite undeveloped, it is clear that grave mistakes were made. A victim of disseminated sclerosis, for example, was taken to be possessed because of his spastic jerkings and slidings and the shocking agony in spinal column and joints. Until quite recently, the victim of Tourette’s syndrome was the perfect target for the accusation of “Possessed!”: torrents of profanities and obscenities, grunts, barks, curses, yelps, snorts, sniffs, tics, foot stomping, facial contortions all appear suddenly and just as suddenly cease in the subject. Nowadays, Tourette’s syndrome responds to drug treatment, and it seems to be a neurological disease involving a chemical abnormality in the brain. Many people suffering from illnesses and diseases well known to us today such as paranoia, Huntington’s chorea, dyslexia, Parkinson’s disease, or even mere skin dis
eases (psoriasis, herpes I, for instance), were treated as people “possessed” or at least as “touched” by the Devil.
Nowadays, competent Church authorities always insist on thorough examinations of the person brought to them for Exorcism, an examination conducted by qualified medical doctors and psychiatrists.
When a case of possession is reported by a priest to the diocesan authorities, the exorcist of the diocese is brought in. If there is no diocesan exorcist, a man is appointed or brought from outside the diocese.
Sometimes the priest reporting the exorcism will have had some preliminary medical and psychiatric tests run beforehand in order to allay the cautious skepticism he is likely to meet at the chancery when he introduces his problem. When the official exorcist enters the case, he will usually have his own very thorough examinations run by experts he knows and whose judgment he is sure he can trust.
In earlier times, one priest was usually assigned the function of exorcist in each diocese of the Church. In modern times, this practice has fallen into abeyance in some dioceses, mainly because the incidence of reported possession has decreased over the last hundred years. But in most major dioceses, there is still one priest entrusted with this function—even though he may rarely or never use it. In some dioceses, there is a private arrangement between the bishop and one of his priests whom he knows and trusts.
There is no official public appointment of exorcists. In some dioceses, “the bishop knows little about it and wants to know less”—as in one of the cases recorded in this book. But however he comes to his position, the exorcist must have official Church sanction, for he is acting in an official capacity, and any power he has over Evil Spirit can only come from those officials who belong to the substance of Jesus’ Church, whether they be in the Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, or the Protestant Communions. Sometimes a diocesan priest will take on an exorcism himself without asking his bishop, but all such cases known to me have failed.
Hostage to the Devil Page 3