Malachi Martin stirred many passions.
Moderator: Super Moderators
‘I Have Smelt The Breath Of Satan’: Malachi Martin
“Exorcism can be extremely violent. I have seen objects hurled around rooms by the powers of evil. I have smelt the breath of Satan and heard the demons’ voices - cold, scratchy, dead voices carrying messages of hatred.”
Those words, quoted from the Scotsman newspaper, appear in the obituary of the Co Kerry priest and author Malachi Martin, published in The Irish Times on Saturday, August 7th, 1999.
Martin’s name has been trickling through newsfeeds in recent days ahead of the release of Hostage to the Devil this weekend. The subject of the dark-looking Netflix documentary is Martin and a spirit he confronted in a career as a “Jesuit priest, an author and an exorcist”.
In 1976 Malachi Martin released a book account of five, he claims, real-life exorcisms; Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans. Sharing the title of the upcoming documentary, this is his best-known work.
Each case in the book has a title and vivid narrative, based on meetings with the exorcists and excorcees. A group of students accompanied him to document the process. The four stages of the “process of possession”, are included in his book.
Like The Exorcist before it, in the 1970s Martin’s book “created more exorcism devotees, among them many alienated Catholic priests who condemned the reforms of the Second Vatican Council for giving Satan a free hand.”
In Hostage, Martin’s reputation as a staunch Catholic and his disdain for the Church’s light touch is evident. “Among the general population of Catholics and Christians of other denominations, large numbers of people no longer learn even so basic a prayer as the Our Father,” he writes.
“In churches and parochial schools alike, the subject of Hell is avoided, as one midwestern priest put it, in order not to put people ‘on a guilt trip’. The idea of sin is likewise avoided, according to the same source, in order not to do ‘irreparable damage to what has been taught for the past fifteen years’.”
Martin didn’t buy into any figurative interpretations of evil. He said possession is not “some tale of dark fancy featuring ogres and happy endings. Possession is real: and real prices are paid.”
The trailer for the new documentary says the exorcist is always in danger. Ultimately, Martin said in his best-seller, the exorcist takes the pain for those who are possessed.
“When the rebellion of the possessed person does lead to exorcism, the bitter struggle is brought out into the open,” he wrote. “The exorcist literally offers himself as hostage.”
Hostage to the Devil is out on Netflix on Sunday, January 15th.
FULL STORY
A mind should not be so open that the brains fall out; however, it should not be so closed that whatever gray matter which does reside may not be reached. ART BELL
Everything Woke turns to -Donald Trump
Everything Woke turns to -Donald Trump