A woman picks up her child, places the sweet gift face down on the floor, and uses her exercise band to wring the life out of her. She repeats those steps two more times.
A man obtains a 3D-printed replica pistol, scrawls epithets on the bullets, lays in wait, and shoots a man who is in the insurance business in the back of the head at point-blank range on a New York City street.
A man steals his grandpa's rifle, positions himself on the rooftop at a Utah college, and waits for a popular young man to come into his crosshairs. He shoots him in the neck, silencing his voice.
That's bad enough, but in every case, a chorus of evil-spirited ghouls cheer on the demons. Some even copied the acts.
If you've gone to church longer than a cup of coffee, you know how debased our human natures are, and how much we need God. You also know that good and evil exist. As fewer people attend a house of worship and rely on their own understanding about human nature, the soul, and erroneous assumptions about man's goodness, evil gains a foothold.
I heard a sermon the other day in which a pastor tells about a conversation with a man at a golf club. They got to talking about God, and the man brought up the fact that he kept getting interrupted while praying. The pastor prayed for the guy about that issue, and suddenly a voice began coming out of the man — and it wasn't his voice. He called the demon out of the man.
Remember the story about the guy who was duct-taped on the plane? He was sitting next to a Messianic pastor (Jewish Christian) and author, and the two had been chatting nicely for two hours when the man asked the pastor what his latest book was about. The book was about demon possession, and the man, using a voice that wasn't his, went berserk. I talked about the situation on the Adult in the Room podcast below, where you'll see the pastor talk about how it all went down.
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Father Chad Ripperger is a Catholic priest in Denver, and told the New York Post that people committing more acts of evil encourage more demonic activity.
“The demons are empowered as more and more people commit evil deeds,” he said. “If a person willingly becomes involved in these evil deeds, Satanism or witchcraft, the actions lead to a susceptibility to Satan’s influence, so that he or she is easily manipulated and can be incited to do more evil things," so there's that.
The Catholic Church reports that social media has amplified the occult and paganism, encouraging more people to open up their lives to, well, evil spirits. What else can you call them?
The conclusion? Garçon, more exorcists, please.
The London Daily Telegraph reports that the International Association of Exorcists (IAE) recently briefed Pope Leo XIV on the need for more exorcists. The demons are loosed, the IAE reported, and prescribed that each of the 3,172 Catholic dioceses have at least one exorcist on staff. The group claims the world needs 2,000 more exorcists. America has only 150.
The Telegraph explains there are different kinds of exorcisms.
There are two kinds of exorcism; invocative and imperative.
The imperative can be used to end hauntings of places as well as possessions of people. “In the invocative form, one calls upon God to intervene, through His power, for the liberation of a person,” Dr Castaldini said.
“In the imperative form, demons are commanded, in the name of Jesus Christ, to leave a person they have possessed or to desist from exerting their evil influence in a place, a house, on an object, or on a person.”
A “major exorcism” is only used in cases of demonic possession. It can only be carried out with the permission of a local bishop. Before it takes place, medical and psychological evaluation must take place to rule out mental illness.
Demonology and exorcism expert, Adam Blai, with the Diocese of Pittsburgh, says he's seen a large increase in the number of people needing prayer and exorcisms.
"I have many exorcist friends around the country who over the last five, 5 to 8 years have said that they're incredibly busy. [S]o for some reason there is an increase, but the more important, beautiful part is the Holy Spirit is raising up this ministry."
Blai says the Church is careful about deciding what's a demon and what's a physically or mentally based malady.
"[W]e also look at psychological factors, and we look for a psych eval to be sure that this isn't perhaps schizophrenia, bipolar with psychotic features, or maybe a PTSD experience. So yeah, the Church is cautious," he said in an interview with EWTN.
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This election season, the American people are confronted with more overt atheistic communist candidates than at any time in memory. Christians or religious-adjacent Americans should ask if they want demons to make decisions on their behalf, or if they should choose people who have a Western moral compass. And if you don't vote, you voted for soulless factotums to make decisions on your behalf. That seems...dumb.
Take that piece of advice if you will. Just don't help the demons. We don't have enough exorcists to cast them out.