The appeal for help sounds like it was channelled from the TV show Stranger Things. “Exorcist: trained teams needed in parishes to fight evil spirits.”
It is, however, the splash headline in this week’s Irish Catholic, Ireland’s biggest-selling religious newspaper.
Fr Pat Collins, a priest of the Vincentian order and a prominent Dublin-based exorcist, told the weekly there was an urgent need for “deliverance ministry” to help people who feel oppressed by evil spirits.
“As Ireland has secularised, there is a crisis of truth, and a crisis of meaning – people are getting into all kinds of things they wouldn’t have got into before. As a result, people are more open to spiritual forces that can be negative.”
In this week's copy of The Irish Catholic, leading priest-exorcist Fr Pat Collins CM, says Ireland urgently needs trained teams of people to lead so-called ‘deliverance ministry’ for those who feel they are oppressed by evil spirits.
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Unlike exorcism, which is conducted by priests given special permission from the Catholic church, deliverance ministry is prayer for people who are distressed and wish to heal emotional wounds, including those purportedly caused by evil spirits.
Collins said Irish bishops recognised the need. “The demand is much greater than the supply.”
The Guardian has contacted Fr Collins for comment.
The priest, a trained psychologist, had made similar calls before. In 2018 he told Irish Catholic of being inundated with people who believed they were afflicted by evil spirts.
“I think in many cases they wrongly think it, but when they turn to the church, the church doesn’t know what to do with them and they refer them on either to a psychologist or to somebody that they’ve heard of that is interested in this form of ministry, and they do fall between the cracks and often are not helped,” he said.