An interview with Exorcist, Fr. Alphonsus, from the research for the new book:
Exorcising Halloween: A Guide to Sanctifying the Season
What is your first reaction about the whole situation with Halloween?
We’re living in a cultural time where all the bad guys of old have been made good guys and often the good guys are portrayed as the bad guys. So if you look at so many of these big TV shows that teenagers in particular watch today: the witches, the warlocks, the vampires, and the werewolves are the good guys. They’re always physically beautiful and attractive and depicted much like teenagers. The bad guys are often those who try to defeat them, and are often either religious people or people who are very much dedicated to getting rid of them, and the way to fight evil is with more witchcraft. So, it’s inverting things.
Would you say this involves a large percentage of shows today?
It seems to be a growing minority of shows. It’s really more something that teenagers and young adults would watch more than people who are older. I do think it’s really big among teenagers and twenty-something year olds, because those are the people you normally see depicted. You rarely see a lot of people who are over twenty-something in it unless they’re something bad. I doubt a lot of these shows have parents involved, or real adult figures. It’s “we the kids, we have to fight this evil, and we have to depend on our own wisdom,” or on the wisdom of some old book or ancient this or that, ghost or spirit or whatever, to get them out of the evil situation.
Are these shows impacting young children or primarily the teenage and young adult groups?
It’s going even to the level of children. I was with a really good Catholic family and I was amazed at the granddaughter. I said, “What saint are you going to dress up as for All Saints?” She said, “No, I’m going to be Zoey.” It was a character from K-pop Demon Hunters, one of these children shows where this little girl was a demon fighter but one of them is herself a half-demon. That’s another thing: a lot of this intermixes Christian elements with pagan. So it’s really hard to separate the two and, of course, it’s all really bad theology. So many of the kids don’t even have any religious background and this becomes the mindset now by which they approach the spiritual realm.
You mentioned these shows that involve characters who fight evil with witchcraft, presenting witchcraft as a resource for help. Have you seen this spill over into real life, where the youth seek witchcraft to handle their own real-life problems?
I’ve been dealing with young people and that’s exactly what happens. They start having spiritual or demonic experiences and the first thing they do is to say, “Well, I better go to a magic shop and get potions.” That becomes the doorway. So many of these things are almost like a gateway drug into witchcraft. Teenagers are often feeling rejected, often feeling powerless, and they’re saying, “Hey, if I’m the kid that’s rejected, I can do witchcraft, and I can have power.” This is the thing that the demonic is using more and more to gain leverage over teenagers.
I had an experience as a high school chaplain with two girls who were coming for spiritual direction, one Catholic and one non-Catholic, who had been playing with the Ouija board. Both of them, independent of the other, were starting to have strong demonic oppression, things flying around the room, voices, unexplained scratches. While it was a horrible thing for them to experience, it opened both of them to the realization, “Whoa! The only one who could help us is God, and the only source to really go to is the Church.” So I was able to instruct them and guide them back to the Faith and back to the Church, and then the Church was able to provide the sacramentals and the prayers that delivered them, everything that was needed to really free them from this. Of course, these are experiences they’ll never forget, including the fact that it was the Lord that freed them, through the Church, through the weapons the Church has, not through more magic.
Do you have some examples of where this did not work out in the end? That would be good for people to also hear about.
Yes, on the opposite side, I had a young woman, raised in a good Catholic family, who started having demonic experiences. She turned to all these psychics who were telling her that she had special gifts and they pulled her into a whole world of witchcraft. Then she came to see me, but she was not willing to leave it, even though I warned her, “Look, this is just going to get worse. You can’t fight evil with evil. She trusted these psychics and these witches more than she did the Church or the priest, and that was really disturbing.
What’s the status of the culture, the pulse, so to speak, when it comes to recognizing the importance of All Saints and having a correct understanding of it?
Kids in a Catholic school will be a little more aware of All Saints but it would have little to nothing to do with their day-to-day lives. All the media they’re watching, all the stuff on TV and the internet, all the stores, everything emphasizes a corrupt form of Halloween. Unlike in other cultures, there just isn’t an emphasis on All Saints in the wider American culture.
Unless you come from a really devout Catholic family, you won’t think about it. Every All Saints Day, I do a Mass with a ton of homeschool families. They have their own type of thing where they go around and talk about their Saints: that’s how they get candy. We do it on All Hallows’ Eve, celebrate, and let the kids know what this is about. Outside of that very small group of young people, the vast majority would have no idea.
What spiritual vulnerabilities do you think the culture, including lukewarm Catholics and devout Catholics and paganized Americans, is encountering at Halloween? A lot of the stores have occcultic displays with their Halloween displays. I saw a large hamsa hand symbol one year at a popular store. Then there are a lot of those witch circles in people’s yards. Things like that seem to be more common in the yard displays: more horrific and more occult-inclined. So, in general, what kind of vulnerabilities do you think we’re facing and should be aware of?
Mainly the general ignorance of the reality of these things. I’ve even had people I would normally consider devout Catholics who, when I’m talking about things regarding the demonic and things of witchcraft, they laugh and think I must be joking. This is due in part because, at the same time, the media has been pushing these things, and the TV shows also do it, in such a fantastical way that many people think it’s just a joke. A lot of people grew up playing with Ouija boards or doing little childhood spells and nothing happened. People play with these things and seemingly nothing happens.
So there’s just a lot of ignorance and a lot of that falls on us priests. We have not really worked to inform our people. Even many good holy priests I know have never talked about the occult, never talked about the demonic, never even talked about Hell. I don’t know if it’s a fear of being laughed at or if it’s because they don’t want to come off as too negative. I don’t know, but I just think we have a huge number of priests who aren’t talking about these things and this has been for generations. We have generations, even back before Vatican II, that just did not talk about these things. We left so much of the education about these things to Hollywood and to the culture which, of course, is already so taken-in, and it’s just become darker.
You said you had an example of how the occult, through ignorance about it, is making great strides, on a very practical level, into people’s lives.
A priest I know has a parishioner who owns a business where they allow people to set up their own goods for sale. In her business, there were a number of these little stores that had occult things for sale. The priest said, “Look, you got to get rid of those,” and she said, “Well, Father, I can’t tell them that.” He said, “Well, just so know, I’m going to have to let all my good Catholics know that that’s not a place for them to go, that they should not be going into a place where there’s occult stuff.” Finally, though, she was able to get the small stores to get rid of those items – but someone told the priest recently that it’s all back! This business owner is a person who goes to Church every Sunday but obviously doesn’t take the occult seriously.
I often think of Lord of the Rings, in the movie, when one of the early lines says, “History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.” So, today, so much of the teaching has been not handed on, for so long that people don’t even question it, even devout Catholics. “Do we really believe this?”, because there’s so little teaching today to back up what we believe. You have to do a lot of research to get the sound teaching that you need, that you can rest on with confidence, in which you can say, “This is ancient, this is enduring.” But we now have 60 years of teaching that has gone one way or the other, or the complete absence of teaching. The devil loves that confusion.
Loves it.
I taught high school Theology for 10 years and I’ve been doing this work for over four, so, for 14 years, every time Halloween comes around, I think, “Okay, what do we do with this?” For 14 years, “what do we do with this?” Every time. I think a lot of people are asking the same question, so somebody needs to start answering it and start provoking parishes, provoking Catholics, to restore the True Faith at All Saints: Halloween, All Hallows Day, and All Souls Day. Then, what do we do about the evil culture? That’s what people need to understand.
A big part is families taking it into their own hands. There’s a good Catholic homeschool family that has really worked to minister to other Catholic families that we have in our area. They’re the ones who host the All Saints Day Mass and party. They went from beginning with probably 20-30 people to now nearly 200 people. People come to their house, the priest comes and has Mass; if a second priest can come, he hears confessions. The kids dress up like the Saints. They have to go around and explain their Saints and then they get candy. This is a good way of taking some of the better parts and the fun parts and keeping it firmly grounded in Catholicism.
I told my parochial vicar that the Sunday before All Saints and All Souls, we’re going to preach all of our homies on this topic. It is good to do every year: this is when they’re all thinking about it. So, we’re going to talk about both: the corruption that’s taking place and how the demonic is involved in that, as well as the sinfulness of getting involved in the occult things that have now become cultural, like Ouija boards and tarot cards and psychics, things that I hear even Catholic school teachers at times attend! Then we talk about All Saints and that this is what it is really about.
Do you mention Christ the King that day even though it’s not in the Novus Ordo calendar?
That’s a really good idea. I think it’s been out of my mind sadly since the Latin Mass got shut down; I just don’t think about it as much, but that is an excellent idea. That’s why it was placed there! Again, there’s so much that was seemingly moved at times for little to no reason; and getting rid of things like the Ember days, that had really contributed to graces in the Church. I see so many, at least the more serious young adult Catholics and new Catholics, that are themselves just picking out these traditions and learning about them, thanks to the internet. Hopefully, there’ll be a groundswell from the laity to bring them back.
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Learn more in Exorcising Halloween: A Guide to Sanctifying the Season, in which you’ll read these insights and those of many other interviews and abundant research on the topic of the sacred season of Allhallowtide.
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