Spiritual Warfare or Mental Illness: When Psychology Replaced Exorcism by Jeff Callaway

Spiritual Warfare or Mental Illness: When Psychology Replaced Exorcism

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

I. OPENING SALVO — A SILENCED BATTLEFIELD

Walk into most Catholic parishes today and you will find something disturbing. Not disturbing like the old horror movies, but disturbing in its ordinariness. The narthex holds pamphlets on anxiety management and depression screening. From the pulpit, priests recommend therapists rather than confessors. The language of psychology has replaced the language of spiritual warfare. Nobody mentions Satan. Nobody talks about demons. Nobody even whispers about spiritual oppression.

This is a new phenomenon in the two thousand year history of the Church.

Compare this sanitized, therapeutic version of Catholicism to the Gospels themselves. Christ spent a staggering portion of His earthly ministry casting out demons. The Gospel of Mark alone contains more exorcism accounts than the entire Old Testament combined. Jesus did not refer possessed individuals to Galilean psychiatrists. He did not prescribe ancient antipsychotics. He confronted evil spirits with divine authority, and they fled.

So what changed? Did demons suddenly stop existing sometime between the first century and the twenty first? Did they pack up their pitchforks and retire to some metaphysical beach resort?

The answer is both simpler and more troubling.

Demons did not disappear. The Church stopped believing in them.

This essay examines how modern materialism hijacked the Catholic understanding of the human person, reducing immortal souls to firing neurons, sin to chemical imbalance, and spiritual warfare to psychiatric symptoms. The consequences have been catastrophic. Spiritual oppression gets mislabeled as pathology. Souls get medicated instead of liberated. Priests get trained to refer cases to clinicians rather than confront the powers of darkness that Christ Himself commanded them to battle.

The Church did not abandon exorcism because science proved demons do not exist. It abandoned exorcism because it lost its nerve.

II. THE BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW: A COSMOS AT WAR

A. Scripture's Unambiguous Teaching on Demonic Reality

The Bible does not treat demonic activity as primitive superstition or symbolic language. From Genesis to Revelation, Scripture presents demons as real, personal, malevolent spiritual beings actively opposing God and tormenting humanity.

The Old Testament gives us glimpses: the serpent tempting Eve in Eden, the tormenting spirit afflicting King Saul, the demon Asmodeus killing Sarah's seven husbands in the Book of Tobit. These are not metaphors. They are documented encounters with evil intelligences.

The New Testament explodes with demonic confrontations. The Gospels describe demons as personal beings with intelligence, will, and speech. They recognize Christ as the Son of God. They fear His judgment. They negotiate with Him. They possess knowledge beyond natural human capacity.

Christ did not treat possession as mental illness misunderstood by an ignorant age. He drew clear distinctions between disease and demonic affliction. Matthew chapter four, verse twenty-four states plainly: they brought Him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and He healed them. Notice the categories: disease, epilepsy, demonic possession. Christ treated them as separate conditions requiring different responses.

B. Christ the Exorcist King

Jesus performed exorcisms constantly throughout His public ministry. These were not peripheral events but central demonstrations of His divine authority and the inbreaking Kingdom of God.

In Mark chapter one, a demon in the Capernaum synagogue cries out: What have You to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have You come to destroy us? I know who You are, the Holy One of God. The demon speaks. It knows Christ's identity. It understands its coming doom.

Christ does not argue with it or analyze its psychological state. He commands it: Be silent and come out of him. The demon obeys immediately, convulsing the man before departing.

The Gerasene demoniac presents an even more dramatic case. A man possessed by a legion of demons lived among the tombs, breaking chains, cutting himself with stones, tormented day and night. When Christ approaches, the demons beg not to be sent to the abyss. Christ allows them to enter a herd of swine, which immediately stampede into the sea and drown.

This was not symbolic. The local herdsmen witnessed it. The townspeople found the formerly possessed man clothed and in his right mind, sitting at Jesus' feet.

C. Apostolic Continuation

Christ's authority over demons did not end with His earthly ministry. He explicitly granted this power to His apostles. In Luke chapter ten, He sends out the seventy-two disciples who return rejoicing: Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name.

The Book of Acts continues this pattern. Paul casts out a spirit of divination from a slave girl in Philippi. Peter's shadow heals the sick and liberates the oppressed. The early Church understood spiritual warfare as normal Christian practice, not extraordinary or unusual.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 1673 states clearly: When the Church asks publicly and authoritatively in the name of Jesus Christ that a person or object be protected against the power of the Evil One and withdrawn from his dominion, it is called exorcism. Jesus performed exorcisms and from Him the Church has received the power and office of exorcizing.

This is not optional teaching. This is apostolic inheritance.

III. THE CHURCH'S HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING OF DEMONIC ACTIVITY

A. Classical Catholic Categories

The Church has always maintained careful distinctions regarding demonic influence. These categories, largely forgotten in modern practice, include:

Temptation: The ordinary experience of every Christian, where demons suggest sin without controlling the will. This is universal spiritual warfare that requires prayer, sacraments, and vigilance.

Oppression: External attacks that cause physical or psychological distress without possessing the person's body. This can include nightmares, inexplicable fears, or targeted harassment.

Obsession: Persistent, invasive thoughts that go beyond normal temptation, often focused on blasphemy, despair, or violence.

Infestation: Demonic presence affecting places or objects rather than persons, creating disturbances in homes or buildings.

Possession: The rarest and most severe form, where a demon takes temporary control of a person's body, though never their soul or free will. The person often has no memory of actions performed while possessed.

These distinctions matter because they require different responses. Not every spiritual struggle requires formal exorcism. Most require the ordinary means of grace: prayer, confession, the Eucharist, fasting, and Christian community.

B. Patristic and Medieval Consensus

The Church Fathers wrote extensively about demonic activity and spiritual warfare. Saint Athanasius praised the sign of the cross as powerful against demonic molestation. Saint John Chrysostom warned against attributing all human affairs to demons while acknowledging their real malice. Saint Augustine distinguished demonic possession from mental disturbance while affirming both as real phenomena requiring different treatments.

The monastic tradition developed sophisticated understanding of spiritual combat. The Desert Fathers battled demons openly in the wilderness. Their writings on spiritual warfare remain classics of Christian literature. They did not doubt demons existed. They encountered them daily.

Medieval theologians like Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure wrote about demonology with the same intellectual rigor they applied to any theological topic. The 1614 Rituale Romanum codified exorcism procedures that had developed over centuries of careful practice.

C. The Rite of Exorcism and Proper Discernment

The Church never treated exorcism casually. It always required episcopal permission. It always mandated careful investigation. It always distinguished between natural illness and preternatural affliction.

The traditional rite includes diagnostic prayers designed to reveal demonic presence. It looks for specific signs: speaking in unknown languages, revealing hidden knowledge, displaying strength beyond natural capacity, violent aversion to sacred objects and prayers.

But here is the crucial point that modern skeptics miss: the Church never denied mental illness existed. Priests were not ignorant primitives who blamed demons for everything. They simply refused to reduce everything to material causes. They maintained that both natural and supernatural explanations were possible and required careful discernment.

The Church held two truths simultaneously: mental illness is real, and so are demons.

Modern psychology claims it can only hold one.

IV. THE RISE OF PSYCHOLOGY AND THE FALL OF METAPHYSICS

A. Enlightenment Roots

The seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment planted seeds that would eventually strangle the Church's spiritual worldview. Philosophers rejected the supernatural, declaring that only material causes could explain reality. Anything beyond physical observation became suspect, primitive, superstitious.

The human person was redefined. No longer a body-soul composite created in God's image, man became merely a complex machine. The soul became an embarrassment to educated people. Materialist philosophy declared that consciousness was just brain chemistry, morality just evolutionary adaptation, and spiritual experience just neurological misfiring.

This philosophical revolution prepared the ground for psychology to replace theology as the dominant framework for understanding human suffering.

B. Freud, Jung, and the New Priests

Sigmund Freud and his disciples offered a new religion disguised as science. They relocated the confessional from the church to the analyst's couch. They rebranded sin as repression, guilt as neurosis, moral struggle as psychological maladjustment.

Freud explicitly positioned psychoanalysis as a replacement for religion. He treated religious belief itself as pathology, calling it an illusion that mature people should outgrow. Confession became therapy. Penance became analysis. Absolution became insight.

Carl Jung took a different approach but reached similar conclusions. He tried to salvage spirituality by psychologizing it, reducing God to archetypes in the collective unconscious, treating religious experience as symbolic rather than real. His approach was more respectful than Freud's hostility, but equally corrosive. It made the soul psychological rather than spiritual, immanent rather than transcendent.

Both men established psychology as an alternative magisterium with its own priests, its own rituals, its own salvation narrative. The fundamental difference: their salvation promised relief from symptoms, not redemption from sin.

C. Psychiatry as a Competing Worldview

Modern psychiatry did not simply add medical tools to help suffering people. It claimed to replace the spiritual understanding of human nature entirely. Authority shifted from altar to clinic, from priest to psychiatrist, from sacrament to medication.

Demons were dismissed as primitive explanations for phenomena we now understand as brain disorders. The DSM, psychiatry's diagnostic manual, does not include categories for demonic oppression or possession. It cannot, because materialist assumptions do not permit supernatural causes.

This represents a total worldview replacement. Psychology did not add knowledge to the Church's understanding. It claimed the Church was fundamentally wrong about what human beings are.

And tragically, much of the Church believed it.

V. THE CHURCH'S POST-CONCILIAR CONFUSION

A. The Collapse of Spiritual Language

Something happened in Catholic practice after Vatican II. Not because of the Council's documents, which maintained traditional teaching on demons and exorcism, but because of how those documents were implemented in a culture drunk on modernism.

Priests stopped preaching about hell. Satan got reduced to symbol or metaphor. Spiritual warfare language disappeared from catechesis and homilies. Exorcism became an embarrassment, something the Church would rather not discuss in polite company.

This was not theological revision. It was theological cowardice.

The Catechism still teaches clearly about Satan, demons, and exorcism. But if you asked the average Catholic in 2024 about these teachings, most would have no idea they exist. The gap between official doctrine and actual practice has become a chasm.

B. Seminaries and Formation Failures

Modern seminary formation trains priests extensively in psychology and counseling. This is not inherently wrong. Understanding human psychology can help priests serve their flocks more effectively.

The problem is proportion and priority. Many priests receive more training in Rogerian therapy than in spiritual direction. They learn diagnostic criteria from the DSM but not the classical signs of possession. They get taught to refer parishioners to mental health professionals but not how to conduct spiritual warfare.

The result: priests who are theologically orthodox but practically impotent when confronted with genuine spiritual oppression. They have been trained to doubt their own apostolic authority.

C. The Practical Result

When someone suffering from demonic oppression or possession approaches the Church today, what typically happens?

They get sent to psychiatrists. They get prescribed medication. They get diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or dissociative identity disorder. Some of these diagnoses may be accurate. But some are not.

And for those whose suffering has spiritual rather than medical causes, the result is years of ineffective treatment, escalating symptoms, and no relief. Because you cannot medicate away a demon.

Families beg bishops for help. Bishops refer them to mental health professionals. Mental health professionals try treatments that fail because they are addressing the wrong problem. Meanwhile, the possessed person suffers in a nightmare that could be ended with the Church's apostolic authority, if only someone had the faith to use it.

VI. WHEN DIAGNOSIS FAILS: CASES THAT SHOULD TROUBLE US

A. Patterns Reported by Exorcists

Father Gabriele Amorth served as the Vatican's chief exorcist for thirty years until his death in 2016. He performed over sixty thousand exorcisms. His writings describe patterns that should disturb any honest observer.

Possessed individuals display violent aversion to sacred objects. A person might seem normal until confronted with a crucifix, blessed water, or the Eucharist, then erupt in rage or physical revulsion. They speak languages they never studied, reveal information they could not possibly know, demonstrate strength wildly disproportionate to their physical condition.

These are not symptoms of schizophrenia or psychosis. They are the signs the Church has recognized for two thousand years as indicators of preternatural affliction.

Dr. Richard Gallagher, a board certified psychiatrist and professor at Columbia and Yale, has consulted on hundreds of possession cases. He describes attending an exorcism where a woman levitated over a foot off her chair for half an hour while eight witnesses, including three strong men, struggled to hold her down. He reports cases where possessed individuals speak fluent Latin despite never studying it, or accurately describe events happening miles away in real time.

Gallagher remains a rigorous scientist. He approaches each case skeptically, ruling out medical explanations first. But after twenty-five years working with exorcists, he has concluded that genuine possession, though rare, is real.

B. Misdiagnosis and Delay

The International Association of Exorcists reports rising demand for their services, calling it a pastoral emergency. Many of these cases involve people who spent years in psychiatric treatment with no improvement.

The pattern repeats: symptoms that worsen despite medication, behaviors that intensify rather than diminish with therapy, resistance to every psychiatric intervention. Eventually someone suggests consulting a priest. Often by this point, the person has suffered for years unnecessarily.

Consider the case of Anneliese Michel, a German woman who underwent sixty-seven exorcisms in the 1970s before dying. Years later, German bishops retracted the claim she had been possessed, saying she actually suffered from mental illness. But the full story is more complex. She had been in psychiatric treatment for years with no improvement. Multiple medications failed. Her symptoms included violent aversion to religious objects and speaking in voices she could not produce normally.

Was she mentally ill? Was she possessed? Could she have been both? These are not simple questions, but they demand honest investigation rather than automatic dismissal.

C. The Scandal of Silence

The worst scandal is not misdiagnosis. It is refusal to investigate at all.

Families approach bishops begging for help. They describe symptoms that match possession criteria precisely. They have spent years exhausting medical options. They are desperate.

And they are told the Church does not really do that anymore. Or that they need more psychiatric evaluation first. Or that they should try another medication. Or simply that the bishop does not believe in that sort of thing.

This is betrayal. Christ gave His Church authority to liberate captives. When the Church refuses to exercise that authority, it abandons souls to torment.

VII. THE CATECHISM: STILL CLEAR, STILL IGNORED

A. What the Catechism Actually Teaches

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, promulgated by Saint John Paul II in 1992, teaches clearly about Satan and demons. These teachings are not medieval holdovers. They are current, binding doctrine.

Paragraph 391: Behind the disobedient choice of our first parents lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God. Scripture and the Church's Tradition see in this being a fallen angel, called Satan or the devil.

Paragraph 392: Scripture speaks of a sin of these angels. This fall consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign.

Paragraph 395: The power of Satan is not infinite. He is only a creature. He cannot prevent the building up of God's reign.

Paragraph 414: Satan or the devil and the other demons are fallen angels who have freely refused to serve God and his plan. Their choice against God is definitive. They try to associate man in their revolt against God.

Paragraph 1673 explicitly describes exorcism as directed at the expulsion of demons or liberation from demonic possession through the spiritual authority Jesus entrusted to His Church.

This is not ambiguous. This is not optional. This is what the Catholic Church teaches right now, today.

B. Spiritual Warfare as Ordinary Christianity

The Catechism does not limit spiritual warfare to dramatic exorcisms. It presents spiritual combat as the normal Christian life.

Prayer is warfare. The sacraments are weapons. Confession breaks the power of sin that gives demons foothold. The Eucharist nourishes souls for battle. Fasting disciplines the body and strengthens the will.

These are not merely therapeutic practices. They are the armor of God that Saint Paul describes in Ephesians chapter six. They are how Christians fight powers and principalities, rulers of darkness, spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places.

Most Catholics have never been taught this. They approach the Christian life as moral improvement project or path to personal fulfillment. They have no idea they are in a war.

C. Authority of the Church

The Church's authority to perform exorcisms flows directly from Christ. He commanded His apostles to cast out demons. That command was not temporary. It was not symbolic. It continues in apostolic succession.

Exorcism is an act of mercy, not superstition. It is liberation, not spectacle. And it requires both caution and courage. Caution to distinguish genuine possession from mental illness. Courage to confront evil when discernment confirms its presence.

The revised Rite of Exorcism from 1999 emphasizes prudent investigation and medical consultation. This is proper. But it does not eliminate the Church's responsibility to exercise the authority Christ gave her.

VIII. FALSE DICHOTOMY: FAITH VS. MEDICINE

A. The Church's True Position

The Catholic Church has never taught that faith and medical science are enemies. Vatican II's document Gaudium et Spes praises legitimate scientific advancement. The Church runs hospitals worldwide. Catholic universities train physicians, psychologists, and researchers.

Faith and reason cooperate. They do not compete.

Psychology, when properly understood, is a tool for understanding human behavior and treating certain afflictions. It becomes problematic only when it claims to be a complete worldview that replaces metaphysics and theology.

The problem is not that psychologists help people. The problem is when psychology denies the existence of the soul, reduces moral struggle to chemical imbalance, and dismisses spiritual causation as primitive thinking.

B. Where Modern Practice Goes Wrong

Modern mental health practice goes wrong when it makes three fundamental errors:

First, when it denies the soul exists. If humans are merely complex meat machines, then all suffering must have material causes and material solutions. This assumption is philosophical, not scientific. It cannot be proven by research. It is an article of materialist faith.

Second, when medication replaces repentance. Yes, some mental illnesses have biochemical components that medication can help. But not all suffering is medical. Some is moral. Some is spiritual. Treating spiritual problems as medical problems does not help. It prolongs suffering.

Third, when trauma eclipses sin. Modern psychology loves trauma narratives. Every problem gets traced to childhood wounds or systemic oppression. Individual moral responsibility disappears. This is not compassionate. It is crippling. It prevents people from repenting, converting, and finding actual healing through Christ.

C. Integrated Healing: The Catholic Model

The Church's approach should integrate all legitimate forms of help while maintaining proper hierarchy.

Medical treatment addresses physical and neurological problems. Therapy helps people process trauma and develop healthy coping strategies. Spiritual direction guides souls toward holiness. Confession reconciles sinners to God. Exorcism liberates those under demonic oppression.

These are not competing options. They are complementary tools that address different dimensions of human suffering.

What this requires: therapists who respect metaphysics and do not treat religious belief as pathology. Psychiatrists who understand they are treating bodies and minds, not judging souls. Priests who reclaim their apostolic authority while respecting legitimate medical expertise.

The goal: souls restored to wholeness through Christ, using every good gift God provides.

IX. THE COST OF MATERIALISM: SOULS LOST IN TRANSLATION

A. Medication Without Meaning

Modern psychiatry can suppress symptoms. It cannot provide meaning.

A person in despair gets prescribed antidepressants. The medication may lift the fog somewhat. But it does not answer the question: Why am I here? What is my life for? What happens when I die?

These are spiritual questions. They demand spiritual answers. No medication can provide them.

The human person yearns for transcendence, for connection with God, for meaning beyond material existence. When these yearnings get pathologized as symptoms, when they get medicated away as disorders, something essential dies.

Not every depressed person lacks neurochemical balance. Some lack hope. Some lack purpose. Some lack God. And you cannot prescribe your way to salvation.

B. The Loss of Moral Language

When psychology replaces theology, moral categories disappear.

Sin becomes disorder. Evil becomes dysfunction. Guilt becomes neurosis. The solution shifts from repentance to reframing, from conversion to coping strategies.

This is not neutral. It is devastating.

Human beings are moral agents with free will and responsibility. When we remove moral language, we remove moral agency. People cannot repent of disorders. They cannot confess dysfunctions. They cannot seek forgiveness for neuroses.

The loss of moral language produces perpetual victimhood. Everything bad in my life is something that happened to me, never something I chose. This is not compassionate. It is enslaving.

Real compassion tells the truth: you have sinned, and Christ offers forgiveness. You have been wounded, and Christ offers healing. You are oppressed, and Christ offers liberation. All three may be simultaneously true. But reducing everything to trauma and dysfunction helps no one.

C. A Church Afraid of Its Own Power

The deepest tragedy is a Church that possesses divine authority but refuses to use it.

Christ granted His Church power to bind and loose, forgive and retain, heal and deliver. These are not metaphors. These are supernatural realities.

But when the Church absorbs the spirit of the age, when it becomes embarrassed by its own teachings, when it tries to be respectable according to secular standards, it loses its power.

Apostolic authority unused is apostolic authority lost.

The devils know this. They remain unchallenged, free to torment without resistance. And the sheep Christ died for remain unguarded, shepherds too afraid or too embarrassed to defend them.

This is unacceptable.

X. WHAT MUST BE RECLAIMED

A. Formation of Priests

Seminaries must restore serious training in spiritual warfare. Future priests need to understand classical demonology, the signs of possession and oppression, the proper use of exorcism and deliverance prayers.

They need collaboration with faithful mental health professionals who respect both science and metaphysics. They need practical experience in discernment. They need to witness exorcisms conducted by experienced practitioners.

Most importantly, they need courage. The courage to believe what the Church teaches. The courage to use the authority Christ gave them. The courage to face spiritual evil without flinching.

B. Discernment Over Denial

The Church must return to the classical approach: careful investigation that considers both natural and supernatural explanations.

Not every troubled person is possessed. Most are not. But some are. Discernment distinguishes between them.

This requires patience. It requires consultation with medical professionals. It requires prayer and fasting. It requires testing spirits as Scripture commands.

But it also requires willingness to acknowledge demonic activity when evidence confirms it. Automatic skepticism is as dangerous as automatic credulity. Both lead to error.

C. Restoring the Supernatural Vision

Ultimately, what must be reclaimed is the supernatural worldview that Christianity has always taught.

The world is not neutral. It is contested territory in a cosmic battle between good and evil, between Christ and Satan, between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness.

Souls are prizes in this war. Demons actively seek to destroy human beings. Angels fight to protect them. And the outcome of every human life matters eternally.

This is not superstition. This is reality as Scripture and Tradition reveal it. This is what the Church has always believed until very recently when it lost its nerve.

If we are to help suffering people, we must see the world as it actually is, not as materialist philosophy pretends it is.

Christ still commands demons today. He does it through His Church. If the Church refuses to exercise that authority, the fault is not Christ's. It is ours.

XI. CONCLUSION — THE WAR NEVER ENDED

Picture the contemporary Church: armed with referral lists but not prayers, staffed with therapists but few exorcists, offering psychological comfort but not spiritual confrontation.

This is a Church that has forgotten its commission.

Christ did not ascend to heaven leaving behind a network of pastoral counseling centers. He established a Church with supernatural authority to trample on serpents and scorpions and overcome all the power of the enemy.

He did not die to balance neurotransmitters. He died to crush the serpent's head, to destroy the works of the devil, to liberate captives from the power of darkness.

The war Satan began in Eden continues today. It will not end until Christ returns in glory. Until that day, the Church must fight. Not with modern therapeutic techniques alone, but with the supernatural weapons Christ provided: prayer, sacraments, fasting, and apostolic authority.

Every time a priest refers a genuinely possessed person to a psychiatrist instead of consulting an exorcist, Satan wins. Every time a bishop dismisses possession as medieval superstition, darkness advances. Every time the Church chooses respectability over truth, souls remain imprisoned.

The Church stands at a crossroads. It can continue capitulating to materialist assumptions, embarrassed by its own teachings, preferring psychological explanations to spiritual reality. Or it can reclaim its apostolic heritage, acknowledge the supernatural dimension of human suffering, and exercise the authority Christ gave it.

The answer should be obvious. The only question is whether the Church still has the courage to be Catholic.

Until it does, many will remain imprisoned, properly diagnosed according to secular categories, faithfully medicated according to psychiatric protocols, but never freed. Because the diagnosis was wrong. The problem was not chemical. It was spiritual.

And the solution is not more therapy. It is more faith. Faith enough to believe what Scripture teaches. Faith enough to trust what the Church proclaims. Faith enough to use the authority Christ granted.

Faith enough to say, as Christ said, to the demons tormenting His children:

Be silent and come out.

~by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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