I once had a friend…

(amazing, I know). Anyway, I once had a friend who was not particularly religious, but she had a dream in which she encountered, if memory serves, a vampire. Curiously, her response was relief, because she reasoned that if such supernatural evil existed, then God must exist too. She was strangely consoled by it.

I think of that as I open my mail and, rifling through the various “please review my books” emails, find this:

I wanted to follow up on a book I sent you that leads readers on an unprecedented journey into the world of exorcism and leaves them with a profound sense of faith. THE RITE: The Making of a Modern Exorcist (Doubleday; On sale 3/10/09; Hardcover) follows Father Gary Thomas as he is trained by the Catholic Church to become an exorcist and, in doing so, reconnects to the traditions of his faith and sees firsthand the healing power of prayer.

Prior to his training, Father Gary knew little about exorcism and was surprised to discover that, rather than being a subject on the fringe of faith, the practice held a strong pastoral element. Participating in more than eighty exorcisms on the road to becoming one of the few Vatican-approved exorcists in America today, Father Gary rediscovered fundamental Christian doctrine. Touched by the deep suffering he witnessed, he nonetheless saw that even though evil existed in the world there was a way to defeat it.

THE RITE also delves deeply into related topics such as the history of exorcism, the teachings of the Church on angels and free will, and a host of other subjects including satanic cults, curses, and the various theories used by modern scientists and anthropologists who seek to quantify such phenomena.

Father Basil Cole, O.P., Professor of Moral and Spiritual Theology of the Pontifical Faculty at the Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C., considers THE RITE “…a wake-up call. It smashes the many myths created by Hollywood movies and other amateurs on the subject about exorcism and the role of the exorcist in the Catholic Church.”

The author, Matt Baglio, experienced his own internal revelation while writing the book, saying that the journey turned him from being a “cultural” Catholic back to a practicing one. A reporter living in Rome, Matt Baglio has written for the Associated Press and the International Herald Tribune.

I once heard a rousing sermon from a black Pentecostal pastor, who recounted an incident in which he and several other local pastors were asked to come pray over a little old lady whose family was concerned she was “possessed.” One of the pastors was a mainline Protestant sort who reflexively assumed that all such things are attributable to natural causes of one sort or another.

They went to the house, and prayed for the woman. In the midst of the prayer, she (a rather wizened and frail little old lady) reached back over her shoulders, grabbed the pastor who was standing behind her, and lifted him off the ground.

“That sort of thing changes your theology,” the Pentecostal pastor observed drily.

Chesterton once said that the next best thing to being really inside the Christian tradition is being really outside it. I don’t recommend *attempting* to encounter radical demonic evil. But I do suspect that, for some people, such encounters are permitted by God (as he permits all evil) in order to send us fleeing toward the Light.