Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  During a few vacations at home on the farm, he walked down to the cemetery where Edward was buried. He sat in the old man’s bedroom. He hiked over to stand in the same place Edward and he had so often visited, and stood in full view of the “Old Man” of Franconia Notch. Once or twice after dinner, he strolled up and down the copse at the west end of the house and thought about Edward. He always felt calm and peaceful in that copse but could not understand why.

  David’s mother, who was always very close to her son and his moods, said briefly to him as he was departing for the seminary after one of those home visits: “David, some things take time. Time. Only time can help. Be patient. With yourself, I mean. And with whatever it is that is bothering you. Remember how many years it took Edward to arrive at his own peace.”

  David was grateful for these words and felt consoled. It was some sort of special message for him. But, again, there was the perplexing character of it: the consolation and the “message” character of her words yielded to no rational explanation. Just as the effect of the copse on him, or the significance of Edward’s last words, or what precisely the possessed man in Paris had conveyed to him, or the strangeness he had discovered in Teilhard. The point was none of his knowledge and scholarship seemed to be of avail. The meanings of all these incidents seemed to flow from some source other than his intellect; they were foreign to his knowledge and his learning. And this disturbed him.

  His students began to notice that the tone and, in part, the content of David’s lectures changed. He was still as unrelenting as ever in his probings of traditional doctrines in the light of modern scientific findings. And he excused in no way traditional presentations of doctrines about creation and Original Sin.

  But a new element caught their attention. “Bones” returned again and again to the data of anthropology and paleontology with phrases they had not heard him use before. “As long as we measure this solely with our rulers and our logical reasoning, we will find no cause for hope,” he might say. Or: “In addition to the scientist’s eye and the theologian’s subtleties, we must have an eye for spirit.” Once he ended a lecture on burial cults in Africa saying, in effect: “But even if you analyze all these data theologically and rationally, you have to be careful. You can do all that faithfully, and yet pass blindly by the one trace of spirit present in the situation.” There seemed to be a note of regret in his tone at such moments.

  Very few people—and this included his students, who generally got to know their professors intimately—very few knew that by this time David had been appointed diocesan exorcist. Father G. had been severely injured in an automobile accident and would never walk again.

  David did not take his new post lightly. In his interview with the bishop when he accepted the post, he tried to get across a curious foreboding to his bishop. “I am changing,” he said. “I mean I am slowly coming to a deep, very deep realization about what I have become over the years. It isn’t that I have gruesome problems. Rather, it’s as if I had neglected something vital and the time is coming when I will have to face it. Exorcisms have the effect of making this need more acute,” he told the bishop.

  “You, Father David, can never stop being useful to the diocese,” was the bishop’s remark.

  “No. Of course not. That is, I hope not. But—” David broke off and looked past the bishop. He had the vaguest premonition. If only he could tie it down in words. “It may be. Bishop, that at the end of a couple of years…” He broke off again and stared out the window. Vaguely he saw the faces of two choices rising up. Yet they made no sense to him. He turned and looked at the bishop. “It may be that I will resign from my teaching job at the seminary.”

  “Let’s take a chance on that,” the bishop answered pleasantly, confidently.

  JONATHAN

  For three weeks in November 1967, David was on leave from the seminary. He was in New York dealing with the strange case of one of his own students, Father Jonathan, born Yves L. in Manchester, New Hampshire. By the time of his excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, Yves had changed his name. He was fourteen years younger than Father David. Like David, he came from an affluent home and, for all practical purposes, was an only child.

  Yves’ father, Romain, was Catholic, French Canadian, originally from Montreal, and a doctor by profession. His mother, Sybil, a convert to Catholicism, was of Swedish parentage. Her first marriage, a childless one, had ended when she was twenty-seven years old, in the suicide of her husband.

  Sybil was over forty and Romain was fifty-two years old when Yves was born. He had one half-brother, Pierre, by his father’s previous marriage in Canada. Pierre’s mother had died giving birth to him. When Yves was born, Pierre was twenty-eight, married, with children of his own, and living in New Jersey.

  Before her first marriage, Sybil had taught in a private Swiss school. She had been educated at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and had a doctorate in philosophy. She emigrated to Canada with her parents in the early 1930s. Yves’ good looks obviously reflected his Swedish ancestry and particularly his mother’s Nordic beauty.

  His childhood was a happy one. Relations and friends who knew all three over many years always remembered how united they were as a family, though some remember the house as too adult and mind-oriented for a little boy. Under his mother’s influence in particular, by the age of nine Yves was reading voraciously; and seven years later, at the year-end examinations, he astounded his school examiners by his detailed knowledge of English and American literature.

  Yves’ mother had a smoldering personality; she always conveyed the impression of deep and somber experiences within her. As with many converts, she was more Catholic than the Catholics themselves.

  His father’s religion was of a more popular and instinctual kind. His youth had been spent in northwest Canada. Later, David was to find out that the earliest images retained by Yves’ father were more or less like David’s own: of rugged nature, gargantuan proportions of sky and mountain and water, unbeatable and often cruel forces in the snow, the storm, the wind, and the inhospitable soil.

  Yves’ parents always remained devoted to one another, but sexual expression of that love stopped when Sybil underwent a hysterectomy after Yves’ birth. Apparently a deep feeling of being wounded or deficient in her femininity took hold of her.

  Romain, on the other hand, entered a religious crisis of acute pain during his wife’s pregnancy. Partly because his wife’s life was endangered by the pregnancy, and partly due to a fleeting affair he had during that time, he developed a constant fear that, because of the sins of his earlier years and the affair during his wife’s pregnancy, he would lose his faith, die an unbeliever, and suffer the loss of eternal life in Heaven.

  Yves never noticed any sign of his father’s agonizing scrupulousness; and he did not realize until much later in life that the marital love of his parents had cooled very early in his childhood. Both parents were outwardly very loving in every way.

  By the time Yves reached his teens, Sybil had become a kind, intelligent, and healthy woman. While no longer attached to what she called the mechanisms of sexuality, she was very aware of her love and sensuality, very graceful in her life, creative, but beyond ambition. Romain was a doctor known for his devotion and skill as well as for his sense of community duty. Father and mother had an unwritten pact of close companionship and intimate care for each other. It created a personal world of utter trust and undisturbed peace.

  All in all, the atmosphere in which Yves grew up and in which he felt secure was an adult one permeated by values he felt more than he understood. Home life was inspired by sentiments he perceived and reproduced but which did not deeply express his own tastes and inclinations. Life with Sybil and Romain gravitated around unseen things that the immature Yves knew best by intuition but could not identify. There was an integrity of person and a graceful style in their living. There was strength of love and a solidity of judgment. But the viewpoint was narrow, too narrow.
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br />   Within that family Yves’ values and personal ties—his parents, his school, his parish ambient, his friends—were held in place by solid moorings. He went to parish schools until he was eighteen. In retrospect, and as far as anyone can remember, there was no difference between him and the other boys of his acquaintance. He was excellent at sports and a very good dancer; he dated local girls, and moonlighted with another boy until they had put enough money together to buy a secondhand car.

  He had only a few serious scrapes with the school authorities. It was never a matter of study—at that he was consistently beyond reproach. But now and then Yves would turn on one of his teachers in full view of the class in a fit of verbal abuse and uncontrollable rage.

  He was always apologetic later, and his obviously sincere regret and winning smile generally had their effect; the school authorities forgave him easily. It probably did not hurt that his father was quite a prominent citizen, and that his mother was an active member of the parish, and that Yves won a state prize every year for his English essay, thus bringing honor to the school. He had a way with words and a touch of the poet that was beyond the ordinary. It helped him in his studies and in his scrapes.

  By sixteen, Yves was an amateur painter, was writing poems to commemorate events at school and at home, was chosen to be his class valedictorian, and genuinely loved literature. By the time he was seventeen, he had decided to become a priest.

  A final school essay written by Yves at the end of his last year reads today like a terrible prediction. In a precocious study of Shelley, Yves wrote: “But with all this beauty, no one can say what it would have done to the poet and the man had he lived beyond the age of thirty. Shelley pioneered a fresh idea of godliness. But it might—we will never know—have been a trap sprung by Job’s Satan or Dante’s Devil.” Yves carried the essay around with him for many years, because he felt that in writing it he had perceived something very profound.

  He owed his decision to become a priest largely to his parents’ influence. Priesthood had been his father’s first ambition in life; and he transmitted this frustrated wish to his son—not as a command or an obligation, but as an ideal. Yves knew from the age of seven that, in his fathers eyes, the priesthood was the best, the highest, the most honorable profession. This is what his father conveyed by look, word, and attitude. His mother’s influence was not so positive. It was more that, by looking down on any other occupation as secondary, she highlighted priesthood as the ideal and the goal.

  The seminary Yves attended was the same one to which two years later Father David M. was posted. Yves was one of many seminarians and did not arouse any particular attention on David’s part. His studies were, as usual, excellent. He had a very fine voice for chanting. He cut an impressive figure in ceremonial robes: over six feet in height, blond-haired, blue-eyed, with hands that were both masculine and beautiful. He was marked by a winsome grace and symmetry of movement; and, above all, he possessed a pair of eyes that radiated a striking luminosity and that had an almost hypnotic effect on people around him.

  For all these reasons, Yves was the ideal actor in the liturgist’s manual and the type for which every preacher’s handbook was written. His knowledge of English and his good writing style helped him in the practice sermons he composed and delivered at the seminary.

  In view of these talents, his interest in art and poetry was forgiven. In the atmosphere of any seminary during the 1950s, there was always a general suspicion of anyone interested in painting and literature—especially poetry. Roman Catholicism of that time regarded such things as “dangerous.” The Church always had had difficulty in governing poets and painters; they sometimes were unwelcome prophets and discomforting commentators.

  But Yves used his gifts well. He kept within the seminary mentality. He was careful, always careful.

  One incident during his seminary years did disturb the authorities briefly. It was 1961. As always with Yves, he quickly overcame it. The occasion was Yves’ final theological examinations, oral ones, conducted by three of his professors and presided over by a fourth, who would, if necessary, step in to arbitrate a dispute or cast a deciding vote in the assigning of grades. Generally, the moderator—as the fourth member of the examining board was called—had no part in the examinations and used the time to read a book or catch up with his correspondence.

  This time the moderator was David. At one point in Yves’ oral examinations, a heated dispute developed between one of the examiners, Father Herlihy, and Yves. Father Herlihy was questioning Yves about the nature of the seven sacraments (baptism, confirmation, marriage, etc.), and he appeared to David to be angry. But it was Yves who drew David’s closest attention—the handsome face drawn and haggard, mouth pulled tight in an obstinate grimace, perspiring forehead, eyes empty of their usual winsomeness. The change, so complete, so rapid, startled David and worried him. He could see none of the accustomed light, but only bitter resentment in Yves’ eyes.

  Yves finally was able to mumble out some sort of answer to Father Herlihy’s questions, and ran quickly from the examination room as soon as time was up.

  In his concern, David went along after the examination to Father Herlihy’s study to discuss in greater detail exactly what had happened between him and Yves.

  Apparently Yves had insisted at one point that all the sacraments were no more than expressions of man’s natural unity with the world around him. According to accepted doctrine, this is heretical. The sacraments are believed to be the supreme means of union with God. Yves’ words had implied that, after his death, Jesus had gone back to nature; and therefore the sacraments were our way of being one with Jesus in the earth, the sky, the sea, and the wide universe.

  With his customary attention to detail, David wanted to know Father Herlihy’s exact impression from Yves’ words. “That was the funny part,” Father Herlihy answered—and David never forgot his next words—“what he said was just foolish; but it was the peculiar sense he communicated to me; I seemed to be listening to something not quite human—I know it sounds foolish.”

  Afterward, David had deep qualms about the whole matter. In part, he blamed himself: he felt that his own lectures on creation and on the origin of man had something to do with Yves’ reaction. Yves could have wrongly interpreted the Teilhardian doctrines David taught. With only a thin and fragile line between Teilhard’s view and a total denial of divinity in Jesus, Teilhardian concepts were delicious mental playthings that could—David saw clearly for the first time—be used to exalt man as an animal, to make his world into a gilded menagerie, to reduce Jesus to the status of a Christian hero as grandly noble and as pitifully mortal as Prometheus in the Greek myth, and to picture God as no more than the very bowels of earth and sky and the spatial distances of the universe with all its expanding galaxies.

  The incident continued to disturb David. Yves had conveyed merely by his looks during the exchange with Father Herlihy a sort of inner savagery and hate that David felt was out of kilter with Yves’ normal demeanor. David had an instinctive suspicion of such sudden and dramatic breaks in the normal patterns of behavior. Perhaps it was merely a bad moment—and everyone has such moments. But if not, then that winning exterior and compatible behavior Yves ordinarily displayed must mask something else, some inner condition of spirit and bent of mind that no amount of seminary training had touched.

  However, there the matter rested. The end of the school year was on them. Three weeks later Yves, with eleven others, was ordained to the priesthood. David himself was scheduled to leave for a vacation at home on the family farm, and then to proceed to Mexico City for an international conference of anthropologists. The incident was quickly forgotten for the time being.

  When the summer was over. Yves was posted as assistant to an outlying parish of Manchester. He was near his hometown and within calling distance of his parents. For Yves’ mother the new appointment was providential. Early in the new year, Yves’ father, Romain, died suddenly from a heart attack. S
he would have been quite alone if Yves had not been posted to Manchester.

  Yves’ memory of the time span between September i960 and January 1967 is clear and full of details. His recollections of 1967 are incomplete but still helpful in reconstructing what happened to him. From April 1968, when David made a first attempt to exorcise the evil spirit possessing Yves, until March 1970, when David concluded the exorcism, Yves’ memory has large gaps. But his recollections, the notes and memories of David, together with the transcript of his exorcism contribute mightily to create a whole picture, a photomontage of how satanic possession started in one individual, gained ground, progressed continuously, and finally became as total as we can imagine it ever to be.

  Possession by the spirit of evil proceeds along the structure of day-to-day life. In Yves’ case, it used the priestly structure of his life, appearing first of all in the way he administered the Sacrament of Marriage, then in the way he said Mass, and finally in all his priestly activities.

  In the Sacrament of Ordination, it is the whole man who is “priested.” He does not simply acquire an extra function. He is not endowed with merely a new faculty or granted a rare permission. Rather, it is a new dimension of his spirit which necessarily affects all he does bodily and mentally. Any deformation of that dimension by the introduction of some antipathetic or utterly foreign element spells disturbance and trouble. The dimension of priesthood cannot be removed or replaced; it can be degraded, neglected, distorted.

  Yves took up his duties in St. Declan’s parish with apparent gusto. The work was not overwhelming. He had plenty of time for his own occupations. The parish bordered on the countryside; he had a view of the southeast from one window of his study and of the west from another. He rapidly became popular as a preacher in the parish, as a counselor for its younger members, and as a welcome visitor in the homes of the parishioners. At no time was there ever any question of his probity; he had no desire to accumulate wealth; he drank seldom; and those who knew him have always asserted that there was never in him the slightest deviation from his vow of celibacy. “A grand young priest” was the general judgment and impression.