Exorcism: Embarassment or Uncomfortable Reality?

Exorcism and other marginal areas of Catholic belief [and those of some other Christian beliefs] have always been an embarassment in polite company, not the sort of thing one discusses in post-modern trendy discourse.

However, my on-again, off-again Catholic practice [as of now re-relapsed] has allowed me to meet one witness and even two practitioners of the craft of exorcism.
For five years I studied as a Jesuit novice and studied at St. Louis U's Philosophate. As a novice, I had lunch with a possible relative [we share the same last name] Jesuit priest who taught Theology at Mundelein in Chicago and was the Archdiocesan Exorcist. He only told me that there are a lot of things that he's seen that he didn't want to talk about.

At St. Louis U, the brilliant "Daddy Wade" was a sparkling philosophy teacher whose Jesuit past had included the soon-to-be-famous case in Mt. Rainier MD which moved to suburban St. Louis. Fr. Wade, SJ, was a deacon in the late '40s when he participated in the St. Louis site where the exorcism was finally completely. Wade told me and some other Jesuit wannabes that when he carried the bottle of holy water for the ritual, it flew out of his hands, through a screen door, up a flight of stairs, did a 180degree turn and smashed against the door of the room where the afflicted child lay in bed. Wade said something like "...don't know about the devil, but I sure know about the power of holy water!"

It seems that the Jesuits handled this particularly grisly episode which began at Georgetown U. and ended in St. Louis U., both Jesuit schools. The kid who was exorcised graduated from Gonzaga High in D.C., an excellent Jesuit high school. The author Peter Blatty was a Georgetown grad.

Strangely, when I saw the movie in Denver CO, I came back out to the snow-filled parking lot and found a near-perfect representation of the fist-sized so-called "idol" lying next to my car---it was a red squeeze-doll for dogs, but looked exactly like the small accursed object in the movie. Synchronicity, I thought, as I was in a Jungian phase at the time.

While I was living in Europe working for the State Dept, another FSO told me she was in a church in southern Italy where she claimed---she was not Catholic---to have seen a possessed person vomiting a gigantic pile of nails onto the floor. Onlookers told her this afflicted person would climb walls and even across the ceiling of the church!

I myself was walking the streets of Sana in North Yemen in the '70s when I came across a small crowd watching a young boy biting his hand and moaning. I asked the onlookers and they told me the boy was "majnuun," [the Arab word for 'bejinned' or possessed.]

Whatever the cumulative result of the above, I still have a vaguely credulous feeling about the "miracles" and other supernatural or at least paranormal phenomena of the world which post-modernists attribute to mental perceptions and not to reality, which they claim to have a monopoly on.

Like Daddy Wade, I may not believe completely in Satan, but have to wonder about the power of holy water!