What the Church Actually Teaches About Demons: A Catholic Demonology — and Everything It Does Not Say

Most of what frightens you is not Catholic teaching. It is folklore, private revelation that was never doctrine, nineteenth-century occultism, and - for the last fifty years, overwhelmingly - film. This book takes it apart, using the Church's own sources, and shows how little is >What the Church teaches fits in about five paragraphs of the Catechism and one clause from a council in 1215: the devil and the other demons were created by God naturally good, and became evil by their own doing. A creature. Made. Finite. And, in the Catechism's own words, possessing a power that however >What the Church does not teach is longer, and it is where most of the fear lives. He cannot read your mind. He cannot compel your will - the rite of exorcism itself assumes a possessed person retains free will. Objects are not switches. Misfortune is not evidence. And the Church warns explicitly against >INSIDE What Scripture actually says, including the verse where the archangel Michael, in direct confrontation with the devil, declines to rebuke him on his own authority. Aquinas on why the angelic choice is irrevocable, and why yours is not. The difference between ordinary action, which is happening to everyone, and extraordinary action, which is rare. The Church's own protocol - medical, psychological and psychiatric examination before anyone is referred to an >And two chapters most books on this subject leave out. One on scrupulosity - the disorder of conscience the Church has recognized for centuries, and its overlap with a condition modern medicine treats successfully. If you have read four books on demons this year, that chapter is >One on the witch trials, in which a Catholic theology faculty condemned the Malleus Maleficarum in 1490, its author was denounced by the Inquisition, and a Spanish inquisitor investigating seven thousand accusations concluded there >THERE ARE NO NAMES IN THIS BOOK No hierarchies, no seals, no invocations, no rituals. Chapter eleven explains why, using Canon 1172 and the 1985 instruction in which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith asked bishops to prevent gatherings where demons are >Chapter thirteen is the strongest case against this book. Not therapy. Not a diagnosis. If you are frightened, the first page tells you exactly what to do, and it is not to keep reading.