In this episode of the John Henry Weston Show, host J. Henry Weston sits down with Dan Schneider to discuss demonic possession, exorcism, and spiritual warfare. Dr. Schneider is an adjunct professor of theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville and author of The Liber Christo Method, a field manual for spiritual combat.
00:10:10.560So you learn, you learn to, to, to, to, to really grind out the spiritual life, fasting, weekly confession.
00:10:18.520Very, very critical because that, that, that, those, those stories do happen on occasion.
00:10:23.380So I guess that gives an answer to my next question, because there are a lot of people who believe, eh, you know, possession, okay, whatever.
00:10:53.680I mean, and part of the genius of the protocol of Father Ripperger is that it does bring some objectivity to it, but, but it's, it's hard to deny what your senses have seen.
00:11:02.820Before we started the, the early, early on, we would do a more Roman model where the late, the late associates would, would hold, you know, and, and now we just, if the husband's present, the, the prayers of the laying of the hands of the husband is usually, if it's a woman, it's usually sufficient.
00:11:17.440Or vice versa, because the authority of the husband over the wife, but one of the earlier cases, um, that really woke it up for me was, uh, I was in charge of the right arm, okay.
00:11:29.000And so, and so I had learned about, you know, we're, you know, when we were training with Father Ripperger and his guys, it's, you know, St. Michael and the Blessed Mother, St. Michael and the Blessed Mother.
00:11:37.860And so it was, it was that this particular case, it was taking a half a dozen or more men to hold this, this young lady down and it wasn't working.
00:11:48.680Again, the protocol has eliminated a lot of that, but this is what we did.
00:11:52.920And so I was holding the left arm and I said, uh, you know, I'm going to say my, I'm getting punched and scratched and trying to hit me, trying to hit the priest.
00:12:48.720And the fingers, I was like, you're kidding me.
00:12:52.360I'm like, I'm a little slow on the uptake, but I get it.
00:12:55.900St. Michael, subdue her left arm, her left wrist, her left hand, and her fingers.
00:13:01.060And I was at the time, I was studying about the power of the mystical body, the intercession of St. Michael, the importance of specificity and prayer.
00:13:07.720All of that was summed up in a 30-second exchange after getting punched and scratched.
00:13:13.940And I realized I'm in way over my head.
00:13:17.500St. Michael, subdue her left arm, her left wrist, her left hand, and her fingers.
00:13:21.460And from that point on, I just sat and just prayed quietly the rest of the time.
00:13:24.980But that was – those are the little nuggets that you get.
00:13:27.120But you start to see that, again, what the devil does, as Father Rupert says, it's quite boring and predictable in many ways.
00:13:35.260What's most fascinating is to see the power of the church, the power of the mystical body, the power of the priesthood, the power of the invocation of the litany of saints, particularly the Virgin Mary, in combat.
00:13:46.520This is what really deepens – this made my understanding – my ecclesiology has been radically purified through an existing priest in here.
00:13:56.680Even holding up a picture of the bishop, any bishop, the bishop of that diocese, and the priest says, all right, hold that picture.
00:14:03.540And the priest commands, I command you to look at the eyes of the Prince of the Apostles in this diocese to see a trembling, a bodily trembling from a demon just looking at the picture.
00:14:16.040You can put your or my picture up there, and nobody would be afraid.
00:14:30.360You might not like his politics, but the demon recognizes the authority where it comes from.
00:14:34.540These types of incidents have really purified my own understanding of the church and the beauty and glory of the church.
00:14:39.940And I try not to get drawn into some of the negativity of the church because I see this just distracts us from the reality, how the demon sees the church and how the angels see the church, how the saints interact with us as the totus Christus, as St. Augustine calls us, the whole Christ, the head body members, the mystical body, the church militant, the church suffering, the church triumphant.
00:15:03.600And how that comes to bear in this particular apostle, it's really fascinating for me intellectually as well experientially.
00:17:20.780But when it comes to the specificity, this is where we defeat him by being specific.
00:17:26.880So, part of the manual is teaching people to be specific in how they confess, being specific in the way they confess the sins, being specific in overcoming whatever defects that's allowing the enemy to manipulate you.
00:17:43.460You know, if you can name it, you can tame it.
00:17:45.420So, you have to identify the defects, identify the spirits behind the defects so that you can tame those.
00:17:49.840But being specific is critical in combat.
00:17:51.460And it goes back to, again, our own causality that God has given us as members of his body.
00:22:00.140So there's a real interplay that gets ignored in many models of exorcism that is embedded because of Father Ripperger's background and Timist's psychology.
00:22:07.600It really addresses the psychological and deals with that as the human person, as the whole person.
00:22:15.000So one of the things that is done or was done a lot was the sort of opposite approach of basically saying everything is a psychological disorder.
00:22:27.080Possession, does it ever happen at all?
00:22:31.820But just for argument's sake, well, we have to go through, you know, years and years and years of testing to make sure we've eliminated every possibility of psychological ailment before we even think about an exorcism.
00:23:15.200And so there's a danger on both, on both of those instances.
00:23:18.420So part of our protocol is working with the psychological and identifying actually those areas of trauma, those areas of psychological wounds, anything that's lingering, because those are areas of vulnerability.
00:23:31.920So it isn't just defects and virtue and moral defects.
00:23:37.100That needs to be addressed in the confessional.
00:23:39.440But before we go to prayer, we have to get separation.
00:23:42.260It's one of the stages of liberation is separation.
00:23:44.560And so getting that psychological separation is very important for the lay team to work with.
00:23:53.280It helps you to identify psychologically areas that you've created that are creating a symbiotic attraction and a psychological compatibility, because those have to be worked through so that you can get the separation from requisite for liberation.
00:24:06.200And so part of the protocol is built in, is identifying, yeah, this is psychological, you've got to work with it.
00:24:12.240I've had cases that are like, my gosh, I mean, there's all sorts of witchcraft in this family.
00:24:18.540They've got all these problems, and she's getting all these things.
00:24:24.280And then at the end of the day, it's just psychological.
00:24:39.480This is why we apply the same rigor to each person and to try to get some, again, objectivity and let the human side come out so we can start to see where this is.
00:24:51.740We've had cases, you know, people that were, we had a guy that was one of the children of the 12 founding fathers, the 12, a quorum of 12 of Mormonism.
00:25:04.560And a lot of those guys, they're all Freemasons.
00:25:07.100And this thing looked like, man, it was just going to be this terrible case.
00:27:12.360So if you have a certain disposition, certain, you know, the devil looks for the mouse that blesses and curses.
00:27:21.540And so, you know, so if he sees these inconsistencies in your behavior, in your speech, in your own, if you rebel against authority in your life, you haven't dealt with your father wound, so-called.
00:27:35.640You have psychological behavior that's very attractive because he's got a father wound.
00:27:42.420How could you have let me make this bad decision and be for eternity damned?
00:27:46.740How could you, you know, if you rebel against authority, if you badmouth the church and you badmouth the hierarchy of the church and you commit, you know, slander, detraction, whatever.
00:27:56.160You're doing the same, you have that same attitude towards the church as the devil does it.
00:28:01.060So you got to be very careful and work on that detachment so you can start to see, oh, that's diabolic projection.
00:28:07.500I'm not saying we're not, we don't continue to actually work to purify the church.
00:28:16.560So a lot of folks from backgrounds that are in the military find a very much easier time in the spiritual life and are asked to do sometimes very difficult things like you were, partly because of your military background, because of the order that puts into your life.
00:29:19.080When I was in seminary, I was reading a book by Henry Nouwen.
00:29:22.820He talked about a nuclear man, you know, and people who grew up in the 1980s were kind of formed by that immediate and constant threat of nuclear annihilation.
00:29:33.460My generation has grown up, you know, under the specter of priestly sexual abuse.
00:29:41.680What say you, Mr. Foreperson, is the defendant guilty or not guilty?
00:29:45.700I think that for many of us, that has also been all-encompassing.
00:29:50.560You know, I mean, I entered the seminary in January of 2004, and it's basically been there for me from the beginning.
00:29:57.920One priest's sacrifice for many priestly sins.
00:31:56.560If you talk to people that you respect as Catholics, and I bet I would list off several things that you do every day that I don't have to ask.
00:32:03.520You're probably consecrated to the Virgin Mary.
00:37:22.360What it means is the husband – the implication of this word is you take your wife and your children, you put them behind you, and you hold your shield up.
00:37:30.220You're the first to make contact with the enemy.
00:39:10.460What he says is does he have authority in his house?
00:39:12.520Does he have authority over the person, the place, or the object?
00:39:14.620And so when you stay within that, the demon – part of the ground, the spade work, really, of the deliverance ministry is asserting those authority, the rights of the soul through the authority structure and asserting those rights back.
00:39:33.380And so the man is the first contact in the home, right?
00:39:36.700And so that – following that authority structure is very, very critical in spiritual combat.
00:40:32.000I'm going to take this a step further because it's – it is an area of great contention, but it's also, I think, underlies so much of the battle that Our Lady promised through Sister Lucy would be the final battle, a decisive battle between our Lord and the reign of Satan.
00:40:48.560I quoted that in the opening of the book, yeah.
00:42:35.200This is a common misunderstanding today that kind of was an infusion from Protestant ecclesiology kind of by way of more of a charismatic ecclesiology, that it's through charism, and it's not.
00:43:21.360Just like when I asked St. Michael to subdue the left arm for me and then the wrist and then the hand.
00:43:26.660And when the husband engages in that way and the wife in union with him, this is how you clean the home up.
00:43:32.640I've had people listen to our podcast and other things that we're doing, and they say, man, my, you know, I had my son was just staying in his room playing video games, and he kept smoking pot.
00:43:43.820And I started praying these prayers as authority of head of household.
00:43:47.960I bind any demon tempting my son and start asserting themselves in the cosmic realm.
00:43:54.160He said within two weeks, it cleared off.
00:44:36.020So first of all, any final thoughts for us?
00:44:40.380Because I want people to know where they can get your book and where they can listen to your podcast, because this is such a fascinating topic.
00:44:56.100And so my parish, just Joe Parrish priest.
00:44:59.040And as I was watching him take down all the altar and put everything away, and I was just alone praying, and I realized, I'm going to write for that guy.
00:45:57.040And so I wrote it that for the average Catholic, Dominion and Father's Book on Mental Health, The Science of Mental Health, these are very huge books.
00:46:07.440I've sat this on my stand to read, and it's like watching, like having to eat a frog.
00:47:21.460He didn't want anything to do with Catholicism, but he finally said, fine, I'll do these stupid prayers, and I'll read this stupid book, and I'll go through it with this couple, one of the – Father Ripperter's team couples.
00:47:32.020So they were walking this guy through it.
00:47:36.280And so I use a lot of military analogies in there.
00:47:39.760And as guerrilla – spiritual warfare is guerrilla warfare, and I talk about Rogers Rangers and Army Rangers.
00:47:45.100And so he gets two or three lessons in.
00:47:48.380And he shows up at this parish and says – the parish priest and says, I want you to hear my confession, and I want it to be received in the Catholic Church after three lessons.
00:47:58.520And so the priest actually used this manual to supplement, and he did some supplementation, and he was received in the church in three or four months.
00:48:06.540So it isn't just a manual for spiritual combat.
00:48:09.080This is a catechetical book on how to go deeper into the Catholic faith.
00:48:13.760And I've kind of condensed Father Ripperter's larger books into a more functional way, into 12 lessons.
00:48:24.680Imagine just understanding as a parent the real ways to spiritually take authority and help expel demons from your own children and under your family home.