Francis Young on Witchcraft and the Modern Roman Catholic Church

Francis Young on Witchcraft and the Modern Roman Catholic Church – Witch Hunt

This episode examines what connects witchcraft, possession, exorcism and the modern Roman Catholic Church, with special guest, Dr. Francis Young, esteemed folklorist, author and historian in the field of religion and belief. Dr. Young guides us through the intricate world of Catholic demonology, shedding light on the complex relationship between witchcraft and demonic possession. Exploring the dichotomy between official doctrine and popular beliefs, we touch on the cultural and regional variations in belief and practice among Catholics globally. Dr. Young's insightfully provided a fascinating explanation on how diverse interpretations of these phenomena manifest within different communities. We explore the risks of exorcism, examining the tragic case of Annaliese Michel and its lasting impact on the church's approach to these rites. As the episode unfolds, we contemplate future navigation of witchcraft and exorcism. Join us as we continue the message and questions: Why do we witch hunt? How do we witch hunt? How do we stop hunting witches?LinksDrFrancisYoung.comSign the MA Witch Hunt Justice Project PetitionJoin One of Our ProjectsSupport Us! Buy Book Titles Mentioned in this Episode from our Book ShopSupport Us! Sign up as a Super ListenerEnd Witch Hunts Movement Support Us! Buy Witch Trial Merch!Support Us! Buy Podcast Merch!Join us on Discord to share your ideas and feedback.WebsiteTwitterFacebookInstagramPinterestLinkedInYouTubeTikTokDiscordSupport the show — Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/witchhunt/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/witchhunt/support

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Transcript

Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.

Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. We have an intriguing episode for you.

Josh Hutchinson: In this episode, we speak with Francis Young, author of Witchcraft and the Modern Roman Catholic Church.

Sarah Jack: We'll explore how the field of Catholic demonology has transformed since its dogmatic definition in the 13th century, leading to a more structured understanding of demonology.

Josh Hutchinson: We'll delve into the ethical and moral concerns surrounding exorcism. Dr. Young illuminates the potential risks and dilemmas inherent in this ancient practice, highlighting the importance of preserving human dignity and avoiding harm.

Sarah Jack: We'll also touch on the structural and hierarchical approach of the church to exorcism, a system designed to ensure caution [00:01:00] and respect for the gravity of these rituals.

Josh Hutchinson: Our journey will also cover the impact of the charismatic movement and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s on the church's approach to these supernatural practices.

Sarah Jack: Cultural and regional variations in beliefs and practices around witchcraft and demonology present unique challenges, as we'll discuss exploring how the church navigates these diverse interpretations.

Josh Hutchinson: A crucial aspect of our conversation was the tension between skepticism and belief. We'll revisit how the church balances these opposing forces, especially in a modern context where both extremes present challenges.

Sarah Jack: The legal and canonical framework governing exorcism within the church is another point we'll explore, understanding how these laws shape the practice today.

Josh Hutchinson: We'll also reflect on some controversial cases of exorcism and how they've influenced the church's stances and practices regarding demonology.

Sarah Jack: We'll [00:02:00] conclude with a forward-looking discussion on the church's future approach to witchcraft and exorcism, considering the global diversity of beliefs and practices.

Sarah Jack: I'm thrilled to introduce Dr. Francis Young, a UK based historian and folklorist specializing in the history of religion and belief. He's authored and edited and coauthored over 20 books, noteworthy for his authoritative insights into early modern English Catholicism, monastic history, and history of exorcism and magic. You will want to stay in the loop with his work and musings on Twitter, @drfrancisyoung.

Francis Young: So I'm Francis Young. I'm a historian of religion and belief. I've written a number of books on the subject of the history of supernatural belief, and several of those do touch on the subject of witchcraft. My most recent book, which is really relevant to the subject of witchcraft, and in particular belief in witchcraft in the modern world, is Witchcraft and the Modern Roman Catholic [00:03:00] Church, which came out in 2022.

Sarah Jack: What do we need to know about defining witchcraft?

Francis Young: The question of defining witchcraft, I think, is an almost notoriously difficult question. There are some scholars today who would almost give up, when it comes to defining witchcraft and say that, witchcraft is whatever people who consider themselves to be witches do, or it is whatever people who are accused by others of being witches are said to do.

Francis Young: I think for the purposes of the book that I mentioned about the modern Roman Catholic Church's engagement with the issue of witchcraft, I took the view that a definition needs to be established which isn't necessarily completely watertight from an objective point of view, but is a definition that corresponds to the way the Roman Catholic Church treats the idea of witchcraft.[00:04:00]

Francis Young: And so, on that basis, the definition I went for was instances where a human being is said to have caused some kind of supernatural evil to someone, or channeled some kind of supernatural evil, as distinct from the very ancient belief in the Christian church that the devil is active in the world, or demons are active in the world, and cause things like demonic possession and demonic vexation and so forth, without the intermediary of human beings.

Francis Young: So when that kind of stuff is said to involve a human agent, Then, broadly speaking, we're talking about what might be termed witchcraft, but that's just a working definition based on the way the Catholic Church has engaged with this.

Josh Hutchinson: And would that definition apply both to the clergy's official position and what the members view as [00:05:00] witchcraft?

Francis Young: I mean, yes, you're right to raise that distinction, because it really is a crucial distinction between popular Catholicism and official Catholicism. And my book is really focused exclusively on official attitudes. And what I mean by that is the pronouncements of popes, the pronouncements of official documents that have been ratified by the Vatican, the views of bishops and the exorcists that have been appointed by diocesan bishops. Now as soon as you get into the writings of exorcists, you do start to tip over into the personal. Personal views of exorcists are expressed in their writings, as well as any kind of official positions taken by the church hierarchy.

Francis Young: But to explore what Catholics on the ground actually think about witchcraft is, beyond my skill set, that would [00:06:00] require the work of multiple anthropologists, so it's not something which I've focused on for that reason. But, nevertheless, the views that the hierarchy, the views that those who are officially or semi officially authorized to deal with questions of witchcraft, what that gives rise to is some kind of interaction and some kind of compromise and some kind of give and take between popular Catholicism, popular religion, and the officially sanctioned views. But that is a huge source of tension in the Roman Catholic Church's attitude to witchcraft.

Sarah Jack: What is Catholic demonology?

Francis Young: So demonology is a branch of theology which can be traced back really to the Fourth Lateran Council. So in 1215, we have a council, an ecumenical council, held in the Lateran, and the crucial decree of that council which creates the discipline of demonology in [00:07:00] a formal way is the decree stating, dogmatically defining effectively, that Satan was once an angel of light who rebelled against God, and as a result of that, he and the angels who served him fell from heaven and became the demons in hell. So this doctrine of Satan as a fallen angel. Now that's not to say that Catholics didn't believe that before that point, but it hadn't been dogmatically defined. It had almost been a sort of extra biblical aspect of kind of Christian legend, but it becomes defined in 1215.

Francis Young: And what that leads to is theologians like Thomas Aquinas developing their explanations of how demons operate, how the devil operates. Aquinas writes a text called De Malo on Evil, which is one of the key texts in this regard. And, whereas there had previously been angelology, so the study of angels, the [00:08:00] study of spiritual beings that were deemed morally good, that's the flip side of that suddenly develops and you get the development of demonology and a sort of science of, a science of demons.

Francis Young: Now demonology can exist in two forms. It can be purely theoretical, so it can be a kind of inverse angelology studying the nature and behavior of demons, or it can be what I term practical demonology, and practical demonology is the idea that you'll get professionals such as exorcists, would be the most obvious example of that, who will actually derive information about what they believe to be the spiritual world, the evil spiritual world of demons from exorcisms, so from the behavior of demoniacs, from people who are supposedly possessed. Or indeed, of course, in the Middle Ages, you're talking about people like Sprenger and Kramer, the authors of the Malleus [00:09:00] Maleficarum, they are also deriving information about the demonic world from the confessions of people who have been accused of witchcraft. So there are these two aspects of demonology, the kind of the theoretical and the practical.

Josh Hutchinson: In understanding how demonology is practically executed through exorcisms. do we need to know anything about the ranks of the clergy in the Catholic church? Who does the exorcist work for and where do they get their leadership and ideas from?

Francis Young: Yes, I think it's quite important to understand that exorcism is a legal proceeding, effectively, within the Church. It's something which is governed by canons, by the laws of the Church, and there's a very good reason for that, which is that in the early Church, exorcism was a charismatic ministry that was exercised by those who felt called to it, who believed that they in and of themselves were possessed of some kind of, particular [00:10:00] gifting from the spirit that they felt able to exorcise where others couldn't. And of course, that's something which goes right the way back to the Acts of the Apostles, the New Testament.

Francis Young: Clearly, the existence of such people who claim to have special gifts within the church represents a threat to any church which is founded on the basis of hierarchy. Because hierarchy needs to be the source of authority, not charismatic inspiration. And the way that exorcism has developed, it's not been eliminated within the Catholic Church, but it has developed in a highly structured, hierarchical way. The Code of Canon Law, which was last codified in 1983, lays down that the ordinary minister of exorcism, that is to say, the person who is entrusted with this ministry within the Church is the bishop, but the bishop is not, unless in exceptional circumstances, actually going to perform exorcisms [00:11:00] himself, and so it therefore falls to the bishop to delegate to a priest or priests, but usually just one within his diocese, the ministry of exorcist. Now that is a ministry that the priest can only exercise on the authority of the bishop. He has no personal authority to exercise that ministry. Priests don't individually have any authority to do that, unless authorized to do so by the bishop. And indeed, if a priest is going to perform what's known as a major exorcism, a major exorcism being the exorcism of a person believed to be possessed, then he also has to have the specific and explicit permission of the bishop in order to do that.

Francis Young: So while a priest who is authorized as an exorcist can take it upon himself to do certain things, such as, for example, house blessings, to go around and, help those who believe that they are under [00:12:00] some kind of demonic vexation, that, their things go bump in the night, their house is haunted, that sort of thing. That he can do without consulting the bishop. But if it comes down to the point of actually performing an exorcism on somebody who is possessed, then the bishop has to give particular clearance for that to take place.

Francis Young: And in recent years, certainly since, in the last 20 years or so, I think it was founded in 2005, the International Association of Exorcists in Rome has given training to exorcists. And in some cases that's provided in Rome for priests who are appointed to the ministry of exorcist and journey to Rome in order to be trained. Or, as well, The International Association of Exorcists has kind of subsidiary groups affiliated with it that will administer that training in other parts of the world. And that's an attempt to regularize the ministry and to ensure that it's done in [00:13:00] broadly the same way around the world.

Sarah Jack: And, there's a rubric that's followed, or the rites of exorcism?

Francis Young: Yes, that's right. So there is a rite of exorcism that was approved in 1999, and that replaced the ancient rite of exorcism, which goes back to 1614. That was the exorcism of the Council of Trent. So, you know, anybody who's watched the film, the Exorcist, what you'll see there is the old Rite of exorcism from 1614 that remained in force right the way from 1614 up to 1999, when a new liturgy was promulgated. Now that liturgy has in turn been translated into English and other languages. It was only translated into English in 2017, so it's only since 2017 that it's been possible for Catholics to have exorcisms in English. Before that point they were all in Latin, and of course it still can take place in Latin.

Francis Young: But that liturgy is [00:14:00] accompanied by rules, essentially, guidelines for how it's to be used. And these are known as the praenotanda. And one of these praenotanda, number 15, is the one which is crucial to determining the modern church's attitude towards witchcraft, because it talks about people who might come to the exorcist and say, so and so has cursed me, so and so has cast the evil eye on me,so and so is trying to supernaturally cause me harm. And the instruction given in Praenotandum 15 is that is not to be accepted as a legitimate reason for exorcism, and such beliefs are to be discouraged as essentially false belief. So there is in theory, therefore, a sort of, I wouldn't say a ban, but there is in theory a, guidance which would indicate that exorcisms in response to a belief in witchcraft shouldn't take place.

Francis Young: Now, does that mean that [00:15:00] the Church actually teaches that such a thing as witchcraft isn't possible? No. I don't think that it should be taken in quite such a strong sense. But it does indicate a tradition which is rather skeptical of the idea of witchcraft. But having said that, when this rite was translated into the various languages, in each case, the bishops conference of the country for which it was translated added a set of interpretative documents, which effectively say how they think those bishops in that country think that this particular rite should be used within the cultural context of that country. And so within certain cultural contexts, but for instance in countries in Africa, there is much more of an emphasis on the possibility of witchcraft, whereas in other contexts, so for example, the French Bishop's Conference totally rule out any possibility that there could be, any [00:16:00] response to belief in witchcraft. So there is great variation across the world in the way in which these, these guidelines are implemented.

Josh Hutchinson: And what is the relationship between witchcraft and demonic possession?

Francis Young: Yeah, that's an interesting question. The idea of demonic possession is far older than the idea of malefic witchcraft, that is to say, the idea that people in league with the devil are causing harm, which, within the context of Christianity, is a belief that really only dates from the late Middle Ages. It's a newcomer, to the scene, really, compared to many of the beliefs in Christianity. The belief in demonic possession of course goes way, way back to, the New Testament, back to ancient Judaism. Indeed, all the way back to the ancient Near East more generally. In fact, I think some of the earliest writing that we have in the world relates to exorcisms of ghosts and things like that [00:17:00] from Mesopotamia. So that's a very old belief.

Francis Young: And the idea that there is a connection between witchcraft and possession is something which doesn't really happen until the early modern period, doesn't turn up until the 16th and 17th centuries. And I think there's one major reason why the idea of witchcraft becomes popular as an explanatory tool for explaining why people are experiencing what they think are the symptoms of demonic possession. Because the traditional view was that the devil has power over people through their sin, and therefore, if somebody commits a sin, the likelihood is that they might be possessed by the devil or vexed by the devil in some way. But cases occurred in the early modern period when apparently innocent people were experiencing these symptoms. And so witchcraft effectively serves an explanatory role to account for innocent people experiencing demonic possession and [00:18:00] vexation.

Francis Young: So in other words, a human agent gets involved and projects demonic power, sends the devil, if you like, to go and annoy somebody, or indeed, in some cases, to possess that person. So the idea of bewitchment becomes elided with the idea of demonic possession, and by the 17th century, these things are almost totally elided. And in fact, you've got, people who are engaging, practical demonologists, whatever you want to call them, who are simultaneously engaging in a ministry of exorcism, but also what Is effectively a ministry of witch finding. And so these two things become very intimately linked, but it's quite a late development.

Josh Hutchinson: What is behind the revival of interest in witchcraft and possession?

Francis Young: This is something which I have coined a term for, in my book, which is neodemonology, and this is a movement which I see within the Roman Catholic Church, and particularly [00:19:00] within this kind of professional cadre of exorcists, which begins really in the 1980s. And it's, in part, a reaction to the skeptical atmosphere of the 1960s and 70s, when many Catholic theologians were moving away from the idea of any kind of theological engagement with the demonic, the reality of the demonic.

Francis Young: You had theologians like Herbert Haag writing his book, Farewell to the Devil,denying the personal reality of the devil and so forth. So it's in part, it's a kind of conservative backlash, a reaction to that. In part, it is something which grows out of the slightly paranoid Catholicism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which we might associate with Leo XIII and his writings on Freemasonry and his belief in Satanic conspiracies, which feeds into a particular [00:20:00] event in the 1980s, which is the Satanic Panic.

Francis Young: And I think that the Satanic Panic was hugely influential, clearly, on Pentecostals, on charismatic Christians, on evangelical Christians, on their conceptions of demonology, but it's also had an impact on Catholicism, and I think that it fed into an existing kind of conspiracist mindset, which existed among some Catholics, which of course had for over a century been lurking in the background of some kind of Catholic attitudes, and particularly the attitudes of Pope Leo XIII.

Francis Young: So yeah, I think neodemonology is this idea that exorcism is something that is absolutely crucial, that the devil is very active and at work in the world. The idea of witchcraft is fairly marginal still, though, [00:21:00] I think, within that kind of neodemonologist view. What I would say that neodemonology has done with witchcraft is to broaden its meaning so widely that it's almost become a meaningless term. So when you read the writings of contemporary exorcists, they will often use the term witchcraft, not just to mean what I've defined it as in the direction of demonic power by a human agent towards someone to possess or vex them, but they will define it as any kind of dabbling in the occult. So any kind of involvement with New Age spiritualities or involvement with occultism or involvement with contemporary neo paganism, for example, will get written off as witchcraft. Now, clearly if you are so liberal with your use of the term witchcraft, it will quite quickly lose any [00:22:00] kind of meaning, and I think this is a particular problem in the contemporary Catholic church, because you've got neodemonologists within the developed world, who will be using the term in this very generalized sense. And yet you've also got, within the developing world, you've got, exorcists who are using witchcraft in a much more precise sense and a sense that is perhaps more recognizable from earlier phases of Europe's history, in terms of people who are believed specifically to be causing supernatural harm to others, people who are therefore at risk of persecution because they are believed to be causing supernatural harm to others.

Francis Young: And so I think that, in the church globally, there isn't much discussion of this, and as a result, there's huge semantic confusion about what's being talked about when the issue of witchcraft is raised.

Sarah Jack: I read Bill O'Reilly's Killing the Witches. I don't know if [00:23:00] you've had a glance at that, but he takes the story of Salem and he takes this, his book into this focus on the Exorcist film and talking about demon possession. And I was so taken off guard and didn't even realize at that point what a tie witchcraft can have to demon possession.

Sarah Jack:

Francis Young: Yeah, no, I think that's a really important point to make. And I think that, one thing that I've written about with regard to the 17th century is the way in which witchcraft becomes a greedy concept. In other words, a kind of a concept that eats all the other conceptual frameworks that people have about the supernatural. Everything becomes witchcraft. And the way in which possession, which as I say, is an ancient idea, going way, way back to the New Testament and beyond. It just becomes eaten by witchcraft and it becomes bewitchment. And the two are utterly inseparable,indistinguishable.

Francis Young: And [00:24:00] almost in any case where someone is showing those traditional symptoms that had classically been associated with possession, a witch will be sought because, this must surely be caused by a witch. And yet, what I'd emphasize is that's such a new idea, that's a recent thing that's come in to Christian tradition. No one before the 13th century certainly would ever have thought that way. They wouldn't have said, 'Oh, a witch must be involved.' The church had, of course, had a more skeptical attitude and had seen claims of witchcraft and sorcery as imposture and this, I think, is very much a tension in the modern Roman Catholic church, too.

Francis Young: So you've got those who are very concerned about the church's reputation and see any kind of endorsement of the reality of witchcraft as a kind of, potential reputational damage for the church, that the church has to be seen as beyond superstition. But you've got others [00:25:00] who, particularly if they're working in the context of developing countries where belief in witchcraft is so normal as to be an accepted part of life, and indeed it would be abnormal within that society to deny its reality, they would say, 'you can't go down this line of skepticism because otherwise you're pastorally abandoning the flock.' They're asking questions about witchcraft, they're asking spells to be dealt with, they're asking bewitchment to be dealt with. If Catholic priests are refusing to have anything to do with this, then they are ceding territory, spiritual territory, either to animist witch doctors or, potentially, to Pentecostalist preachers, and therefore the Catholic Church is losing ground.

Francis Young: The Catholic Church is caught between a rock and a hard place, because if it is too skeptical, then it will lose face in the developing world, and [00:26:00] if it's too credulous, it will lose face within the developed world. And I'm not sure it's a tension that can be resolved, and really it's a question I wanted to grapple with in this book, can a global church, a truly global church like the Roman Catholic Church, actually successfully adopt a single coherent line on something which is as culturally specific as witchcraft?

Francis Young: Because I said at the very beginning, it's incredibly hard to define what witchcraft is. People in Uganda might think that witchcraft is people who are secret cannibals, and therefore they live in fear of cannibalization. People in southern Italy might primarily think of witchcraft as being overlooked by someone with the evil eye. Now those are such two profoundly different conceptions of what witchcraft is, there isn't really any commonality between them. And I think these culturally specific and linguistic [00:27:00] issues are huge. Every language has got a slightly different word for supernatural harm caused by, agents of the devil or whatever you want to say, and they all have slightly different meanings. They all have slightly different connotations. It's not something where you can simply say, oh, we all know what witchcraft is. We all have some kind of agreed cultural parameters. for what it is, because we just don't.

Josh Hutchinson: And given all those differences, what could the Catholic Church do to prevent witch hunts from breaking out?

Francis Young: Yeah,the Catholic Church has a mixed record on this. There are cases where Catholic groups, particularly in Africa, have led witch hunts, and it's something which has been, yeah, connived at, really, by the Catholic clergy. When it has been exposed, generally speaking, the hierarchy has clamped down on it.

Francis Young: And for example, in Uganda, there were, in [00:28:00] the 1970s and 1980s, there were instances of lay Catholic witch hunting by devotional groups, but once they were clamped down on, they became these non violent campaigns of attempting to destroy what were believed to be instruments of witchcraft or to force people into confessing that they had been involved in witchcraft. And what some anthropologists have argued that this has a positive effect, in that it allows people to confess to have been witches, and therefore reduces the potential danger to those people because they can be re, accepted within their communities, and there's less danger of vigilante violence against them. But there's more than one way of looking at that, clearly. The classic case, which I think was a bit of an embarrassing moment for the church, was the case of Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo. He was the [00:29:00] Archbishop of Lusaka in Zambia, so the head of the church effectively in Zambia. And he was performing, in the 1980s, he was performing mass exorcisms, which essentially were unbewitchings because of the particular cultural understanding of possession as being something caused by witches. And this caused great concern within the Roman hierarchy, indeed from Pope John Paul II himself, and Malingo was ordered to go to Rome.

Francis Young: Now what the Church believed would happen was that this would stop his ministry, but in fact, he just restarted his ministry in Rome, in Italy, and it defies all the expectations that we might have, all the cultural expectations that sociologists and anthropologists might have, where they might see belief in witchcraft as something characteristically African, for example. Apparently not, because he was as popular in Italy, particularly Southern Italy, as he had been [00:30:00] in Southern Africa. And huge crowds turned out, people started manifesting what they believed were symptoms of possession and so forth. And, yeah, he had a hugely successful ministry and eventually ended up being excommunicatedby the Roman Catholic Church.

Francis Young: That I think has several lessons to teach us. And one of it is that these heavy handed attempts by the central church to impose its cultural norms on developing countries don't seem to work. And secondly, that the expectations that we have about witchcraft is an African thing or it's a Papua New Guinean thing or it's something which we associate with the developing world. That doesn't seem to be truly the case. It's more complicated than that. So yeah, I think that the Milingo case is fascinating and I think it probably explains why the church subsequent to that has taken a very softly approach, or indeed almost buried its head in the sand when it comes to the issue of witchcraft.

Sarah Jack: I was interested [00:31:00] in finding out a little bit how the case of Anneliese Michel revealed previously private exorcism details.

Francis Young: Yeah, the case of Anneliese Michel is unique. It's the only case where we have complete documentation of a major exorcism that I know of. And the reason for that, of course, is because the priests who exorcised her were tried for unlawful killing. I'm not sure of the exact charge that was made against them under German law, but certainly they were accused of being responsible for her death. And therefore, of course, all of the documents in the Diocese of Württemberg were made public, because they were part of the trial evidence. And so we know every detail of that case. It was a huge embarrassment for the church in Germany. It was a huge embarrassment for the Catholic church in Europe.

Francis Young: I think that it created a reluctance amongst the bishops conferences [00:32:00] of Europe to endorse exorcism. It also came at a time in the 1970s when faith in demonology was at a low ebb in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. So in fact, before the Michel exorcism in 1975, a document called Christian Faith and Demonology had been issued as one of the post-conciliar documents in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, which didn't officially change any of the Church's teachings on demonology, but it very much emphasized the importance of caution, skepticism, downplayed the demonological tradition. And I think it's against things like that that the later neodemonologists were reacting against that.

Francis Young: In terms of the role of witchcraft in the Michel case, Annalise herself claimed that she had been cursed at birth, that someone in her village had been conspiring against her, that there were evil people who [00:33:00] were trying to introduce demonic influences in her life. This is the kind of stuff which very much kind of resonates later with the Satanic Panic, the idea of children being offered to Satan as babies and cursed at birth, and this kind of thing that then explains supposedly later manifestations and involvement with the occult and the need for exorcism at a later stage, although I think that in the case of the Michel exorcism, it also arises from Bavarian popular Christianity and a much older kind of folk tradition of suspecting people of witchcraft within rural Bavaria. It has international kind of ramifications, but it also does have culturally specific aspects that are rooted in that kind of Bavarian popular Christianity.

Josh Hutchinson: And in her case, was anybody named as a witch?

Francis Young: Yes, there was somebody named, but I think that it was somebody who had long since died.[00:34:00] The issue of naming people as witches is, I think, an interesting one, because in the West, certainly, it's something which really falls into abeyance in the 18th century. So whereas in the 17th century, people who were bewitched would often make an accusation against a specific person, who then obviously at that point, might end up being put on trial for that. By the 18th century, largely as a result of the fact that the law has changed in many countries, and certainly in England, the 1735 Witchcraft Act has made it a crime to attempt an imposture of being a witch, and the focus is on the kind of the vigilante violence against people who accuse their neighbors of being witches, that people start to make general claims about having been bewitched, but very rarely is anybody named. And this is what Owen Davies calls witchcraft without witches. The accusation of witchcraft is made, but it's not directed against anyone in particular.

Francis Young: And I think this very much [00:35:00] chimes with what we then encounter in the late 19th century Catholic Church, Leo XIII's rather generalized kind of paranoid fear of satanic conspiracies. And again, it's less about the accusation of particular people. It's almost as though the accusation of particular people would reduce the appeal of this paranoid mindset, because that kind of limits it. Whereas if you're making these vast kind of unfalsifiable claims about satanic conspiracy, we see it today in something like QAnon, that the vaster the nature of the conspiracy claimed, the more amenable it is to those who are of a conspiracist mindset to incorporate it into their worldview. And yeah, I think that it's not so much an issue of specific accusations, although having said that, in the Satanic Panic, of course, we do see the return of very specific accusations that are made against family members and so forth, and miscarriages of justice as a result of that,[00:36:00] but that's not something which is specifically Catholic. And in fact, the Satanic Panic is at its strongest within Protestant contexts and doesn't really take root in Catholic countries. So I think, yeah, the idea of accusing specific people of witchcraft is something which doesn't really have much of a place within more recent Catholic tradition but more vague claims of you know evil conspiracies or or people who offered you as a child to Satan and things like that those do have a, have a place and of course belief in the evil eye. I suppose the difference to the belief in the evil eye in somewhere like southern Italy, it's not actually the fault of people who have the evil eye. The belief there in Sicily, for example, is that some people are unfortunate enough to have the evil eye. And therefore, if they look at a child, for example, something might, bad will happen to that child. But that's not quite [00:37:00] the same as witchcraft in the way that we might understand it in the sense of 17th century Salem or something like that. It's not a pact with the devil. It's not a deliberate act. It's just that some people are ill-favored for unexplained reasons and when they look at people, bad things happen. So again, it's this very culturally specific belief, which can't just be, bunched, bundled together with all these other beliefs.

Josh Hutchinson: What is the significance of Pentecostalism and the Catholic charismatic renewal in regards to witchcraft and exorcisms?

Francis Young: Pentecostalism begins at the very start of the 20th century and is a fairly fringe movement within Protestant denominations to begin with. But in the 1960s, again, in the aftermath of the ressourcement of the Second Vatican Council, which means a kind of return to the sources, this idea that the church needs to return to the heart of its [00:38:00] tradition, rather than simply accepting tradition in its most recently received form. The idea of going back to the Charismatic Renewal becomes popular, partly, I think, because of the claims made within the Charismatic Renewal that their way of doing things was closer to that of the early church. So again, that's very much part of that resourceful kind of ideology of do things if you can in the way that the early church might have done them.

Francis Young: It's certainly true that when you look at the evidence for early Christianity, it was highly charismatic in the small 'c' sense, that people would act and minister as and when they felt they had the gifts from the Holy Spirit to do that thing. So certainly when it came to exorcism, that seems to have been how it works. There was no formal authorization or sense that exorcists had to be approved by the bishop or anything like that. So I think that, yeah, within Catholicism, the charismatic renewal primarily has been a return to [00:39:00] the idea of the active ministry of the Holy Spirit within the Church in things like healing and miracles.

Francis Young: The exorcism element of it is marginal, really, within that movement. But of course, where you introduce the idea of miraculous healings, exorcisms follow very swiftly behind that, because again, if you're being true to the New Testament, Jesus spent most of his time, if you're looking at all the people that he assisted, most of the time he was actually casting out demons from them. The majority of the all the healings in the New Testament are exorcisms. Again, that's inevitable that that's going to come up. That question is going to be raised. And I think this is something which the church, again, grappled with in the 1980s. To what extent should they accept that the charismatic renewal was bringing this ministry back into the church?

Francis Young: And, yeah, you can see that there is some hesitation, certainly Cardinal Ratzinger, who later becomes Pope Benedict XVI, was [00:40:00] very wary of this and issued guidance in the 1980s that tried to suppress these sort of spontaneous exorcisms and deliverance ministry within the charismatic renewal.

Sarah Jack: Where do things go from here? Where will exorcism go from here?

Francis Young: But I think when it comes to witchcraft, there is certainly no sign that belief in witchcraft is going anywhere, either in the developing world or indeed in the developed world. And I think that the, looking at the developed world particularlythe, the growth of conspiracy theories really makes it more likely that accusations of witchcraft or witchcraft adjacent accusations, things like the Satanic Panic seem more common, more likely to happen than ever before, really.

Francis Young: So I think that, yeah. The Catholic Church is faced with the question of how it deals with this. Does it double down on the the rather cautious, skeptical positions that were adopted in the wake of the second [00:41:00] Vatican Council, or does it go in a direction which is determined by the pastoral needs of countries in the developing world, where some would argue that unless the church engages with belief in witchcraft, others will, and therefore the church will cede that ground to other potentially more dangerous forces, which are less restrained and less governed by the hierarchical and legal restrictions that I've described.

Francis Young: So you know,it depends how people regard the Roman Catholic Church. They might see the Roman Catholic Church as one of the more benign religious forces when it comes to dealing with witchcraft because it has a historically quite cautious approach, at least in recent centuries, with regard to how it deals with the question of witchcraft.

Francis Young: Or they might see it as potentially a harmful influence, because the Roman Catholic Church has never [00:42:00] abandoned the basic principle that witchcraft might be real, andclearly it has this highly developed demonology, which makes it possible to draw on Catholic demonology in order to prosecute a witch hunt, which is something which has been seen in certain parts of the world where lay Catholic groups have conducted these witch hunts under the umbrella of their interpretation of Catholic teaching.

Francis Young: So I dunno, it's difficult to see, but I think that one thing I would say is that the church burying its head in the sand is probably not an option, because witchcraft is a major pastoral concern in many countries and a massive issue and something which people's beliefs about it have a profound impact on their lives, either because they end up being persecuted, accused of it, or because they believe so powerfully that they have been affected by it that it causes severe mental and physical illness.

Francis Young: So I think that it's something which the Church has no choice but to deal with. But it really [00:43:00] it meets with questions about synodality, which are currently being discussed within the Catholic Church, about the extent to which the Church should be governed by synods of bishops rather than by central authority. And certainly, when it comes to individual conferences of bishops in nations, determining what's the most culturally sensitive and culturally particular way that Catholicism would be implemented in their territories, less interference from the central church might potentially be a good thing, because it would allow particular cultural understandings to be recognized and pastorally dealt with within those countries.

Francis Young: But who can say, it's difficult to see where the future lies in this regard.

Josh Hutchinson: Given the death of Annaliese and we see stories all the time about deaths and injuries in other denominations during exorcisms, are exorcisms dangerous?

Francis Young: It seems that they often [00:44:00] are, yes, and I think that there's a simple reason for that. Which is that exorcism is a form of dissociation of a human person from their humanity. So if you say that somebody is a demoniac, that somebody is no longer themselves, but has become displaced by a demonic personality, your moral behavior with regard to that person is going to be affected by that, particularly if you have a powerful belief in the absolute evil of the entity that you're attempting to exorcise from that person's body.

Francis Young: And that therefore can overpower normal moral reasoning, it can overpower your normal human responses to that person who you believe to be a different person. So I think that there is, therefore, this tremendous danger to human dignity that is inherent in the practice of exorcism. Does that mean that it can be done in [00:45:00] an ethical way? I don't know, but the Roman Catholic church certainly has put in place safeguards, which are supposed to ensure that things like the death of Anneliese Michel couldn't happen again. And in fact, when you look atmost of the abuse scandals that the Catholic church has been associated with, the vast majority of them are of a sexual nature and not of a spiritual nature. Now, whether that's just because the ones of a spiritual nature have simply not made the headlines, that's one possibility. But it seems that the Church is much more careful about issues of exorcism, partly because it is so sensational. If these things reached the point where they start making headlines, it causes huge reputational damage to the church.

Francis Young: But yes, there are huge moral concerns about exorcism, and I think particularly when it's totally unregulated and there aren't really any rules about how it's done.

Sarah Jack: Is there anything else [00:46:00] that you would like to share today?

Francis Young: I'm particularly interested in the history of politics and magic, and there is a connection here, in that witchcraft very often has a political dimension that accusations of witchcraft are politically motivated or they're related to the political context of crisis through which a region or a country is going. And of course, much of what I've been talking about already is to do with ecclesiastical politics. I've written a book called Magic in Merlin's Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain, which came out a couple of years ago with Cambridge University Press. That's about one country. It's about Britain, but it's looking at all the ways in which magic and politics have been intertwined over the centuries. So that's another aspect of my research and something else that I work on.

Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary. [00:47:00]

Mary-Louise Bingham: Spiritual warfare is defined as protecting oneself against evil forces, which are derived from Satan and demons, while utilizing the practice of magic. It also includes protection from any inclination that one may act upon that is harmful to oneself, others, and the environment. Spiritual warfare differs in each culture, depending on religious beliefs.

Mary-Louise Bingham: In rural areas of Africa, the witch doctor is believed to be able to protect others against the sorcery. In the U. S., some religious leaders are believed to be trained to exorcise a demon which supposedly might inhabit a person who is not living a life centered in Christ. In the view of advocates to end witch hunts, it is the basic human right for every person to practice in any religious community. However, it is not a basic human right when that community uses their [00:48:00] religion to inflict physical harm with often deadly consequences on other innocent people. Thank you.

Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.

Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a non profit 501c3 Weekly News Update.

Sarah Jack: Thou Shalt Not Suffer podcast, a project of the End Witch Hunts movement, amplifies global advocates working to end witch hunts. Explore our advocate episode list to hear how witch hunts persist in many countries and learn how to support their efforts. Learn about the crisis in Africa, India, and Papua New Guinea from our advocate interviews. Get a crisis overview with our Modern Witch Hunts 101 episode. Please deepen your understanding of the root causes of witch hunting and engage in conversations on social media and in person. Together we can empower advocates to impact their communities.

Sarah Jack: Witch hunts are not just a historical crisis, they persist today. Join the ongoing conversation about why, how, and who we hunt, and how to stop it. [00:49:00] Victims rely on our voices to amplify theirs. Special thanks to our historians and advocates for their contributions to the podcast.

Sarah Jack: If you've been keeping up with us on social media, then you saw our exciting preview. You're in for a festive treat this Christmas. Christmas morning, you can hit play in your favorite podcast app to unwrap a special surprise episode featuring a beloved guest favorite. Our December 28th episode marks the final release of Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. Starting January 1st, we become Witch Hunt.

Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts is proud to educate and collaborate with like minded people and organizations to obtain a state apology and exoneration measures for the historical witch trial victims of the United States. In 2023, we worked with many dedicated volunteers to see the state of Connecticut clear the names of all their known witch trial victims. Now, we are seeking acknowledgement for those affected by witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. If you [00:50:00] would like to help obtain an exoneration for the innocent women hanged for witchcraft in 17th century Boston, Massachusetts, please sign the petition at change.org/witchtrials. To volunteer for this project, the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project, visit massachusettswitchtrials.org.

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Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Jack: You're welcome.

Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Witch Trial Podcast. Remember that we'll be changing our name to Witch Hunt on January 1st.

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Josh Hutchinson: Have a great [00:51:00] today and a beautiful tomorrow and happy holidays.

Witch Hunt

Francis Young on Witchcraft and the Modern Roman Catholic Church