Movie, "The Exorcist" and Fr. Karras

[Denise]

The Education of Fr. Karras

by: Msgr. Robert J. Batule

Friday, March 28, 2025

In William Peter Blatty’s famous novel The Exorcist (1971), Chris McNeill, the mother of Regan (a mysteriously disturbed child) and a professional actress, arranged to meet Fr. Karras at the Key Bridge near Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Her awkwardness could not have been more obvious. She was not a Catholic; indeed, she wasn’t even a believer. But she was desperate to find help for her daughter.

Probably to tamp down her anxiety, Chris decided to ask Fr. Karras, first, about his education. She thought Fr. Karras had originally been a psychiatrist and then left that life behind to become a priest. Fr. Karras explained that, no, he was, first, a priest, and then his Order, the Jesuits, sent him to medical school, and then on to training in psychiatry.

Chris was working her way up to the real reason for meeting with Fr. Karras. All of a sudden, she just blurted it out. “How do you go about getting an exorcism?” Fr. Karras was stupefied. “t just doesn’t happen anymore,” he said. Chris interjected, “Since when?” Without missing a beat, the priest replied, “Since we learned about mental illness. All these things that they taught me at Harvard.”

The Harvard curriculum has never taken an official position on Catholic teaching and demonic possession. Nonetheless, Fr. Karras was certain, because of his time there, that the possessed individuals mentioned in the Gospels were schizophrenics. Thus, when Chris revealed it was not an exorcism for herself but for her daughter Regan, Fr. Karras responded, “forget about getting an exorcism.”

But the conversation was not over. Fr. Karras was not going to change his mind on an exorcism for Regan, but Chris tried one last time. “Can’t you even look at her?” “Well, as a psychiatrist, yes, I could.” Chris was not satisfied. With all the force she could muster, she yelled at Fr. Karras: “She needs a priest.”

In Fr. Karras’ education, there was seldom if ever a comeuppance like the one given at that moment. With that single remark, enough doubt is cast upon the supposedly insuperable judgment that had bubbled up in the helping professions by that time that every unruly behavior can be explained and treated by applying the right therapy.

Several years before Blatty wrote The Exorcist, Philip Rieff published The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), whose subtitle is often overlooked: Uses of Faith after Freud. In the book’s very last paragraph, there is this telling admission, a virtual lament: “[A] sense of well-being has become the end, rather than a by-product of striving after some superior communal end.”

After taking his readers through an extensive study of the psychoanalytic thought of Freud and a few other psychoanalysts like Jung and Adler, Rieff argues that a stunning change has occurred in modern consciousness. It is the claim that well-being, psychologically understood, is the real goal of human life. Rieff then goes on to note that this has led to a fundamental change in our culture. And then comes the coup de grace. In such a perspective, which focuses on individual feeling, “there will be nothing further to say in terms of the old style of despair and hope.”

That attitude was no doubt central to Fr. Karras’ education at Harvard and in his subsequent psychoanalytic training. His quick dismissal of demonic possession, and his flat-out refusal to even considering an exorcism attests to how swift was the triumph of the therapeutic.

What remains puzzling, of course, was the failure on Fr. Karras’ part to take into account the education he must have received in the seminary before his Ordination. Surely it would have included how to contend with the mysterium iniquitatis (the mystery of evil), by means such as prayer, spiritual direction, ascetical theology, and the sacramental life – all of which might very well have helped him at least to keep an open mind.

Fr. Karras started out seeing Regan as a psychiatrist as he said he would, but then something happened. He had a change of heart because, as he later reported to the bishop, Regan’s case satisfied the requirements for an exorcism as “laid down in the ritual.” A ritual is, to be sure, an important thing, but it is not the same as a deep personal adherence to the Faith, which we are led to under the aegis of grace.

Not all education arrives via schools and degree-granting institutions, as the novelist intended us to see, this time in Fr. Karras’ favor. For the last and best part of Fr. Karras’ education would come through a fellow-Jesuit – Fr. Lankester Merrin. Merrin had been chosen (by the local bishop) to be the chief exorcist even though Fr. Karras had expressed a desire to fill that role. At a pause in Regan’s exorcism, Fr. Karras asks Fr. Merrin, “[W]hat would be the purpose of possession? What’s the point?”

Fr. Merrin answered, “I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity.” This was doubtless owing to his experience as an exorcist; Fr. Merrin had exorcised a demon on an earlier occasion in his ministry. But the answer Fr. Merrin gave is quite a rejoinder to those Philip Rieff identified who believe with a kind of religious fervor that after the triumph of the therapeutic, “there will be nothing further to say in terms of the old style of despair and hope.”

Despair remains stubbornly with us. All we need do is consult the current suicide rates for young people. Or maybe consider the suicide rates for those who have sought to “change their gender” and found worse misery in the false state of “trans.” Are psychological therapies all we have to offer them?

A priest’s ministry is always a ministry of hope. We need to bear this in mind now more than ever, especially as Lent prepares us for Easter.

[MarieT]

A good article.
The Ritual for Exorcism is very valid.
Francis isn't much for it.
They tried to remove it.

In the Exorcist, when the psychiatrist priest visits a young girl and she's floating in the air or growling like an animal or speaking in different languages she never knew......things flying around the room.....doesn't take a rocket science to know, an exorcism is required.

Sadly when medical science wants to disregard it, and put it on the back bench as psychiatric, that's when the issues arise.
As for me, when confronted with a patient suffering a seizure, I know for a fact that the Litany of the saints invoking all the hierarchy from God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Mary, archangels, angels, saints..... calms them and they wake up with no recollection of what happened.

Keep the prayer in mind, it works in the most serious causes.

[Denise]

Keep the prayer in mind, it works in the most serious causes.