BEWARE LITTLE WOODEN FRIENDS

With a heavy heart I watched the sad saga of the Pachamama idol venerated in the Vatican Gardens and saw a coterie of people with their fat bottoms flung in the air as foreheads brushed the ground to honour the wooden effigy which represents a pagan deity. Pachamama is defined as a pagan deity by the Encyclopedia Britannica. There was, of course, the main reason to be sorrowful: the devotion given an effigy, which should be given to Our Lord.  But for me personally – it stirred painful memories. Bear with me while I explain. I was regrettably close to a woman who took part in paganism and she deviously encouraged people away from the sacraments and towards paganism. She also gave mischievous hints that she took part in witchcraft. As I will explain, I believe she was possibly possessed.

I do not know if she ever honoured Pachamama, so I cannot create a link between that exact form of idol worship and the classic signs she showed of having ceded her will to allow a demon to possess her. But my time with her taught me that there is total truth in St Paul’s revelation that pagans sacrifice to demons and not to God, and that for a person it can be a grave temptation to invite a demonic entity into oneself because to do may mean acquiring angelic intelligence.

I knew the woman who showed signs of possession when I was a young thing in Ireland and trying to get my education. I thought she could teach me a lot. She was considered a genius and I was seduced by her pretense of being one, but I never, not once, learnt anything of value from her. While she had been raised an Irish Catholic and maintained a carefully cultivated appearance of still practicing, I found out that she had actually thrown away her Catholicism like rubbish onto a dust heap, yet she needed to keep up a façade of being a Catholic because when she “practised” she harassed good priests and nuns viciously. Yet when she described her practice of paganism and, ahem, other rituals, she was praised by an admiring audience of fallen Irish Catholics and broken priests and nuns who praised her free spirit and even encouraged her while they were also scared of her. I saw first-hand in Ireland that souls who give up fear of God will become terrified of people in their midst who are the meat puppets of demons, and they will be subservient to them, because they have abandoned the protections that the Faith gives, which makes them vulnerable, and rather than admit in humility that they need to re-embrace the Faith, they will often instead cooperate with someone who practices witchcraft.

I wanted to fawn over the woman, too, because my sinful ambition was such that I wanted to get what I could from her. But to my chagrin, she hated me with a hate that was deeper than hate. At first I put my troubles with her down to a personality clash, and that she despised me for the many flaws in my character and how narcissistic I was, but it became clear to me she had a particular hate for my name, Mary, because when she had to say it, she lost all semblance of her Irish brogue and her voice became metallic and hissing, and she looked like she was convulsed in pain.  In her many character assassinations of me she relied on much hidden knowledge. At first, when she’d rant about my faults and my sins, I thought she was perceptive. There came a time, however, when in a painfully legalistic way she detailed venial sins I had committed in my bedroom, when I was completely alone. I was very embarrassed when she recounted my sins, and felt silenced into submission to her. In my youth and shock I did not think to wonder how she could know such things; I merely felt the sting of her rebuke. 

In my deep pride I felt I could not tell anyone, because to do so would also be to tell my sins, and whenever I tried to talk to someone about her, they reminded me of her great intellect. There was an episode with instructed me that I could no longer put her “insight” down to genius-level intelligence. One rainy Irish morning I put some pro-life literature in my bag, in case I met another student who was pro-choice, so that I could serve them some pro-life apologetics. A few hours later I met with this strange woman and she sneered at me for carrying pro-life material and she made wicked comments against the exact pro-life apologetics espoused in the literature I had in my handbag, complete with a devastating critique of the picture accompanying the text so much so I felt I was against a hateful grand jury and not one single human woman. Again, it bears repeating that I had shown no one the literature and the whole time she jeered at the literature, it was buried in my bag!

I began to see that her status as a “genius” did not rely so much on her meagre native intelligence as it did on the angelic intelligence of the demons she had incurred when venerating her little wooden friends in the various forbidden practices of idolatry in which she had enthusiastically engaged. There was an escalation in her knowledge of my venial sins, which was very traumatic and something that caused hideous pain in me. At the time, however, I was not so convinced of the offence given Our Lord by venial sins, and I did not know that such a person who has such esoteric knowledge may be possessed, especially if it is accompanied by very strange phenomenon, which in her case was plentiful.

This brutal experience taught me that we should not for one moment sanction the open tolerance of idol worship and occult ritual by the titular Heads of the Church. We must speak out against it with every breath in our bodies. As asinine as they look, the wooden idols portend demonic power. And just as the demons are allowed control over a body by a person who give them part or all of their will, each and every Catholic must start their opposition to such evil by using their will to resist the temptation to think these pagan idols are harmless.  

I wrote this column for the Spring Edition of the Mass of Ages, the quarterly magazine of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales.