American Exorcism by Michael W. Cuneo

Author:Michael W. Cuneo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2002-10-15T03:00:00+00:00

For Francis MacNutt it’s been a long journey back. After leaving the priesthood and getting married in 1980, he suddenly found himself persona non grata in Catholic charismatic circles. (“A lot of people thought I’d been tempted by the devil,” he told me. “It was a horrible scandal. The charismatic magazine New Covenant did a full-page story saying I was now beyond the pale.”) For several years he kept a low profile, running a small healing and deliverance ministry out of Clearwater, Florida, with his wife Judith. As time went on, he began receiving speaking invitations from various Protestant charismatic groups, and in 1987 he and Judith moved their operations, which they were now calling Christian Healing Ministries (CHM), to a former Episcopal parish complex in Jacksonville. During the late eighties and early nineties word got around: MacNutt was back in action, and his gifts for healing and deliverance were as impressive as ever. Before long, CHM was swamped with calls for help, and even quite a few Catholic charismatics seemed more than willing to give MacNutt a second chance.

Christian Healing Ministries occupies a large corner lot in a low-slung, working-class neighborhood on the northern fringes of Jacksonville. Just six or seven blocks to the east is N. Main Street, a lugubrious, crack-infested thoroughfare haunted nightly by zonked-out addicts selling sex for ten dollars a pop. As I discovered when I dropped by for a meeting with Francis MacNutt, however, the CHM staff has far more serious things to worry about than the surrounding neighborhood. Upon arriving, I was ushered into a waiting room in the ministry’s main building—a two-story hall with three yellow-stuccoed wings and a courtyard opening out onto an L-shaped chapel. Within minutes three women came into the room on the pretext of introducing themselves and engaging me in small talk. But this was no ordinary small talk. One woman stared intently into my eyes, another slowly circled me two or three times, and the third stood off to the side with upturned nostrils. A pleasant enough exchange in its way, but also a bit unsettling.

Later, over lunch, I mentioned this odd welcome to MacNutt and asked whether I was being scrutinized for indwelling demons.

“Of course you were,” he said, laughing. “We have eleven salaried people on our staff, and most of them are charismatic Episcopal women with strong gifts for discerning evil spirits. They can smell them, feel them, sometimes sense them spatially. Sometimes they’ll even say to me, ‘Francis, there’s something on you,’ and they’ll pray over me.”

“And how did I come out in the inspection?”

“You came out fine. You’re clean. Otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here having lunch. The thing is, we have to be vigilant about protecting our ministry. Demonic attack can come from anywhere. You came down to see us from New York City. We didn’t know much about you, so we didn’t want to take any chances.”

It isn’t hard to see why MacNutt was once the heartthrob of the Catholic renewal movement.

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