The Gospel text for the day was familiar enough: Matthew 4, depicting the devil's threefold temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. But the Sunday sermon, delivered last week by New York's John Cardinal O'Connor, quickly became a headline grabber. To illustrate the reality of evil and give the biblical theme a contemporary twist, O'Connor recited what he termed "gruesomely realistic" portions of The Exorcist, the 1971 novel (and later film) that drew upon accounts of hundreds of exorcisms. Moreover, after Mass the Cardinal revealed to reporters that priests had been authorized to perform two exorcisms in his archdiocese over the past year. "As far as we know," he said, "they have been successful."
That might have been enough for many preachers, but O'Connor wanted to give the devil his full due. He warned in his sermon that "diabolically instigated violence is on the rise" and asserted that heavy-metal rock music can "help trap people, especially teenagers," into dabbling in disgraceful Satanist practices. In particular, the Cardinal denounced rocker Ozzy Osbourne's tune Suicide Solution ("Wine is fine but whiskey's quicker/ Suicide is slow with liquor . . . Suicide is the only way out./ Don't you know what it's really about?").
O'Connor's attack enraged Osbourne, a flamboyant performer who first won fame singing with a group called Black Sabbath. The singer's onstage artistry has included such excesses as biting the head off a bat. Osbourne, who has fended off a lawsuit claiming his songs prompted a youth to kill himself, fired off a telegram, informing the Cardinal that he had "insulted the intelligence of rock fans all over the world."
Satanism? Exorcism? Was O'Connor seriously suggesting that demons were loose in the land? To be sure, the Cardinal did say in his sermon that demonic possession is "very rare," and that exorcisms are not conducted unless psychological or medical possibilities are first ruled out as explanations for extreme behavior. Still, the fact that they are performed at all seemed remarkable in an age when literal belief in demons is widely viewed by Roman Catholic theologians as a naive medieval holdover. (Among Protestants, exorcism is confined mostly to missionaries in areas where spirit-possession cults are common, and to Pentecostalists, many of whom make it a regular practice to cast out demons.)
Although the New Testament includes numerous mentions of satanic activity and exorcisms, liberal theologians have all but scratched Old Scratch. Father Richard McBrien, chairman of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame, dismisses the idea of a personal archdemon as "premodern and precritical." Individuals tend to personify evil, he explains, "because we see it in people." But for sophisticates acquainted with sociology and other disciplines, says McBrien, "sin is now seen as something systemic, institutional and structural, as well as personal." Laments William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist: "The devil has been soft-pedaled and de- emphasized by the church." Absent the notion of a personal devil, of course, exorcism becomes an obsolete, in fact meaningless, exercise.