There are roughly 150 trained exorcists serving Catholic dioceses in the United States, up from about two dozen fifteen years ago, and they cannot keep pace with the requests coming in. In March, representatives of the International Association of Exorcists asked Pope Leo XIV to make sure every diocese on earth has at least one priest trained for the work, citing a spreading problem they traced to occult sects, esotericism, and Satanism. Demand is outrunning supply, and the men doing the work say the trend line is going the wrong direction.
All of this is happening in a country where a majority of adults, if you hand them a survey, will tell you the devil is a metaphor.
The worldly view is that Americans have simply gotten more superstitious, that the horror movies won and the rest is TikTok. The truth is that these are not two competing facts. They are one fact, observed from two angles. Are horror movies, video games, TikTok, or drugs contributing to the acceptance of demonic influence? Yes. That’s because they are not replacements for the supernatural. They are tools of the adversary.
Our civilization did not stop believing in the supernatural. We renamed it and gave it excuses. Then, we stopped believing in the only One capable of protecting it from the rest of the supernatural. The house was not fortified. It was emptied. And empty houses do not stay empty.