The Exorcist Debate

Crowds of the curious are invading Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., these days, and the Jesuit school's telephones are busy with calls on subjects that not long ago would have embarrassed thinking Roman Catholics: the devil, demonic possession and exorcism of evil spirits. The reason: part of the movie made from William Peter Blatty's novel, The Exorcist (TIME, Jan. 14), was filmed at Georgetown.

Many reviewers have panned the movie, but Catholic spokesmen are divided on its worth. Father Edmund Ryan, executive vice president of Georgetown, Blatty's alma mater, is pleased that Jesuit priests, who are the exorcists and their colleagues in the movie, are sympathetically portrayed. "I don't think it is a religious film," says Ryan, but he does think it will produce "a great deal of thought," especially about the battle between good and evil that the demonic encounter portrays. "There is probably more debate right now about the devil than at any time since Rosemary's Baby." At Loyola-Marymount University in Los Angeles, where Blatty once worked in public relations, Jesuit John O'Neill thinks that some of the film's explicitness might be excused as a device "to show the power of evil." O'Neill adds that for him it was too effective: he was not able to sleep for several nights after seeing the film.

One of the movie's most articulate critics is Dominican Father Richard Woods, a young expert on occultism at Chicago's Loyola University who recently published a book called The Devil (Thomas More Press). Woods encountered 23 cases of people who thought they were possessed by the devil after reading The Exorcist; he now fears another wave of hysteria from moviegoers. "The movie is going to cause so many pastoral problems I wish they had never made it." Beyond that, argues Woods, the film never really grapples with the problem of evil. "The devil's true work is temptation. He leads us into sin. Evil as we know it is basically, fundamentally sin. That is almost entirely missing from the movie. The devil in the movie was an easy devil to deal with."

Both Woods and the Rev. Juan Cortes, a Jesuit psychology teacher at Georgetown, point out that in traditional Catholic teaching on possession, the evil spirit was considered to be a lesser demon, not the devil himself. Cortes doubts the existence of such lesser demons, seeing them merely as archaic religious interpretations of what are now recognized as mental and psychological disturbances. Though Cortes believes in a personal devil who incites evil, he does not believe in possession. Thus, he says, the movie results in "a victory for the devil, because people will believe he can actually possess them."

Even the film's defenders warn children and impressionable adolescents to stay away. "Students say they wish they had never seen the film," says Jesuit Richard Robin of Loyola-Marymount in Los Angeles. Worse, he says, "I saw ten-year-olds in the theater with their parents. That is nothing short of a crime."

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