Walking With My Brother

Confide to Me your failures; I will show you the cause. Whom do you wish to see interested in your work? I am the Master of all hearts, My child, and I lead them gently where I please. I will place about you those who are necessary to you; never fear!

I have come to You often with deep concern and a deepening sense of failure and guilt for two individuals close to me. They struggle so and there seems so little anyone has been able to do to help.

You placed on my way last week a new book about the “world’s most popular exorcist,” Fr. Gabrielle Amorth, who passed away in 2016. It’s called “The Devil Is Afraid Of Me.”

I’ve long feared for the souls of several people close to me. I have been tormented by the glee the Devil must take in so nearly capturing their unwitting hearts.

I’ve prayed. You know, Father. We’ve talked often about them. But it hasn’t felt … what? …efficacious? It feels as though my prayers — so often, my whining sense of impotence — aren’t enough, that somehow more is needed. More focus. More heart, maybe. More holy. More intense? There was this sense that what I am praying for is so weighty, so immense that there just needs to be something more, something better that I should sacrifice on their behalf.

After reading about Fr. Amorth, I feel You’ve offered me, if not the answer, then at least an answer.

What Fr. Amorth counseled for a lay person like me, who was trying to help save a soul of a loved one is simple: A strong faith. Period.

Joy of joys. I have that. I want to have it, anyway. I want to have complete faith in Your goodness and Your almighty power. Show me how. Strengthen my faith, Holy Lord.

Fr. Amorth directed emphatically that laity should not be dabblers (my word, not his) in exorcism or in any kind of occult. He suggested, though, that praying a Rosary of Liberation can be a fruitful enterprise. I was unfamiliar with this prayer. Apparently, so too are many others, Father, as acknowledging and understanding Satan and his forces has fallen out of favor over the centuries.

“Prayers are efficacious, if they are done with faith, humility, and charity (therefore without any material interest,)” says Marcello Stanzione speaking about Fr. Amorth. “Praying for one another is a recommendation that comes to us from God. Each one can do it in conformity with the faith that he derives from his baptism — that is, the priesthood of his baptism; and it is even more efficacious with the ministerial priesthood. These are cases of private prayer that have nothing to do with the sacramental of exorcism. But they are prayers that bear much fruit.”

I’ve so far only prayed one such Rosary of Liberation, but I during my first experience with it, I was gradually filled with a joyful certainty and confidence in its strength and benefit.

What a beautiful sacrifice of love. How could it go unnoticed, Father?

And, if it is Your will that the snares and entanglements of their lives be loosened and eventually that they be freed, then I know with certainty, that in Your mercy and through Your healing and saving grace, they will indeed be really and truly freed.

Little did I realize that, in this new grace, I too would be liberated from the debilitating sense that somehow I needed to do more than have complete faith in You to act when and however You know is best.