Discerninghearts .com presents inside the pages insights from today's most compelling authors I'm your host Chris McGregor and I am delighted to be joined by Adam Bly who is a church decreed expert on religious demonology and exorcism for the Pittsburgh Diocese he's helped train exorcists for over 15 years and has attended hundreds of solemn exorcisms his journey started in brain wave research and psychology and is now focused on the spiritual realities of miracles angels demons and possessions he's also the author of several books including the exorcism files with Adam Bly we go inside the pages of the history of exorcism published by Sophia Institute press Adam thank you so much for joining me sure Chris it's great to be back with you I'm very grateful for the history of exorcism I think it's an important work I think it's one of those things that needs to be brought out in the light because people have a lot of different ideas about what exorcism is but also maybe not an appreciation of its role in the life not only of the church but even before that and you bring that forward so clearly so thank you so much the history is all there so I really didn't do a whole lot except try to put it together and maybe synthesize it a little bit but I found it to be a really interesting story which is why I wanted to to get it out to people in the form of a book because yeah as you said most people really have no idea where this came from they've just kind of seen the movies you know they have their ideas from there which which is really distorted obviously Hollywood doesn't know much about this so yeah I'm hoping it'll kind of demystify it a little bit and and also it had some interesting twists in the road through the history of this so it's kind of a neat story I thought and I'm not saying that about like my own book I'm saying that the history of it is just it's a neat history well I'll say it for your book it is a neat book I found it fascinating and I think context is everything isn't it so to understand something more fully you need to be able to put things into context don't you mm -hmm yeah I think you do and hopefully it'll help not only with the idea of solemn exorcism but the whole deliverance world it kind of puts the whole range of prayers in a context because it shows back when it was more of a gray area and prayer was just prayer and you know deliverance and exorcism weren't well defined in the early church in terms of where the lines were between them so I hope it'll lead people to understand why exorcism is is really a qualitatively different thing than just deliverance prayers how did you become involved in the ministry that that helps to free people from a captivity that the church wants to be able to offer them well it's a long story but it's about 15 or 16 or 17 years ago I was doing graduate work in adult clinical psychology and mainly brainwave research and I was curious whether any of these strange experiences were real or if they were an artifact of the brain or mental illness and so I started looking into it stumbled across a possessed person early on it wasn't like anything I had seen clinically or been trained for clinically the interventions that you would do in psychology for psychosis had no impact and that led to you know obviously questions and then as I got to meet specialist clergy and got drawn into this and saw full -blown cases of solemn exorcisms I started seeing things that you can't explain and so once I realized it's a real phenomenon it's a real spiritual reality I then decided to basically as long as God was willing dedicate my life to it because there was so few exorcists around at that time you know 27 well about 17 years ago the ministry really you know it had faded out it was almost gone and so we've been working you know as a community for a lot of years and now there's a lot of exorcists trained up in the United States you know a few hundred at least and there's more every year so things are really kind of rolling at this point well the really good news about that is it as you said in the past maybe 15 years or so institutes have developed the one that I'm more familiar with is the Pope Leo XIII Institute that is established by priests and also their particular teams which include practitioners as you are someone who is not only devout in his faith but somebody who has an understanding of the human person which can help them to provide their ministry and then that's an important thing isn't it yeah and it's good to mention of course I'm a lay person I'm not a priest I don't actually do exorcisms only a priest with permission from their bishop can do that but God seems to have called me into a kind of unique role of training and teaching and essentially coaching priests and particularly new exorcists so the best way to learn is kind of in the situation so I do teach at the Leo Institute and I've taught at other national conferences for years and things like that but really the at the end of the day you have to do it and kind of be mentored by other exorcists and people with experience basically and just wanted to be clear so people don't make the mistake of assuming I'm an exorcist I know from the founders of the Pope Leo XIII Institute I know Monsignor John S.