Why don’t exorcists use consecrated hosts more often in exorcisms?
We usually conduct them in a room with a tabernacle. And so the Lord is there, but we don’t use consecrated hosts out of a fear that they will be desecrated, that they will be attacked. And so that the consecrated host has to be protected.
We don’t cast the pearls before the swine and neither is the host magical in the sense of if we know that the host, that the blessed sacrament is the most precious thing that the church possesses. We know this. It’s the most precious thing, bar none. Yet if all it took was to wave a host in front of a possessed person the church wouldn’t have a need for a rite of exorcism.
It wouldn’t have a need for all of the other prayers that it does and the other disciplines in which it engages to keep the devil out of one’s life. Who cares about the devil if all you do is just wave a host in front of him and poof, magically he leaves. Exorcism is, is a process of relationship. We are peeling off one relationship and putting on another. We are aiding the victim in rescinding from that relationship with the devil, and we’re aiding the victim in forging a relationship in replacing that relationship with one with God. The Eucharist is one part of that, even though innately it is the most precious thing we possess.
But in and of itself, it is not everything. There’s more than the Eucharist besides that is needed. It’s not like magic.
You’re saying there has to be something coming from within the person suffering.
Yeah.
