Fr Pat Collins CM. Veteran exorcist Fr Pat Collins has warned that the ‘Evil One’ may be exploiting a lack of faith to bring about a surge of fear and anxiety during the pandemic.
This comes on the back of recent research which shows that Irish people are amongst the most afraid of contracting Covid-19 in Europe, alongside respondents in southern Europe.
The famous Vincentian priest and author said that the primary source of the fear is a fear of death, which Scripture links to the devil.
“He’s the father of death, because obviously death came into the world through the temptations of the Evil One. I think that there’s a possibility that the Evil One is exploiting the current situation to bring people into fear and anxiety,” Fr Collins said.
Fear
This heightened fear of death is linked to a lack of a sense of meaning, and to a lack of belief in eternal life, Fr Collins suggested.
“There’s a very poignant line in the second chapter of Ephesians, and St Paul is talking about unbelievers. He says: “They live without hope and without God in the world”.
Now, it would strike me that as Ireland has secularised and as people have parted company with formal religion, that many of them have less of a relationship with God and have less hope of eternal life,” Fr Collins said.
Movement
This movement has been noticed by Fr Collins, who said that one of their parishes in Dublin has seen a noticeable drop in people looking for church funerals, despite the fact that the “vast majority” of people who die in the parish are Catholic.
The pandemic has exposed the fact that the “anchor” of the Faith came loose over the years, and that people are “adrift upon a sea of relativity”, and that death has become more scary as a result.
He noted that an increase in anxiety is the result of depending on “here and now” rewards as opposed to eternal meaning and life, and this has been exacerbated by recent events.
Quoting St Francis de Sales, Fr Collins said that “next to sin, the greatest enemy of the human soul is anxiety. That it’s very corrosive.
“It leads people to be more narrow-minded and less open. It’s a very detrimental and corrosive emotion, and the only thing that will dislodge anxiety as the basic deep-down emotion is the sense of ultimate belonging,” Fr Collins said, a trust in God and his providence.