 Welcome in. I'm Tim Hill with 10 books honored to be joined by Father Chad Rippiger and Dan Schneider, author of the new book, the Lieber Christo Method. And guys, I certainly am nowhere near as educated and involved and experienced with the themes that we're going to talk about today. So I appreciate your education. You're joining us here today and really looking forward to your thoughts. Father Rippiger, if you don't mind, why don't we start with you? I'm guessing you've gotten maybe some interesting questions in the last few days, weeks, months where Hollywood has brought up Father Gabriel Morth in the Pope's Exorcist movie. I'm interested, what's your experience been like here recently? Yeah, getting a lot of questions. Actually, I get a lot of questions, especially in relation to Nefarious as well. The movie, I think I think they call it really infectious. I actually have not seen it because as soon as I watched the trailer where I bring myself to pay that attention, because it just seemed like the typical Hollywood kind of sensationalism. I did talk to some experts who have seen it and they said, yeah, pretty much straightforward sensationalism. And I was saddened, especially in the light of the book. Tan is about to get out here, he's coming out on Gabriel's live, actually traced it very clearly. And I think that it's unfortunate because one of the things that I noticed a lot of the people in Hollywood is that, you know, they do all this stuff sensationalized, but the real interesting story for the exorcism, and even if a life or more, you read some of his books, the real interesting stuff is not a sensational stuff. It's in the lessons we learn catalytically or by the Lord later. But I think the best opportunity for a great man, a man who's considered the father of modern exorcism. And it was just a missed opportunity for me. And then you worked on that book for Tan books, the official biography of Father Gabriel Amor, the Pope's exorcist. And so you're involved in no plenty of the background as well. What's your experience been with the movie and the conversation? Right, no, I agree with Father. I mean, it's the movie, the trailer itself was showed you with the direction they were going to go. It's very sensational, you know, the old saying, if it bleeds, it reads. And so if they make it sensational, people will see it. But I don't think it's really conforming to the life of this man who really was just a very simple priest in one sense. But also, but I didn't know I learned much about him through the process of doing the content editing on this book, preparing it for an American audience. I mean, he was a, he was a soldier he fought against. He fought against fascism. He was a mariologist. He was a Paulist. He didn't get called into this, the Ministry of Exorcism until rather much later in his career, he walks into the Chancellor's office, the Chancellor of the Diocese of Rome, just to kind of visit. The Chancellor says, have you heard of the work of Father Candido Amantini, who was a diocesan exorcist? He said, sure, I respect, I know him. I've read and seen some of his work. He's very respectable. He says, good. He gets out a piece of paper. He said, and he wrote down, I hereby commission you as assistant exorcist under Father Candido. And so that's what began his career as an exorcist, which was quite interesting. He was well into publishing and all the things that Paulist priests do. But this was somebody who was under, beneath the mantle of the Blessed Mother from the beginning of, from the very call to the priesthood all the way through. And it was a very beautiful story. You get to see the human side. It doesn't have all the fantastical stuff, the phenomena of exorcism that an American audience likes, but it really gets you see the humanity behind someone who really was groundbreaking in many ways, pioneering because you're coming off a time, theologically in the church, both in the seminary systems, many in the hierarchy and academia, where any belief in the devil was considered, you know, superstition or old preconciliar beliefs and all these other things, not something for the modern progressive mind. And so for him to go in in his very first session, as Father notes in his training of priest, often your very first case is going to be one of your toughest cases. His very first case, he gets a, the person that was a young farmer, he levitates. And so Father finishes the prayer, puts a stole over him, says amen, and the levitation completely stopped. And he never saw it again his whole career. So, so you see some, some of the stories of what he went through, but what you get is the real human side, how much the whole person of Father Amorthus portrayed in the book. And you're not going to get that Hollywood's not going to get into that. They certainly don't want to see a priest battling, going into the woods and battling against fascism, you know, so, so they're going to focus on the, on the fantastical stuff, but not the real Father Amorth. So I think the, the TAN book is an excellent resource. Well, the book's always better than the movie. Almost a hundred percent of the time, I guess it holds true in this case as well. Father Rippiger, what do you take away from Father Amorth's work most? Not just in his biography, but in the health contained in there, it is how well you understood this kind of work, how hard he worked at it, the consistency of it, and also dedication to it, especially in the time when, again, it's alluding to it, especially in the time when this stuff is simply a work by the majority of the theologians and academics as well as worshiped priests. So I think the thing that I take away most from reading is about the V before I really introduction for forward, but was actually, this was, this was obviously a man with deep prayer, very system in his priesthood throughout the whole of him, and also the marriage side, which does come out a little bit in his books, but not like it does dog. Interesting. And then how, if at all, does what he did apply to what you guys are doing today, Father? Well, you know, when I was first an essayist, the core book that I started reading was actually Father Amorth's. He would write the different kinds of diabolical ones. He had some very elementary counsel to do, not to do. Obviously, he had contained the fullness of his knowledge in that, but he was his original writing that gave me this sense of, okay, this is what I'm going to ask, this is supposed to be, which was 17 years ago before there were many people even writing this area. And so he was one of the few scores out there. He first lived in the beginning of the Rich Mullin and Ote especially, and I think he would say that you know, tend to be right of exorcism, but in the old kind of exorcism they say, that you really should study the approved authors. And he was one of the few who could read and know that at least as far as the practical side of things and there's also in relationship to the distinction among how do you behave, what kind of diabolical you were on solid ground. Dan, what about you? You have a very interesting background. You're now a professor of theology, but before that, a U.S. Army attack helicopter pilot, combat veteran and now part of Father Ripperger's exorcism team. Yeah, no, we all bring to to the spiritual life, our past good and bad. So for me, reading Father Amorth as a combat veteran and now having worked in this apostolate and various models and seen various ways of this being done over the past 10 years. So I read Father Amorth quite differently and I have a lot of, I overlap because he was also a combat veteran from World War II. So he was a young soldier as well at those times and those are very formative times. As Father would tell you, early in the priesthood, this is why in tradition, priests are usually taken from young men. And so that's very formative those early years. And so my formative years were in the military and then theological formation later in kind of my doctoral training in biblical studies was sort of coterminous happening at the same time that I was working on exorcism team. And so I was able to approach this both from the experience of the military as well as theology and my background in theology and scripture. So for me, it makes very, very clean sense spiritual combat. It's not something we should be afraid of. In fact, if you look at the early church, the image of the cross was seen as the tropion. We read this on Good Friday, the priest reads it on part of the lit, not the litany, but the sequence on Good Friday. The Panjelingue sing my tongue of the glorious battle where Christ was triumphant on the tropion, the war memorial, the cross has always been the war memorial for Christians, the identity of who we are. And so understanding that seeing that seeing real combat in physical time helps me to help filter some of the things that we see in spiritual combat, but combat is combat. We fight an ancient enemy. And so the same battle that Father Morth fought, the Father's fought, the Middle Age priest fought, I mean, this is this battle has been going on for a long time. What we're trying to do is, is bring back some, some good theology and bring some things back into Catholic norms that's consistent with the tradition of the church. Yeah, with your book, the Lever Christo method, you have the great line, we fight an ancient enemy, and the ancient weapons are best. Father Rippenger, do you consider yourself a fighter, a battler? I would imagine a lot of people might react a little strangely to that thinking going along with the being a priest. Yeah, I mean, it was, basically, I tell people, my whole time, I was in my torture rational preacher, their intelligent preacher. It is actually, I think that Dan was mentioning, you know, some theology, I think that's one of the good things about a Morth, Morth was one of the guys bridged the gap between when the stuff was all going on in 50s and 60s, and then collapsed afterwards, and then into the day. But as far as I don't know, if I see myself so much as a warrior, as someone who's been kind of inscripted in this, used military language, you know, I never wanted to be an exorcist, I tell people I still don't want to be an exorcist, but every time I try and get out of it, I feel like the lady talks to me back in, so I keep going. But for me, I see myself more as an academic, but I think that's actually one of the reasons why I'm a Lord of our meetings have me in this, precisely to take what the tradition of courage has always been in these patterns, and then apply it in modern content that actually give us, you know, the coherence and coherent understanding and continuum of ideology today. Well, I think that's one of the great things about modern technology, actually, kind of almost maybe counterintuitively, is that when we used to be boxed into a network television or radio specific times, and if other people are going to hear your message, they either had to be with you in a room or they were limited to other constraints. Now on the internet, I think we can have fuller discussions like this, and it's, you can get a much better understanding of where everyone is coming from, which is another reason why I'm really appreciative of you guys joining us today. Dan, I was hoping you could enlighten us now on how your book came about and just the Libre Christo method in general. Yeah, about 10, I guess it's been almost 10 years now, but it may be seven years now. We're, I was involved with Kyle Klange, who's father's right-hand man and case facilitator. We were doing some training at the Poblio Institute, working with some of the late teens. And Kyle says, I want to form this group called Libre Christo, and, you know, support Father Ripperger and for case management. Because what we found, there was major problems, and anyone, any experts will tell you, some of the major problems are the people that are coming to you aren't prepared. They don't have sufficient virtue. They have no understanding of prayer. They have a very weak will. They have no real desire to have any sort of active agency in their own liberation. They come and say, pray over me so I feel better. But at the same time, on the other side, so at the beginning, there was a deficiency in many people wanting help, there was no way to discern the psychological from the spiritual, because some people just, I have psychological problems. They don't need an exorcist. They need a therapist, and they need to get their mental health in order. But on the other side, what do you do with post-aftercare? When you do find, lead a soul, and there is a liberation, what do you do with that soul? They come very attached to the exorcist, and that's not healthy either. So the model that Father developed that we helped to work with and develop and put into practice is the four-phase protocol, and the book, the manual that's coming out is our phase two of the four phases. So this is a catechetical journey, a catechetical walk through 12 steps that you can either do it for yourself or you could, you know, our teams are also using this book as well for the catechetical portion of the four-phase protocol. But again, we fight an ancient enemy, and so the ancient weapons are best. But the question is, what are those ancient weapons? Father Amorth says that one confession is better than 20 exorcisms. Exorcism, I mean, confession is stronger than, is better than, confession is better than exorcism. Confession, you take souls from Satan, exorcism, you remove their bodies. So the most important thing is working on the state of grace and developing the level, sufficient level of virtue and holiness. That really makes the job of the exorcist much, much easier. By the time they get to the exorcist, which is our phase, well the phase three is utilizing the parish priest, by the time they get to the exorcist, those cases are very rare. Father put in his introduction of the book, the last year that he did statistics when he, before he moved to the Archdiocese, there were 600 cases that year came for, for assistance of the 600, 450 actually were discerned by Father and the team to, to have had obsession or higher, some level of diabolical affliction of the 600 that originally came, only three were actual possessions. So the bulk of people can tap into the resources that are common to all of us, the ordinary means, which is confession, the sacramental life, virtue, prayer, mental prayer, meditative prayer down the road, all these things, a sacrificial theology or spirituality of suffering, of offering up your suffering, integrating your trauma with good mental health practices to a Thomistic understanding of the human person. All these things are very critical in the ancient way that we've always been battling against the enemy and so the book kind of works those things in so the cases can now work themselves through this and there's a determinative figure, there's an objective criterion now to determine is this person, does he need prayer or they just need more pastoral help. So they finish page two and then they cycle either back into pastoral care into mental health care or they cycle through into more, more deliberate minor exorcism prayer. So this, this is just one part of the, of the package, but it's not written. I didn't write it with, with our teams in mind. I tried to write it with two audiences. One was our teams, but also that any Catholic can pick this up and learn how to make at the end of the day, the, the meat of this is a deep dive general confession. So where do you learn to remove the obstacles of grace? Where have I allowed permissions for the diabolic to get into my life? Where do I have unhealthy habits, defects in virtue, that sort of thing. And that, that is a, is an integral part of liberation. Whereas before a lot, we would just pray over everybody and hope for the best. And it was just kind of gunsling and sometimes it would take hours and hours and months and months and years and years and get very, we got a lot of movement, but not a lot of liberation because we didn't remove those attachment points. So this book is trying to identify those attachment points. And so to help people self identify those things, and that greatly assists to work with the ecstasy. And I want to get into some of those details with you in just a minute, Dan, but first, Father Rippenger, I know in your full word of the book, I saw that you, you wrote that people are always trying to get the easiest way through things, find the easiest solution. How has that been your experience? Uh, well, I generally call it the McDonald's road. People want to drive up, get their exorcism and then drive off without putting any effort into it whatsoever. But one thing, if anything, and that's just what Mrs. Thomas is saying, but by Jack, that's more than the people who end up possessed and go through the process of liberation. The real goal of God is to signify that through that process. And that requires a lot of work. This is also really going to have all the pressure and obsession that they have to be able to be willing to do a lot of the work in order to kind of climb the way out. The two other things that we started noticing, and this is one of the reasons why this phase two is so important. This first part is related by Kyle Clement, my assistant. He said, you know, one of the patterns you notice is that everything that's possessed has some area or theology at music around you, or that you're having a hard time giving a sense to. And as I went on, we've been able to find out that that was actually true. And so going through a kind of technical process can help identify that so that the person can work out before they even come to the section. Because as Dan mentioned, we've kind of thought a lot of this stuff because we would pray with people for months before we discover some little thing that even the demon was holding on, which could have been cleared up earlier on. The other part of this, we started to, part of it can be very helpless, is for the recognized, not with possession, even with obsession or oppression, but even in our more normal spiritual lives. There are areas of psychological compatibility that demons, when they tempt people, that they're influencing people, will develop and foster, often without the person even realizing that the demon is developing this psychological compatibility. So when you go through the secret pages of liberation that occur and they become liberated from possession, you can actually look at the degree of psychological separation you'll have to actually pin where they are in those secret pages, just from that, if you know what you're looking at. But the beauty of this stage two of the protocol is that it helps identify where the areas of catechesis that need to be straightened out and what kind of psychological compatibility can be there so that it's cleaned up. And then what we found is the time that you actually have to pray with people, it's much more contracted. It takes less time to liberate them. When it did, you just start praying with them. Because if you start praying with them, they get the relief, but then it stands out much longer because they are hidden areas. A lot of times the demons know where they are, they hide them. And so whereas this is a more objective way, ferret those things out first and then we can actually move forward. So this is one of the things that I think that, you know, in all of these, just learn that God is really trying to purify the person and get them what they need to be, both spiritually, psychologically, morally, that's when they're marching before actually live. And then it wants to liberate, they can stand on their feet. Very interesting stuff there for sure. Dan, I love the way that your book starts. And Father, you mentioned it in your forward as well with the analogy to David and Goliath and the five smooth stones. And then you talk about arming yourselves, ourselves with ancient weapons to fight an ancient enemy. And number one, I think applies to what Father was just talking about there, a renunciation of evil influences. Well, first you have to identify those, right, Dan? Right. So in the book of Revelation it says that the ancient enemy or the devil the accuser of our brethren accuses the brethren day and night before the throne of God. And so what is he using to accuse us with? He's accusing us with areas of our lives that we've given him permission and access to, through perhaps a past witchcraft work or working with, you know, or immoral behavior first and six commandment violations are the most common. And so people first have to look at those areas that they've allowed the enemy in. And sometimes those areas like Father had alluded to, this is something that is largely ignored by most other models of liberation. And that is the psychological compatibility. So looking at those areas of trauma, what areas in their life do I have a woundedness? Wherever there is, you know, you can have a, whatever there's a psychological obsession, that soul is very vulnerable to a spiritual oppression or even spiritual obsession. So cleaning up those areas of psychological trauma, the very first case that we had, we were working through the early, very early beta stages of the protocol. We had a case of a young woman that was, that was a date raped at age 16. And she didn't even live in our diocese. She was the, she was the daughter of some people that came to us, but she was interested in health. So we were using the phase two book that's here that we're now the manual, we actually just had that, the trifold preparation for a general for confession by the fathers of mercy put out. So Kyle and I, Kyle kind of worked through with me. And so I was working through with this couple. We had her coming in on zoom. The parents were there, but we put them through the protocol, 30 days of strict prayer, media fast, the entire family construct is praying. This woman had, she was at that time, 26. She had been living with this obsession, spiritual obsession. It happened very quickly for most of her adult life since, since that incident, that traumatic incident, we started working with her weekly parents, everybody's the whole family siblings, the whole family starts praying. So she, so she's praying and doing these prayers and I'm working with her weekly, working on the cycle of logical trauma. How do you integrate this with, you know, with the suffering of Christ? How do you, how do you learn how to unite your suffering with Christ suffering? They're praying, she's going back, she goes back to the church. She's back into the state of grace and now she's growing. And this is going, this only takes about six, eight weeks, about eight weeks in. I said, look, I think you need to do a general confession. There's a priest in your city that I know that I know is versed in minor exorcism. You should go see him. She shows up at the parish. He's on a sabbatical for six months, six months. And so the father or the priest that's standing in says, sure, I've got to hear your confession. She does a quasi general confession after this disciplined prayer, prayer regimen, the whole family's praying. And after about eight weeks, she goes to a priest. He just does his regular job as a priest. He hears her confession and anything else he may have done in the internal forum, she comes out and is liberated from an obsession level of affliction and is now years later a very successful nurse practitioner and has married and children, et cetera. So the point that God was really showing us was through these first initial cases, this actually works. And part of it is the imposition of order, the establishment of removing those areas that I'm having psychological compatibility with the enemy, that I'm exposing myself, my vulnerabilities, so that I can identify them. You can't hit a target if you can't see it. So learning how to be more accurate in your prayer is very important. So we walked this case, the first case we put through receives a liberation. It had nothing to do with an exorcist or anything fantastic. It happened in the confessional. And it was, I think the Lord's way of saying, you're on the right path. This is how the normal way for liberation takes place. And Father, that kind of reminds me what we were talking about before. That didn't sound like the easy way out. And it sounded like the work was put in to get done what needed to get done. Yeah, absolutely. I think that two parts of the first is that, as I mentioned, God wants people to have to go through these struggles. He precisely, the reason why he allows eyeball confessional confession sometimes even confession in a person's life is precise through the process of the struggle that they'll develop virtue on a level that they normally wouldn't other develop. But I've also had people who we, when I was through the next twist, I did what I was trained to do, which you can have you listen to people's story, it seems credible, and they don't seem like they have psychological issues when you come ahead to start paying with them. And so I hit this one kicker, this one woman, where she was 15 at the time. And we said the pair, by the grace of God, in like three or four days, was actually liberated from possession of a demon of fear. And then I told, I started after she was 15 with her mother, and now that I said, look, what you're going to have to start leading a Catholic life. Well, it seems like one of the people that just wanted to be cleaned up, she left about three months later. The parents said we think she's possessed again. So I talked to her, and it turns out shortly after we had liberated, she went out and committed a sin, part of this compatibility issue that she filled with even to this day. It was part of the compatibility issue. And I told the parents at this point, I don't think she's serious about cutting off this compatibility. But if only the other priestess, I didn't want to do it, I'd allow them to do it. So another priest said, a week later, she was liberated again, she got cleaned up, not having to do any work on her own, which I think was God's mercy. But then she did it again, and she ended up doing something even worse after that. And so now, well, we can't work with you until you go through this protocol, because you've got to be able to break that compatibility. And I think that's real danger with people that want to just get cleaned up by the way, and kind of go back to their normal life. In fact, you'll often hear people, well, I just want to read this so I can live a normal life. When they really should think of themselves, well, God's telling me to a life above and beyond the normal life, right? Just why should we primarily create that level of virtue that is at that level that he's telling in direct proportion to the battle, the spiritual battle that he's asked to be to fight. And so I think a lot of people, when you just start to agree with right away, you end up with a higher rate of recidivism. We don't, people do you really follow your activism as to the protocol. They're developing virtue along the way, getting rid of all this stuff, which is what that mandate is all about, getting rid of all these paddibilities, all these issues in various spiritual life that can cause recidivism. Whereas if we put them to protocol, they go to that second place and they do that, go through that manual. Once they are integrated, odds of falling back are very strong. Dan, it sounds like this plays right into the medical model that you speak about in your manual that it's not just a bandaid to heal. It's actually getting to the spiritual, psychological wounds. And then I guess that would be the good medical model these days, right? Then actually healing and getting to the place that everyone needs to be. Right. The medical model is what is how Kyle and father established it. Exorcist is your heart specialist or your brain surgeon. And most of the time they'll show up and they'll say, Father, this is the type of surgery I have. This is what I have. I've been looking it up on Google and this is what I need you to do for me so I can be liberated. And it just doesn't work that way. It's absurd if you think of that, but we do that. This is what Father Morse said and I quoted him in the book. There's always a strong temptation for charismatic sensitives and exorcists of finding the quickest way to heal by going outside of the common sacred means to obtain grace. Those who seek solutions outside of the ordinary channels of obtaining grace, he says, unwittingly fall into the trap of magic. We try to just do this quick fix to alleviate the suffering. But in the medical model, you've got your exorcist as your brain surgeon, your heart surgeon. Your general practitioner is your parish priest. People say, oh, no, you need the charism to drive out demons. No, if you're ordained, that's part of the three of Munara, the three-fold office of duty, obligations, responsibilities of the priesthood, the Munu's Rajendi. And so the priest has the duty to rule, to reign as part of, in Persona Crescia, their sacerdotal ontological identity as priest. This is part of who they are. People say, oh, that's clericalism. No, I don't think so. I think it's Catholicism because this is the way Christ has established the hierarchy of the church. And so the third phase is working with the parish priest who has his own authority over the individual as pastor and as Roman Catholic priest. And so the second phase, the first and second phase, you've got the lay associate. So we assist in the prayer sessions, but we're hero support. The heroes are the exorcists and the parish priest. And so we're the nurses, we're the prep staff that are getting them ready. I jokingly tell the cases that I work with, I'm sorry, but I'm nurse ratchet. And you're not going to get through to see Father until you get through and do what we're asking. Like she told me, no cigarettes, right? I mean, so you got to have the lay people and we give some distance between these cases and the priest and work them through. Many, many times we would sit down before the protocol. We would get the person prepared for prayer. And I would always ask, so did you go to mass this weekend? And they'd say, oh, no, the demon wouldn't let me. The demon wouldn't let me. Did you go to confession? No, the demon won't let me. The priest comes out, they pray a lot of movement, a lot of activity, no liberations, no liberations because they weren't in the state of grace. Their soul wasn't in position. Didn't have the merit to receive the graces. God can work outside of that, but the norm is that state of grace is very critical for liberation to the reception of this sacramental. Father Rivengar, I wonder if you could comment on that, that concept, the quote that sticks out to me that is the magic part of that. I imagine that's a pretty common misconception that you deal with. Yeah, I think the description of the description I quote more right now is always looking for quick easy fix. And it's usually the normal brawling that an activist experiences. I think that one of the things when you read Morse, why realize he had to face this drug out well, it takes times years to liberate people. And that it's a big, it's a brawling. I have seen any priests who started being exorcists. They'll give you a place that starts grinding for a while. And instead of just resorting to prayers, especially after being our media car, specifically under that title, revealed to me what I'm supposed to do. And usually like this would come in an ordinary gray, we're not looking for something charismatic, but she would just give the grace, yes, to the sea. This is what actually needs to be done at this point. But instead of grinding it out, being willing to take the time that God had preordained regarding the person's growth and holiness, we want to do this quick fix. And so I've actually seen an exorcist do one of two things. Actually, three obvious nurses I just didn't know. They used to have to grind it out and praying, asking for a gift of knowledge, to give you the understanding of these things, okay? Or to give you the talents you want to do, right with me. But the, a lot of times, sometimes I've seen exorcists, because demons start suggesting incursion. When they're talking, they say, oh, well, you have to do exorcianity. And that's the standard actually contrary to the first man or contrary to the teaching of the church. And exorcists will have been intensively involved in the psychologically in the case, and they get much down the rabbit hole. And so the end of doing so, that ends up making them out, they're actually in powers agreement. Or the other thing is, is that they'll try and find somebody who reported has a gift of sermon experience, you know, and so they'll say, you know, I have a gift of sermon experience. But my experience, I've only, all the people that I've ever met, that claim to have the gift of sermon experience, there's only one. Do I honestly, we've had it. Most people that are intuitive, they might have a good sense to these things. But that doesn't mean that they actually have a gift, which God reveals to them. So like in the case of the woman that I knew that actually had an authentic gift, you can say to her, I'm working with a woman who's 40 years old, she could then tell you how many demons there were, what parts of the body to present, how they got in, like the most likely to get them out, and a variety of aspects of the dynamics of the cave. And whereas other people, it's really more of a human thing, we're seeing more and more. That's the tendency towards magic is starting to occur, is where people are actually striving to get knowledge or answers or use that for knowledge, which will quickly get this thing done, rather than just being willing to suffer the process for the sake of your salvation. And Dan, I imagine with your experience, along with Father Rippingers, you learn to separate those who are truly wanting and searching for doing things the right way. And then those who are looking for that quick fix or looking for the magic that you spoke about. Right, the magic that Father Morph's talking about isn't necessarily in the person that's asking for help, it's in the practitioners. He says charismatic, sensitive, and exorcist, and so they're often looking for a quick way out too. I've had priests will call and they'll say, hey, this person that had a priest call, this guy did this, and he did this ceremony, and he was in this cult group, and then he did this satanic ritual, and he starts describing all these horrible things, and he said, what prayer should I pray to liberate him? And I said, I don't know. I mean, you know, I don't know. It sounds to me, I know a Jewish carpenter who was an exorcist that said, this type only comes out through prayer and fasting. And he says, man, I'm doing so much fasting, I'm losing weight and on and on, I hardly eat, I'm mortifying myself. And I said, Father, with all due respect, I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about that guy. He's the guy that did the ritual. He's the guy that offended God deeply with First Commandment Violations. St. John Chrysostom, Dr. The Church, said that scripture applies to both the exorcist and to the inergamine, the person that's afflicted. But the work isn't up to the exorcist. The exorcist and his team, we just are there with pickaxe. This is spade work. This is grunt work. The work is done between the soul and God, and we're there in support of the exorcist and their role as ministers of the church and Persona Christi. We're there to assist, but ultimately that mystery between Christ and the soul, you're not going to circumvent that. Sometimes God will allow the suffering of this person to stay there until he mines out all the graces of that suffering for not just for the individual, but for the whole family, the whole construct. When I'm doing intakes, I'm watching. I was just a cab scout in the military, so I'm still just doing cab scout work. I'm looking at the individual as coming to us for help, but in my alter vision, my side vision, I'm watching who in this family construct is in the most need of salvation, whose soul is most gravely endangered, and then getting that person to connect their suffering to this soul. It could be the soul of those who abused and the father who sexually abused them. It could be the soul of their ex-husband or their mother or whatever, a child that's suffering. God might be allowing you to suffer to pour out more grace into the entire familial construct, and that's just going to take time to work through. And Dan, you label this or subtitle this a field manual for spiritual combat. I'm wondering what exactly you're hoping that people who pick up your book and read it can take specifically? Is that identifying that you just talked about? Yeah, I tried to walk you through. I use a lot of analogies to help it make it understandable or make it interesting because this is not a textbook, this is a manual. A manual is tactics, it's a tactical manual. So in combat you have tactics, you have strategies, and then you have combat multipliers. A Cobra helicopter was a combat multiplier. It increased the multiplication, it was a force multiply, it increases the power, the fighting capacity. So we've got three books coming with Dan. This one is a tactical manual. This teaches you the hand-to-hand tactics. Strategy is the bigger picture. That's the primer that's coming out. But this is a tactical manual. The force multiplier is the book on the Blessed Mother, using and understanding why we hold her in such high regard with hyperdullias as the teachings of the church. Why do we hold her in such high regard? But this manual here is to give practical tactical advice, which is why I use David and Goliath, I use Rogers rules for Rangers, what the US Army Rangers use, some examples from military experience. So you can see this is how we fight in physical combat. Now how do we do that? Father Amorth kicked things up. He brought this back to the forefront and was very effective. But now the enemy changes. The battlefield shifts. Just like when we were in Iraq, I witnessed the largest artillery barrage in the largest tank engagement from a helicopter watching it. I saw these things in military history in the largest tank engagement since World War II, and now we hardly have tanks. We have no artillery because the enemy regrouped. They said, no, we cannot beat the Americans in an open battlefield. So what do they do? They take off their uniforms, they hide behind civilians, they drew us into hand-to-hand combat, they went primitive. And so the military had to adjust and go back to a more primitive way of fighting. And the way I see this, again, as a scholar, as a military veteran, as someone who works with Father Ripperger and with cases locally as well, I see the battlefield shifting. And what this manual is doing is bringing us back to practical Catholic norms that are workable, that's taking what Father has written, two beautiful works of psychology of mental health and dominion, and trying to boil those down for the layperson to read those and go, oh, okay, that makes sense, that makes sense, and making it a practical tactical manual for lay Catholics. Father Ripperger, did you see it in a similar way, this book, and what people could take from it? Yeah, exactly. I think it's really, it's a practical work, which I think is very beneficial. And I think it also, it does import, because it gives you something, what the battlefield actually looks like, what the dynamics are on the battlefield, and also what your response needs to be in relationship to what battle is going to entail. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make with thinking that, you know, spiritual warfare is highly predictable. There's not much that you can do if you just rely entirely on God over your dad, that's true, but in a different way. And so they tend to think that, you know, you just use this app and pray, God, did you through the thing? Well, one sentence is true, but humans are extraordinary consistent, they act always almost in the same way because their nature didn't change, their sin locked, they took a specific way of thinking, and then God regulates how much interaction, and how that interaction occurs, they're very predictable. But that also means then, so is the battlefield. And so this is, I think, one of the beauties of Emmanuel, it's an actually provides people with the practical side of what they need to engage that battle effectively. And Dan, towards the end of the book, in the conclusion, you have a quote that stuck out to me talking about warriors now and fighting on the battlefield of faith, the true soldier fights not because he hates what's in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him. What do you hope people take from that? Yeah, I think the point of that, the Chesterton quote, that we have to fight out of love, we have to fight out of love for our families, we have to fight out of love for our children, we have to regroup as Catholics and put first things first. And so I want men in particular to see, this is where we're fighting, you know, when I looked at my enemy, the Iraqi army, many years ago, yeah, there's a certain amount of animosity towards them, but the true soldier, I'm not out there because I hate them. I'm out there because I love this country. I love my family. I love the people that are behind me that I've left behind. And the spiritual combat needs to be the same way. We need to do this out of love for our families, love for the church, right? I also put a quote in there from the comment of martyrs, office of readings. We are warriors now fighting on the battlefield of faith and God sees all that we do. The angels watch and so does Christ. What honor and glory to do joy, to do honor, glory and joy to do battle in the presence of God and to have Christ to prove our victory. Let us arm ourselves in full strength to prepare ourselves for the ultimate struggle with blameless hearts, true faith and yielding courage. What honor and glory and joy to do battle in the presence of God and to have Christ to prove our victory. So I just want to encourage Catholics not to focus on the devil, you know, because that becomes very, very easy in this particular apostolate or ministry for the priest is to focus on what the devil is doing and all the supernatural things. Know that we're battling an ancient battle. Catechism says this has been our battle. Man's history is one of dour combat from the beginning of time until the end of time, says the catechism. So what joy, what joy to do battle, you know, like the Maccabeans says they battled Judas and his brothers battled joyfully the wars of the Lord. And so how do we do that and be joyful in what we do and not focus on what the devil is doing. Let's focus on what Christ is doing and fight for the right reasons. Father Rivinger, you get that takeaway from the Chesterton quote as well about battling not what's in in front of you, but what's behind you. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, as exorcists, you can't, you can't even have hatred even for the demons in a certain sense. Although that's kind of made for the description of the perfect thing. I hate some of the, well, let's take that reference that this actually is a reference to with the demons. We have to have perfect turning play for them. It's just that you can't love them obviously. But the point is that the real shooting, you see this even in the person who is battling it, even in life of the exorcist, is it's an opportunity to grow in love of God, because in addition to things being revealed about the same God, which is the real ancient stuff, all the stuff that people see on Hollywood, yeah, we've seen that, but it's not the type of stuff that's really interesting. What's interesting is how good God is in this process, how merciful he is, how beautiful and wonderful the saint are, and how powerful some of the angels are, etc. And so it's a real love that you start to grow for God. And ironically, even though you're against the battle, basically over the course of time, the exorcist, we should actually become more unique, because you have to be framed, your appetites war, because the demons will kind of pick at that. But in point of fact, the demons want you to hate them, because they want your focus to be on them, even if it's bad. And as long as it's not on God, whereas if your focus is entirely on God, even if it's a process, then you become quasi immune to their attacks into what they're trying to achieve in your life. And so in the end, it's really more about our love of God and God and building a charity. Because as an exorcist, this is a quasi spiritual work of mercy and a quasi corporate work of mercy. So ultimately, it's rooted in charity, or at least it has to be, if it's worked in it, it's rooted in the priest helping that dies, then it's going to be a big problem. But over the course of time, you begin to realize you can detach it, even from the demons, even when they face the things, you just become detached from what's going on with them. And then otherwise, you're not focusing on fact, these things are causing you a tremendous amount of damage, not necessarily exorcists, although they do attack you, but the person you're working with, whether your focus comes on what good God has shown regarding self in this process. In that vein, I guess we could see Hollywood's bringing this issue to light, even though not ideal, maybe a net positive, Dan. Well, I think they're trying to capitalize on it. There is across the board a general increase in the supernatural and the diabolic. I've said before that as we become as a nation, and that really as worldwide as we become a post-Christian nature of hordes of ores, so does supernatural and preternatural, the preternature of hordes of hordes of void. And so to be post-Christian, we're now becoming neo-pagan. And so we see this a resurgence of neo-paganism and other forms and people are, they don't know what to do. So look into Hollywood and Hollywood's giving them, the Shelling movies because they're fantastic. I think there's nothing fantastic about, there's no stories in this manual. This is just a basic grunt manual, a military-type manual. Pick this up. This is how you get out of this situation. This is how you walk your way through. If you notice in the table of contents, there's 12 lessons, but 12 lessons, the exact middle lesson is the Blessed Virgin Mary. She is absolutely the key. In the military, the infantry is known as the Queen of Battle. And so understanding what a warrior queen is, why she has such a high place of hyperdulia, a high place of honor of her, why Clannan Law says that we should all have a filial devotion to her, her role in liberation. Walking up to that point and then going into a general deep dive confession based on what Father Ripperbreath put together and his deliverance prayers for the Solati and other sources, identifying defects in virtue, identifying areas of repeated sin, getting the soul clean, and then learning the clean from the unclean, getting the habit of prayer in place, and then starting to introduce how to do lexioduvena and mental prayer. These are all essential areas of combat, the way the church has always battled the enemy. So there's an interlogic into the progression of what this book walks the reader through, and so far we've had good success in some of the beta trials we've done with different cases. That's certainly good to hear, and it seems like a good way to wrap this up, Father Ripperbreath, or anything you would like to add? No, just that we're appreciative of Tan, of publishing with animals, so I'm very appreciative of Tan having put out the biography of a whore. I think they'll both be very big contributions. I think the biography of a whore that you're putting out is very timely in the movies where people have an analysis and you'll find out what the real man is like, but then also this field manual like people to a lot of people, a tremendous amount of good. Well, really appreciate you guys joining us here today. Father, if you don't mind, why don't we conclude with a prayer? Sure. Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed are thou, those women, and blessed is the fruit I will achieve. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Thank you Father Rippegurf. Thank you, Dan, for both your work, your time today, and your contributions to this Tan conversation. We really appreciate all that you've done. Thank you, Tim.