I begin today with awful news about Father Carlos Martins, the Catholic exorcist I’ve praised recently in this place. This broke over the weekend:
A St. Jude relic traversing the United States came to a stop this week, while the priest organizing the tour faces an Illinois police investigation over alleged inappropriate conduct involving children.
The priest, Fr. Carlos Martins, is well-known for ”The Exorcist Files,” a 2023 podcast series featuring dramatic audio portrayals of allegedly demonic encounters Martins claims to have experienced in ministry as an exorcist.
According to a statement from Queen of the Apostles parish in Joliet, Illinois, Martin was accused Thursday of an unspecified “incident” involving students which prompted Fr. Michael Lane, parish moderator, to contact the police.
Martins “was confronted with the information,” Lane wrote, and “we informed the priest that he must depart from our parish and our diocese.”
You might assume, as I initially did, that “inappropriate conduct involving children” involves sexual misconduct. It’s not true. It’s not remotely true! I gathered more information on the incident — information I am not yet authorized to make public, but will as soon as police finish their investigation — but I can assure you that this is nonsense. As we will all soon know, it’s an example of an innocent Catholic priest held up to humiliation and contempt, including by Catholic authorities, in a hysterical overreaction by people eager to believe the worst about all priests.
I have every confidence that Father Martins will be exonerated, and soon. Watch this space for the whole story, as soon as I can tell it. It’s important to me, though, that you all know that this is a bullsh*t slander against a priest who did nothing wrong. You all know that Rod Dreher is the last person to side automatically with a cleric accused of wrongdoing against a child. My outrage over this kind of thing, and decades of lying and cover-up by Catholic authorities, cost me my Catholic faith. But justice is justice; what Father Martins is suffering now is profoundly unjust. Even after he is cleared, there will be many people who assume he is some kind of dirtbag abuser.
Note well that this happened right after his excellent new book, The Exorcist Files, was released. It’s not the only bad thing that has happened surrounding the book’s publication. Shortly before, Father Martins had an accident that broke two of his ribs. And his literary agent heard a noise in his house, and went downstairs to find that a pipe had burst, flooding the first floor. The agent, an older man, slipped on wet tile, broke two ribs, and sustained a head injury. Now this.
This is not exculpatory in the Martins case, heaven knows, or in any particular case, but you should know that veteran exorcists are used to this kind of thing. Another exorcist of my acquaintance endured a false claim along the lines of what Father Martins now suffers. The Enemy will take any opportunity he can to destroy exorcists. You will all know exactly what I’m talking about when police file the results of their investigation, and I report it here. The Diocese of Joliet has a shameful record of abuse and cover-up, which no doubt accounts for its throwing poor Father Martins to the dogs over an absurd and malicious accusation. Again: you’ll see. Wait. Withhold judgment. As I see it, this is another case of a blameless priest having to pay the price for the crimes of abuser priests, and the longstanding, contemptible indifference of Catholic bishops.
Today’s newsletter continues below the paywall, after one more item. I want the whole world to know, though, that it is absolutely necessary to withhold judgment of this priest until the whole story comes out.
The news every day out of Great Britain gets worse, as wokeness manifests ever more fiercely as soft totalitarianism. How much longer will it remain soft is anybody’s guess, but the trend lines are terrible. Sadly, there is no better time for the British edition of Live Not By Lies to have hit bookstores in Blighty.
The Cambridge professor and free speech advocate James Orr penned the introduction to the UK edition. In it, Orr wonders why it is that so many of the great anti-totalitarian novels of our time are set in Britain, a liberal democracy:
One answer to the conundrum is that it is because Britain had hitherto resisted the tyrannies that bedevilled the European continent for so many centuries that it has so often been imagined as dystopia. Each of these writers knew that the shock of contemplating Britain’s descent into totalitarianism horrifies us more than that of any other country, real or imagined.
And yet in the four years since the publication of Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies, Britain has lurched more rapidly than perhaps any other Western nation into the soft despotism that this book warned us so eloquently was becoming a reality. Britain is now tangled in byzantine webs of legislative and regulatory incursions on free expression unimaginable only two decades ago.
Global indices of press freedom no longer rank the nation that incubated the liberty of the Fourth Estate in the top twenty-five countries. Every year around three thousand people are arrested in Britain for speech violations. London is now one of the most heavily surveilled cities on the planet outside China. A woman has twice been arrested for praying silently outside an abortion clinic. Britain’s prisons now hold dozens of citizens for crimes ranging from the possession of stickers bearing offensive slogans to making tasteless jokes in private communications. A flagship piece of legislation protecting academic freedom is now the target of a government intent on using its executive powers to overrule the settled will of Parliament. British police are now routinely recording people who are taking lawful actions deemed to be ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents,’ which is predictably leading to a chastening of free expression. In Scotland, a law has been passed that criminalises a vague and circularly defined offence of ‘hate speech’ that is almost certain to fuel self-censorship to a degree that has no precedent in that nation’s long history.
This rising tide of ‘soft totalitarianism’ – to borrow that apposite phrase first coined by Dreher but now in widespread use – cannot be blamed on the state alone. Vocal critics of the phenomenon, including a union expressly dedicated to protecting freedom of expression, have – irony of ironies – found their bank accounts and online payment platforms shuttered on the most spurious grounds and their applications to other service-providers immediately rejected without explanation. This sinister complicity between the administrative state and private corporations is an altogether novel development. It is one that not even the brave dissidents whose courage Dreher so eloquently documents in this book would have known, but a phenomenon to which he has been alerting his readership on an almost daily basis for nearly a decade.
I used the term “soft totalitarianism” because the emerging model of totalitarianism in the West has been characterized not by gulags and secret police, but is achieving the same results (the crushing of freedom) by gentler means. That, and it’s being done for therapeutic reasons, e.g., to protect privileged victim classes from alleged harm.
Again, though, in Britain today, people are going to jail for offenses against the regime. The softness is rapidly hardening. Britons of courage and conscience must resist. The brave men and women who, generations ago, fought the hard Soviet version, have much to teach us. Read Live Not By Lies; it’s as fresh as today’s news.
