By Msgr. Robert J. Batule.

In William Peter Blatty's famous novel The Exorcist (1971), Chris McNeill, the mother of Regan (a mysteriously disturbed child) and a professional actress, arranged to meet Fr. Karras at the Key Bridge near Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Her awkwardness could not have been more obvious. She was not a Catholic; indeed, she wasn't even a believer. But she was desperate to find help for her daughter.

Probably to tamp down her anxiety, Chris decided to ask Fr. Karras, first, about his education. She thought Fr. Karras had originally been a psychiatrist and then left that life behind to become a priest. Fr. Karras explained that, no, he was, first, a priest, and then his Order, the Jesuits, sent him to medical school, and then on to training in psychiatry.

Chris was working her way up to the real reason for meeting with Fr. Karras. All of a sudden, she just blurted it out. "How do you go about getting an exorcism?" Fr. Karras was stupefied. "It just doesn't happen anymore," he said. Chris interjected, "Since when?" Without missing a beat, the priest replied, "Since we learned about mental illness. All these things that they taught me at Harvard."

The Harvard curriculum has never taken an official position on Catholic teaching and demonic possession. Nonetheless, Fr. Karras was certain, because of his time there, that the possessed individuals mentioned in the Gospels were schizophrenics. Thus, when Chris revealed it was not an exorcism for herself but for her daughter Regan, Fr. Karras responded, "forget about getting an exorcism."

But the conversation was not over. Fr. Karras was not going to change his mind on an exorcism for Regan, but Chris tried one last time. "Can't you even look at her?" "Well, as a psychiatrist, yes, I could." Chris was not satisfied. With all the force she could muster, she yelled at Fr. Karras: "She needs a priest."

In Fr. Karras' education, there was seldom if ever a comeuppance like the one given at that moment. With that single remark, enough doubt is cast upon the supposedly insuperable judgment that had bubbled up in the helping professions by that time that every unruly behavior can be explained and treated by applying the right therapy.

Several years before Blatty wrote The Exorcist, Philip Rieff published The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), whose subtitle is often overlooked: Uses of Faith after Freud. In the book's very last paragraph, there is this telling admission, a virtual lament: "A sense of well-being has become the end, rather than a by-product of striving after some superior communal end."

After taking his readers through an extensive study of the psychoanalytic thought of Freud and a few other psychoanalysts like Jung and Adler, Rieff argues that a stunning change has occurred in modern consciousness. It is the claim that well-being, psychologically understood, is the real goal of human life. Rieff then goes on to note that this has led to a fundamental change in our culture. And then comes the coup de grace. In such a perspective, which focuses of individual feeling, "there will be nothing further to say in terms of the old style of despair and hope."

That attitude was no doubt central to Fr. Karras' education at Harvard and in his subsequent psychoanalytic training. His quick dismissal of demonic possession, and his flat-out refusal to even considering an exorcism attests to how swift was the triumph of the therapeutic.

What remains puzzling, of course, was the failure on Fr. Karras' part to take into account the education he must have received in the seminary before his Ordination. Surely it would have included how to contend with the mysterium iniquitatis (the mystery of evil), by means such as prayer, spiritual direction, ascetical theology, and the sacramental life - all of which might very well have helped him at least to keep an open mind.

Fr. Karras started out seeing Regan as a psychiatrist as he said he would, but then something happened. He ...