Exorcist Shortage Signals Spiritual Crisis, Churches Must Act

The surge in requests for exorcisms, the shifting American view of the supernatural, and how Christian institutions responded are the central threads here; this piece looks at the supply-and-demand crunch for trained exorcists, the cultural forces that emptied spiritual authority from public life, and why careful discernment matters when confronting claims of demonic activity.

There are far more people asking for help with things they describe as demonic than there are priests trained to respond, and the gap is widening. Dioceses that once had one or two exorcists now count dozens, yet even that growth cannot keep pace with requests. The men on the front lines say the trend is clear and worrying.

At the same time, surveys show a curious split in American belief: many adults deny a traditional devil while still admitting to spiritual influence beyond the visible world. That contradiction is real and revealing, because it points to a culture that swapped a coherent Christian map for a grab bag of practices and beliefs. People are spiritually hungry, but the guideposts that used to organize that hunger have been removed.

Entertainment, apps, and online subcultures are often blamed for this shift, and they deserve some of that blame. Horror, occult content, and platforms that market mystical practices supply both tools and temptation, but they are not the origin. They operate inside a vacuum created when spiritual authority and vocabulary were abandoned.

The divorce between belief in unseen powers and belief in Christ’s lordship has practical consequences. Polling reveals broad spiritual openness alongside widespread theological incoherence, and that combination produces real-world effects. When people have appetites for the transcendent but no framework to navigate it, they become vulnerable to bad ideas and bad actors.

Barna, Springtide, and other researchers note behaviors that used to be marginalized—daily tarot use, astrology subscriptions, witchcraft content views—are now mainstream enough to show up in data. Those numbers matter because they signal transactional commitment: people spend money and time on these things. That is rarely done purely out of curiosity.

The Church’s institutional experience brings much-needed restraint to this conversation. Catholic practice treats most cases as medical or psychological first and demands careful training and authorization before any ritual is attempted. That patient process protects both the vulnerable and the credibility of the few cases that are genuinely anomalous.

Journalists and commentators would do well to copy that discipline: test claims, rule out ordinary explanations, and avoid sensational declarations. A charge of possession is not a rhetorical weapon and should not be scattered across headlines. Rigorous inquiry is the best defense against both false alarms and bad theology.

Italian priests who have seen more requests in recent years describe people who, in the words of one, feel that their lives are no longer in their own hands. Some of those cases are untreated illness, some are despair, and some reflect the corrosive effect of content designed to erode conscience. The remaining cases, priests insist, sometimes resist easy explanation.

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

That image is uncomfortably specific: the problem is not a filthy, wrecked soul but an empty, well-kept one. Western culture cleaned up the visible trappings and threw out the catechisms, warnings, and practices that once shaped moral imagination. We celebrated the renovation and skipped the move-in, and vacant houses do not stay empty for long.

The retreat from a robust language of spiritual danger was often self-inflicted. Many pulpits softened cosmic stakes to make the gospel more palatable, and in doing so removed a vital category for people in real distress. When ordinary pastoral systems lack a place for spiritual struggle, people look elsewhere—often to practitioners who traffic in the very things that hollowed out the space in the first place.

The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ should shine unto them. 2 Corinthians 4:4

Blindness like that rarely shows up as overt hostility; it operates by default and omission, steering people toward other guides. That intelligence, if you call it that, moves quietly through institutions, appetites, and incentives. It prefers to be unnoticed because secrecy is advantage.

None of this licenses assigning possession to public figures or using spiritual language to score political points; such moves cheapen the doctrine and obstruct honest inquiry. The prudent path is measured: protect the vulnerable, insist on testing, and recover a vocabulary that recognizes there are real powers at work without resorting to easy explanations or conspiracy claims.