As a cradle Catholic, I used to take the sacraments for granted until I was asked to teach others about them. As I began reading about, thinking about, and teaching about them, what I found is that the sacraments are supernatural and powerful. They fill a deep and intense longing that we each have to be in touch with God and they open our minds and imagination to the possibility of the supernatural world. Accordingly, they can save us from falling into two common heresies prevalent in our time, scientism and the New Age movement.

In order to examine the supernatural and powerful aspect of the sacraments I would like to share an excerpt from a true story reported by the Indiana Star Newspaper from about ten years ago. This is a scary story but it has a happy ending.

It’s a tale, they say, that started with flies.

In November 2011, Latoya Ammons’ family moved into a rental house on Carolina Street in Gary Indiana, a quiet lane lined with small one-story homes. Big black flies suddenly swarmed their screened-in porch in December, despite the winter chill.

“This is not normal,” Latoya’s mother, Rosa Campbell, remembers thinking. “We killed them and killed them and killed them, but they kept coming back.”

There were other strange happenings, too.

After midnight, the mother and daughter both said, they occasionally heard the steady clump of footsteps climbing the basement stairs and the creak of the door opening between the basement and kitchen. No one was there.

Even after they locked the door, the noise continued.

The mother, Rosa said she awoke one night and saw a shadowy figure of a man pacing her living room. She leaped out of bed to investigate and found large, wet bootprints.

The daughter Latoya said the family’s unease turned to fear.

It was about 2 a.m. Normally, grandma, mom and children would have been asleep, but they were mourning the death of a loved one with a group of friends.

Latoya, who was in her mom’s bedroom, startled everyone by screaming, “Mama! Mama!”

Rosa, the grandmother said she ran into her bedroom, where her then-12-year-old granddaughter and a friend were staying.

Both Latoya the mom and Rosa the grandma said the 12-year-old was levitating above the bed, unconscious.

“I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ ” Rosa said. ” ‘Why is this happening?’ “

Eventually, Rosa said, her granddaughter descended onto the bed. The girl woke up with no memory of what happened. The people who were visiting that night refused to return.

What Latoya and Rosa say happened next also was detailed in a DCS report of a family case manager’s interviews with medical staff.

They went to their family physician, Dr. Geoffrey Onyeukwu (on -ye-kawoo), on April 19, 2012.

Dr. Geoffrey told The Star it was “bizarre.”

“Twenty years, and I’ve never heard anything like that in my life,” he said. “I was scared myself when I walked into the room.”

Rosa said her grandsons cursed the doctor in demonic voices, raging at him. Medical staff said the youngest boy was “lifted and thrown into the wall with nobody touching him,” according to a DCS report. “He began to have a weird smile on his face and he charged at the grandmother’s stomach and head-butted her several times until she grabbed his hands and started praying. “[He] was speaking in a different deep voice saying ‘It’s time to die,’ ‘l will kill you,’ and staring around the room. “[He] had a weird grin on his face and began to walk backwards while the grandmother was holding his hand and he walked up the wall backwards while holding the grandmother’s hand and he never let go.

“He flipped over and landed on his feet in front of the grandmother and sat down in the chair.”

After failing to get help from psychics and soothsayers Latoya Ammons was directed to call a Catholic priest. Fr. Mike Maginot responded to the call and after the initial interview in which he placed a crucifix on the forehead of Ammons she began to convulse, Fr. Maginot sought permission from the bishop to pursue the path of formal exorcisms.

The priest said he blessed the family’s new home to prevent more problems.

After that, Latoya said, her nightmares subsided.

In the third and final exorcism at the end of June 2012, Fr. Mike Maginot said he prayed and berated the demons in Latin. It would be the last time Latoya saw Fr. Mike. She and her mother drove back to Indianapolis, where Latoya regained custody of her kids and they say they now live without fear.

Like almost every other true story about exorcisms, it is only the Catholic priest who can put it to an end. This is because the Catholic priest continues the ministry of Jesus Christ and has access to the deposit of grace that Christ earned from the cross.

This story about Latoya and her family was turned into a script and pitched for a full-length movie but it could not get the funding because the film studios said we already have so many other movies like it. As more and more people become less religious and reject Christianity and other traditional religions they seem to become more fascinated with the occult. If nature abhors a vacuum then so does the super-nature.

Hollywood celebrities have led the way through these dark and dangerous doors.  People such as Ariana Grande, Madonna, Jay Zee, Beyonce, and Katy Perry are well-known new-age pagans. Singer and songwriter Adele credits spiritual crystal healing for calming her pre-show nerves holistically. Spencer Pratt runs his own online crystal shop, Pratt Daddy Crystals, and told Entertainment Weekly that he has “spent thousands of dollars” on a wizard coach. “I sage everything, all the time. Constantly sageing,” Mary-Kate Olsen told Vogue in 2017. “I don’t want bad energy,” she added. Tom Brady said his wife Gisele “always makes a little altar for me at the game because she just wills it so much,” complete with pictures of his children. “And I have these little special stones and healing stones and protection stones and she has me wear a necklace and take these drops she makes, I say all these mantras,” Brady said. “And I stopped questioning her a long time ago. I just shut up and listen.” Brady said at first he thought, “This is kind of crazy,” but it worked.

Perhaps this fascination with magic, the occult and fantasy, in part, grows from an intense dissatisfaction with ordinary life. We are created with a body and soul. Therefore we are natural and supernatural beings. We were made to have God in our life. Sacraments fill a deep and intense longing that we each have to be in touch with God. Without God and without religion we have no way to fill this hole within and we are left hanging and restless with an intense innate desire for communion with God.

CS Lewis said this was called innate desire and that it is a desire for another world.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Our Catholic faith teaches that this other world, the world on the other side is both good and evil, light and dark. There are angels and fallen angels, heavenly peace and hellish violence, saints and the damned.

These celebrity examples were not meant to cast judgment on them but rather to point out that without God and religion, we may lapse into a world with no meaning and no purpose. Sooner or later this leads to sad, depressed, jaded, and empty people. When people encounter the reality of supernatural power by opening these forbidden doors of the occult they seek raw spiritual power without the grace of the cross and the moral responsibility that Jesus demands.

Given the effects of Original Sin, that they are seeking to fill an internal, spiritual hole and emptiness is legitimate. The question for Catholics is, ‘Why wouldn’t we want the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, God’s grace to fill the hole, rather than witchcraft, sage, crystals and mantras which amount to a sort of counterfeit Catholicism?’.

Furthermore, where the occult makes unsatisfied, desperate people, the sacraments make saints. The sacramental grace we receive fills us with peace, strength and spiritual life. Whereas the occult rituals suck the life out of people and in some cases violently oppresses their thoughts and imagination to the point of severe, suicidal depression.

The sacraments are the opposite. They bring life over death, light over dark, freedom over enslavement, courage over fear, love over hate, union over division, healing over harm, forgiveness over vengeance. ‘Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more’(Romans 5:20) Good is bigger and more powerful than evil.

Sacraments also shield us from the temptation to doubt the possibility of a supernatural world. We, in the name of science, all have grown up with a strong tendency to be hyper-skeptical. We are told that modern, educated people are not supposed to believe in the power of religious rituals. Sadly, many people believe that they have to give up faith in order to ‘follow the science’. This is what we call the heresy of scientism.

There’s a story about these French Dominican Sisters (Catholic nuns), each highly educated. They studied physics and chemistry and they each earned a doctorate in some form of science. As they walked in silence across the university campus in the French countryside, as was their custom, suddenly from the gray skies above there was a monstrous clap of thunder. Immediately, as if they choreographed it, they all made the sign of the cross. Keep in mind these are people who could give college lectures detailing with scientific precision the cause of thunder…and yet they embraced the event as a religious experience. They refused to make that compromise of exchanging faith for science.

With this sacramental mindset every day we are living in a grace-filled world. The world around us becomes a sacred visible sign of unseen grace where we see grace as God’s life, power, gifts and presence, in us and around us.

Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and Holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures… As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace (Fr. Andrew Greeley).

We are not talking about magic. The efficacy of the sacraments depends on a response from us. We have to be open to risk responding to God in faith. This is why over and over again in the Gospels Jesus, after healing someone will say “Your faith has saved you’.

C.S. Lewis said our salvation through faith and grace looks like a butterfly type metamorphosis from an ordinary person to a son or daughter of God. “Jesus said He will make us a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale). His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. When he said we must be perfect, he meant what he said. Nothing less than that!”

Neither science nor the occult can match this kind of power.