My uncle, Jeremy Davies, who has died aged 87, was the chief exorcist for the Catholic church in England and Wales.
His religious beliefs were utterly alien to me. His views on the role of the devil in daily life were variously horrible (“homosexuality is the work of the devil”) and absurd (yoga just as bad). Because of an ancient breach in our family tree, I never met him until March 2020, just as the pandemic was descending. It was a strange encounter.
My first glimpse confirmed my worst fears – this thin, almost skeletal figure, cloaked in black, with only his dog collar blazing white. We shook hands in the church doorway where we had agreed to meet, and he led me to the vestry, where we sat and talked for four hours.
The austere figure proved to be unusually gentle in speech and manner. He told stories with a twinkle in his eye. He had humour! And empathy, shaking his head in wonder at the cruelty of his father, whom he loved but who had abandoned the children from his first marriage, including my own father.
Jeremy was born in Wimbledon, south-west London, the son of Idris Davies, a senior officer at RAF Fighter Command during Jeremy’s wartime childhood, and Elizabeth (nee Ponsonby). He went to the King’s school, Canterbury, then studied English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
He talked to me about the years after he left Oxford in 1957, feeling meaningless, bobbing around in pointless jobs, drifting towards the Catholic church and then studying medicine, and in 1967 going off to work as a doctor in poor communities in Africa. This was a kind man. But still baffling.
He had abandoned medicine because “I felt that I was being called by God.” Some of this was purely intellectual: he had read deeply into the history of Christianity and felt impelled to act. But with a touching honesty he confessed that his final decision to be ordained as a Catholic priest, in 1974, came after he did something he felt was “very wrong” and he wanted to atone. He worked as an assistant priest in London until 1987 when Cardinal Basil Hume appointed him exorcist.
Although for me – the atheist, yoga-loving former Guardian reporter – his rituals expelling the devil from buildings or people were entirely bizarre, I began to see glimpses of the world through his eyes, living with the certainty that a malevolent force of almost unlimited power was ruining vulnerable humans. And he – armed only with his crucifix and his god – challenged that force. In its face. Every day. In spite of its terrifying power. He was a very brave man, wasn’t he?
Most of his work had not involved ritual. Simply he had sat in this same vestry, very much like a psychotherapist, with someone whose life was dangling over disaster, allowing them to speak, giving comfort, offering a spiritual safety net which could break their fall.
An odd encounter, two strangers sharing nothing apart from a broken family root and yet at the end, we shook hands with real affection. I didn’t touch another human being for months. An invisible force of horrible power had descended and set about killing millions of people.
Jeremy is survived by his sister, Miranda.
