An Irish Priest has said there is an urgent need for trained teams of people to lead "deliverance ministry" to help those who feel oppressed by evil spirits.
Fr Pat Collins, a priest of the Vincentian order in Blackrock and a Dublin based exorcist, made the appeal in this week's The Irish Catholic, Ireland's best-selling religious newspaper.
He told The Irish Catholic: "As Ireland has secularised, there is a crisis of truth, and a crisis of meaning – people are getting into all kinds of things they wouldn't have got into before. As a result, people are more open to spiritual forces that can be negative.
"I think there is a growing need for deliverance, undoubtedly, this needs to be acknowledged."
While exorcism is conducted by priests given special permission from the Catholic church, deliverance ministry is prayer for the person experiencing distress and wishing to heal emotional wounds caused by evil spirits.
Fr Collins, a trained psychologist, made similar calls in 2018.
He told the Irish Catholic then he was inundated with people who believed evil spirits afflicted them.
He said: "I think in many cases they wrongly think it, but when they turn to the church, the church doesn't know what to do with them and they refer them on either to a psychologist or to somebody that they've heard of that is interested in this form of ministry, and they do fall between the cracks and often are not helped."
Fr Collins also said he believed Covid was a "dress rehearsal" for the "great tribulation" and said God was giving people a chance to turn their lives around.
He said a talk he gave at the Divine Mercy conference in the RDS in 2019 before the outbreak of the virus was a "prophetic" talk on what was coming.
Speaking to the Irish Catholic, he said: "Part of it was saying that there were very clear messages coming through, reliable people, that a tribulation was on its way and it wouldn't be brought on by God, it would be the result of human fallibility but God would use it for divine purposes and that it would be by way of a chastisement that it would challenge people and it would attempt to purify them."
Get breaking news to your inbox by signing up to our newsletter.
