Free The Dark Sacrament by David Kiely Page B

talk.
    â€œWould you believe it?” she said with a rueful smile. “I lost my rosary on the bus. Isn’t that just like me?”
    Joe felt as though he were losing his mind. He stared in disbelief at Heather, but Heather was nodding sympathetically.
    â€œThe bus driver was very good,” Breda was saying. “He took my phone number and said he’d ring me if he found them. They were from Lourdes, you see, so God willing someone finds them and turns them in.”
    â€œGod willing,” Heather repeated kindly. “Don’t worry, Breda, I’m sure they’ll turn up. Won’t they, Joe?” She looked to him for confirmation.
    â€œWell, you…You’d bloody well know, Heather, wouldn’t you?” He was dazed by the unreality of the moment. “You would bloody know!”
    They stared at him in astonishment. Aunt Breda put a hand to her heart.
    â€œJoe! What’s got into you?”
    â€œMaybe you should ask her that!” He pointed a trembling finger at Heather. “I know what I need: a bloody drink, and to get as far away from her as possible!”
    He left the house. He needed to be alone with his thoughts. Heather needed help; they both did.
    The next day, at Joe’s insistence, Heather went to see her doctor. After speaking to her at length, he took Joe aside. The man confessed his bafflement; what he heard from Heather made no sense.
    Joe told him everything he knew. He thought that the doctor would laugh, accuse him and Heather of wasting his time with superstitious nonsense. He did not. He advised something few medical practitioners would even consider in the circumstances. He recommended that Heather go and see a Christian minister.
    There was a good man he knew—the best man in the “profession” of deliverance. They would have to travel, though: Canon William H. Lendrum lived eighty miles away, in Belfast.
    An appointment was made and, on a spring evening in 1992, Heather Mitchelson and Joe Kilmartin presented themselves at the home of the canon. He introduced them to his two assistants, and the exorcism began. The canon expected it would be no more arduous than celebrating a Eucharist….
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    We are sitting in the living room of Canon William Lendrum’s Belfast home as he relates the details of Heather Mitchelson’s case.
    At age eighty-two, he can look back over an astonishing four decades of battling demons and other paranormal entities. Duringthose decades, he tells us, he came upon few cases of actual possession. Heather’s was the exception rather than the rule.
    Yet he has witnessed an ever-increasing call on his ministry in recent years, and expresses a wish that the church hierarchy would take a more robust approach to exorcism.
    â€œPeople are a little afraid of this subject,” he says. “They don’t wish to be reminded of the ugly side of life, the more frightening side. They believe that by bringing such things into the open they leave themselves vulnerable. They don’t seem to realize that not confronting these things gives the Devil free rein to do as he chooses.”
    He recalls Heather Mitchelson with fondness. He was gratified that he could—if only for a time, as events would show—liberate a young woman who had fallen foul of so much evil, yet had battled through.
    â€œWhen Heather came round after the exorcism, she remembered nothing,” he says. “This is a common occurrence. The demon can take over the entire consciousness, you see. I knew I wasn’t speaking to Heather throughout it all. Afterwards, she said she felt ‘beautiful and clean’ within, but ‘empty’ as well, as if something had been taken away from inside of her. The change in her was extraordinary; her whole demeanor, even her voice, was different. I prayed over her and she rededicated her life to Jesus.”
    We wonder if Heather was possessed by her dead relatives or by evil