"'This is why her God will be my God.'"

"During this period, since Daphrose [Rugamba] was a Christian, she prayed and cared for her husband.  Cyprien told me:  'After everything I did to her, she didn’t leave me, even when I got sick.  Instead, she took care of me.  This is why her God will be my God.'"

     Xaverine Kabihogo, in the film J’entrerai au ciel en dansant =Nzinjira mu ijuru mpamiriz, by François Lespes (2018), 14:24.  According to the film, Cyprien was struck, in the early 1980s, by "a mysterious illness" that affected not just his appetite, but "all . . . his senses":  touch, hearing, sight, etc.

"joint heirs of the grace of life"

     1 Pet 3:7 RSV.  Photo is of Servants of God Cyprian and Daphrose Rugamba (m. 7 April 1994).

Exorcism "is beginning to acquire again today that urgency which it had at the dawn of Christianity."

      "What does this [first] standard signify for our question?  Anyone who applies it comes upon an amazing result.  Whereas just now, in the question about creation and in the question about the Law, we found that the New Testament, as compared to the Old, contracts the matter into a simple central truth, exactly the opposite happens here, in a movement of expansion.  The notion of demonic powers enters only hesitantly into the Old Testament, whereas in the life of Jesus it acquires unprecedented weight, which is undiminished in Paul's letters and continues into the latest New Testament writings, the captivity letters and the Gospel of John.  This process of amplification from the Old Testament into the New, along with the extreme crystallization of the demonic precisely in contrast to the figure of Jesus and the persistence of the theme throughout the New Testament witness, is telling."

     Joseph Ratzinger, "Farewell to the devil?" (Spring 1973), trans. Michael J. Miller, in Dogma and preaching:  applying Christian doctrine to daily life, trans. Michael J. Miller and Matthew J. O'Connell (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2011 [4th ed. of Dogma und Verkündigung, 2005]), 200 (197-205).  "Only after the belief in the one God, with all its consequences, had become the unshakable possession of Israel could the view be widened to include powers that overrun the world of man, without letting them challenge God's uniqueness" (201).  Ratzinger goes on to name three additional standards or "aids to judgment" that can "keep the  faith from being truncated for the sake of modernity" (199), and it is under no. 3 the following occurs (203):

the more visible and powerful holiness becomes, the less the devil can conceal himself.  In this respect, one could even say that the disappearance of demons that supposedly leaves the world without danger goes hand in hand with the disappearance of holiness.

"Gradually we have stopped laughing"

     "Did we not also have, in the ten years after Gaudium et spes, experiences that, despite the differences of level, were not entirely unlike those that lay behind the metaphorphosis of Don Quixote?  We started out boldly and full of confidence in ourselves; there may have been, in thought and, perhaps, also in reality, many an auto-da-fé of scholarly books that seemed to us to be foolish novels of chivalry that led us only into the land of dreams and made us see dangerous giants in the beneficial effects of technology, in the vanes of its windmills.  Boldly and certain of victory, we barricaded the door of a time that was past and proclaimed the abrogation and annihilation of all that lay behind it.  In conciliar and postconciliar literature, there is abundant evidence of the ridicule with which, like pupils ready for graduation, we bade farewell to our outmoded schoolbooks.  In the meantime, however, our ears and our souls have been pierced by a different kind of ridicule that mocks more than we had wanted or wished.  Gradually we have stopped laughing; gradually we have become aware that behind the closed doors are concealed those things that we must not lose if we do not want to lose our souls as well.  Certainly we cannot return to the past, nor have we any desire to do so.  But we must be ready to reflect anew on that which, in the lapse of time, has remained the one constant.  To seek it without distraction and to dare to accept, with joyful heart and without diminution, the foolishness of truth—this, I think, is the task for today and for tomorrow:  the true nucleus of the Church's service to the world, her answer to 'the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men of our time' (Gaudium et spes, 903)."

     Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic theology:  building stones for a fundamental theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 1987 [1982]), 393 ="Der Weltdienst der Kirche:  Auswirkungen von 'Gaudium et spes' in letzten Jahrzehnt," Internationale katholischen Zeitschrift Communio 4 (1974):  454.