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.