the girl – didn’t the girl think she was going mad? What was this? Did I fall asleep? Was it a dream? Did it even happen?
Doubt … Doubt … Doubt …
What’s hardest is spotting those who, to look at, are no different from us at all. They do nothing in particular to make you suspect there’s anything malevolent in their activities. On feast days they crawl on their knees around the altar, just like we do, and give to the Church no more and no less than we do ourselves on average. And when they go about their work, they do it no better and no worse than we do. They resemble us in every way, but in reality they are very different. Just because you find them in bed at night when you go to their house in secret and peek in, it doesn’t mean they are really lying there on the mattress. Not entirely. Because while their body is sleeping, their soul could be flying off to one of those ill-famed places where people of their ilk like to gather, people who do us harm and make our lives much worse than they could be otherwise. They’re the ones, the ones you can’t catch in the body, who are the most powerful of all, since they’re able to travel outside their body. They don’t need a broom, and they don’t have to depend on creams that make their body float above the bed or above the floor. Their body can sleep – and be truly asleep and even snoring – while they fly around doing evil. Even when they do quite ordinary things, it doesn’t mean they’re all there, working, their soul included – since they can make it so their body moves and speaks while their little soul is somewhere else entirely.
So how can we prove that such people are part of the evil host, when there’s no external evidence or facts?
Well, it’s hard, but not impossible. For where there is faith, everything is possible. The one who truly believes won’t be taken in by some evil spirit, no matter what alluring enticements it tempts him with. Who among us is devout and who isn’t – here there can be no doubt. For wherever doubt appears, faith starts leaking out and has to be verified. Where doubt bores a hole, evil makes its home.
Verify. Verify. Verify.
Apart from God, nothing is entirely certain. For there are forces that don the likeness of God, that disguise themselves as God’s voice and God’s words …
‘But what does the voice of God even sound like?’
‘It is terrible, true and strict – but beyond this, it is hard to say anything about it. God usually speaks to man not through the ears but through the heart, and what he says we first feel, and the moment we feel it, we understand. And whosoever’s heart is uncorrupted, pure and clean, he will know when it is God speaking to his heart and when a worm is residing there. For a worm bores holes in the heart, that tender yet strong piece of meat which is the nest of the soul. The worm burrows in, nibbles at it with sharp teeth – and it hurts, oh, how it hurts, when the worm sinks its teeth in the heart and with every nibble gnaws off a little piece of faith and hollows out a place for doubt. Doubt. Doubt. Doubt. Always and everywhere, that accursed doubt.’
Report from the patriarch of Aquileia to the Holy See
In the period from April to the middle of September in the year of Our Lord 1596, I performed visitations in the Hereditary Lands of Inner Austria. Let me begin by noting the appalling disorder rampant throughout the provinces; I have, therefore, instructed the lesser Church authorities to deal quickly with this issue using all available means. I should stress that this will not be easy: so widespread are the various excesses that in some places they have become entirely routine practice. In the present report I do little more than mention certain forms of heresy, which require a separate discussion. My visitations, performed over a period of several weeks in the company of a retinue of aides and soldiers, were primarily intended to verify the work of the Catholic clergy, in which endeavour I frequently encountered heretical apostates and, at times, in place of God’s shepherds, people of entirely different professions and profiles.
The first stop on my visitations was a place called Mirna – a small settlement, more village than market town, even if it does pride itself on possessing market rights. As our road took us past the local church, dedicated to St Andrew, I ordered my retinue to stop. It was a Sunday, and I expected at the very least to see fresh flowers on the main altar. But that the House of God should not be open on the Lord’s Day – this was something I had not foreseen! After the soldiers dismounted and I set off for the church with my aides, it became clearer with every step that God’s house was poorly cared for. The main door was densely overgrown with a vine that would surely have been ripped off the wall had one of us even tried to open it. I asked my retinue how much time it would take for such a plant to grow so profusely that it covered the entire front of the church, but they just stared at me stupidly and mumbled something. I mention this only because it shows how little I could rely on my retinue for the explanation of natural phenomena. Surely one of them might have known something about a rather common plant and its cycle of growth. I stress this because, among other things, the description of the visitator’s tasks includes elucidating natural, unnatural and supernatural phenomena, so I advise my successors to include nature experts in their retinue. The Dominican and Benedictine monasteries have been educating such people for
centuries; the universities and Jesuit colleges also do this quite thoroughly.
Let me continue. When we were looking at the grounds around St Andrew’s Church, I saw further that some kind of red weed had grown into the cracks in the walls and that swallows were chirping noisily in a nest above the church door; they had clearly not been disturbed in a long time. Indeed, our visitation may well have been the first disturbing event to upset the swallows’ peaceful existence in Mirna (whose very name means ‘peaceful’). Someone proposed that we break into the bolted church, but instead, I ordered some soldiers to brace their backs against the church wall and lift me up so I could examine the interior. I saw nothing. The glass in the window was so filthy I saw only my own distorted reflection. I gave orders to proceed to the presbytery, which, as my retinue informed me, was next to the main square.
We knocked at the door and an elderly woman stuck her head out; she was so surprised and frightened to see me that she could hardly answer my questions.
‘The priest’s not here, not at home …’ she says in a trembling voice.
‘So where is he then?’ I ask.
The woman looks left and right while making some sort of grunts, until finally she tells me that he went out a little while ago.
‘Where did he go?’ I ask.
‘To give a peasant extreme unction …’
‘When do you expect him back?’
‘Hard to say, very hard to say.’ She is more and more flustered. ‘Up there, that’s where he’s sick, the peasant,’ she says, pointing to some hills in the distance. ‘The road gets bad sometimes, really bad, and Father has to move the rocks and stones all by himself. It’s hard work, can take hours, the whole day even …’
‘But up there, woman, where you’re pointing, I don’t see any village. Men!’ I say, turning to my retinue. ‘Do any of you who are younger than me, with sharper eyesight – do you see a house in those hills, even some ramshackle hut?’ They shake their heads as the woman visibly cringes from her lies and embarrassment.
I tell her we will wait for him.
‘What, now?’ she asks, alarmed.
‘If we had arrived yesterday, we would have waited for him yesterday, but as we are here today, we will wait now,’ I reply.
‘Inside? … Or here, outside?’
I had no patience left to communicate with this thick-headed underling, so I ordered my aides to do whatever they could to make us comfortable. There was a fine garden behind the house with some wooden benches, above which a leafy grapevine was growing, filtering the sun’s hot rays.
‘Why are there so many benches here? Does your master sometimes perform Mass outside? Since he apparently doesn’t do it in the church.’ I look at the woman.
‘There’s nothing I can tell you, not a thing,’ she says and