When “The Exorcist” raged through the state, Bishop Raymond Lucker was suddenly the exorcist, too.

“I had any number of calls from people who were disturbed,” he remembered,”who began to think that perhaps they were possessed.”Possession by a demon. What is it?

IT USED to be simple mental illness, according to the bishop of the New Ulm diocese. Or epilepsy. Anyone with a physical or mental irregularity that went otherwise unexplained was possessed of a demon.

No more, according to Bishop Lucker. In his estimation, demonic possession is vanishingly rare.

“It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to judge whether a person is possessed by the devil or he or she is psychotic, he said. “In a sense, it’s easier to blame some other power than to take personal responsibility.”

THE CLOSEST Bishop Lacker has come to the rite of exorcism is a talk 25 years ago with an older priest who took his seminary class on a retreat The older priest had performed a casting-out.

The Roman Catholic prayers for exorcism are recorded in a special book, but the procedure for applying the prayers is roundabout.

An exorcising priest must first obtain the permission of his bishop, who will usually convene a theological commission before granting it.

SHOULD A priest in the New Ulm diocese request permission of him to perform an exorcism, the Most Rev. Lucker may well opt for other solutions.

“I would be very quick to say that I believe in the devil,” he said.”I believe that the devil has an evil influence and that we can be affected by the temptations of the devil.

“But I have always been very reluctant to perform exorcisms.”

THE EXORCISM became traditional in the Catholic Church from the early days when demonic possession was used to explain illnesses for which we now have other names.

Exorcist was one of the stages through which a clergyman had to pass for ordination. Now, since the Vatican Council reforms of recent history, the exorcist stage has gone its way.

Still, some authorities place the number of major exorcisms per-formed in the United States in a year at a score or 8o.

ALTERNATIVES TO exorcism include psychiatric care and faith healing.

The bishop in former times did not take seriously the grandstand prayer-healing which Oral Roberts helped make popular, but has more recently given it consideration.

Certain persons, he said, seem to have a mysterious ability to go to the sick and restore their will to live, which aids in their recovery.

Restoring will to live is “part of it,”according to Bishop Lucker. The other part he describes as “faith.”

THE ACT of healing persons possessed by evil spirits begins with not opening one’s life to them, the bishop said.

“It is dangerous for anyone to open his life to the influence of evil spirits,” he said. “People dabble with it and they think they are just playing games.”

Among the dabbling-stage spirit mediums he lists the ouija board, a hard board covered with letters and numbers over which a pointer slides when two persons place their fingertips lightly on it.

The pointer, by sliding across the letters, may spell out coherent words or sentences, and occultists argue that the coherent messages are answers to questions which the participants ask.

BISHOP LUCKER said ouija board use is a violation of the First Commandment-“Thou shalt have no strange gods before Me.” Use of the board blurs focus on true supernatural powers, he said.

“We give supernatural powers to something which does not have supernatural power,” he said. A user is then in danger of deeper involvement with the wrong kind of spirit.

“I think these things tend to go along very gradually,” he said.

WHY DO people become involved in ouija boards and other alleged spiritual media?

“I find it difficult to imagine why people would worship the personification of evil,” said Bishop Lucker. “Maybe it’s a fear thing. Primitive people stand in awe and worship forces of nature. They stand in awe of and worship evil with the idea of fending it off.

“I suppose there’s something to it – maybe partly the craving of man for the supernatural, the craving of man for the spirit.”

New Ulm Daily Journal

April 27, 1976