Catholic, Evil, and Dead - After the Apocalypse

1981's The Evil Dead is the perfect allegory for what it feels like to be Catholic in the post-abuse revelations landscape. Who would've thought.

I watched the first film for the first time on the business end of 20 years just recently. A lot had happened since then, not least of which was both the 2002 expose by the Boston Globe, the 2009 CICA report in Ireland, and the 2018 grand jury report in Pennsylvania. At the time that the Boston Globe reports began to enter into the mainstream I was a young adult volunteer in a high school ministry and by the time the 2018 report hit I had already spent several years as a director for parish youth programs. Until the 2018 report I had thought the worst was behind us. I was wrong.

For those unfamiliar with the Evil Dead, it is a highly influential gorefest where a small group of college students are assailed by the forces of darkness in one unrelenting night in a derelict cabin in the woods. Innocent young adults will be unrecognizable by the end, either by death, distortion or design. Even the film's sole remaining hero will never be the same again.

To be a Catholic who remains in the Church after learning so much about how certain priests and their leaders have devastated the lives of children has been a complete horrorshow. We find ourselves alone in a cabin breathing in evil's noxious fumes. 

In the film, the terror is preceded by normalcy. People are hanging out with every day worries just hoping to live their life. It's a quiet take on that period of time when you're a young adult and there isn't much to worry about other than hanging out effectively. It's trial adulthood, not the kind where you can no longer move back in with your parents or where bills are easily ignored. There are no children to raise and relationships aren't terribly serious. It's where Ashley "Ash" Williams and his friends can joke around in a yellow 1973 Oldsmobile Delta. an old car, some good friends, and a night of drinking are the only things that deserve the moment's thoughts.

But then the evil manifests, prompted in the cabin in the woods by a tape recorder playing recitations of an old book, a fictionalized version of the kind you'd find in those ancient Mesopotamian religions. This is the Sumerian stuff that predates the Bible and where the eldest of foreboding evil is first told of.

It was so hard to read stories of priests that go back to when Bing Crosby would wear the collar, doing things that no self-respecting Sumerian demon would dream of doing. First the stories came from somewhere else. Then they involved priests in our diocese. Then from our own parish and -oh God- from people we KNEW. They absolved our sins and consecrated the Eucharist. Could it have happened here? It could. It did.

Suddenly, the Church no longer feels animated by any Spiritus Sanctus but by something else. They're arguing in the pews. I'm suspicious. Nothing feels right.

But I don't run.I stay. 

I stay for the same reason that those gore-y horror movies still somehow manage to remain at least somewhat moralistic because it's in touching on one abhorrent form of metaphysical evil that it's converse is powerfully asserted. Why do people like the story of a good exorcism? Because in a roundabout way it confirms faith. There IS something out there and if it exists then so do grace and salvation.

In a Church overrun by demons a halo can be made out from the periphery. We are repulsed at the demons in the cabin and that disgust is a reminder that all is NOT well but MUST be. Things must be made aright.

And what of that interior experience? It cannot be explained. How is Ash going to leave the cabin and explain what happened? How will he explain the horror without seeming to be complicit? In the sequel series Ash vs. the Evil Dead we learn that back home nobody believed Ash, that in truth he is not guilty for the battle for his own soul. It was not him. Yet to the eyes of everyone around him, his presence in the cabin means that he partook of the dark sacrament and that the evil came from within. He is complicit with devils and demons. If he wasn't than he would have never been in that cabin to begin with.

Ash is no saint and neither am I but as an adult I've only known the Church in a sex abuse crisis involving children. I have 3 children. As a parish worker I've worked with what seems like thousands of children and their families. Each of those parents have had to internalize what they've seen and read in their own way. They've had to reckon the horror their own way. When they tell their neighbors and co-workers where they go on a Sunday morning, they are like Ash explaining the horror in the cabin and somehow sharing in unearned blame. 

In this, they bear witness. They bear the burden of affiliation. Is this martyrdom? Is it payment for the sins of others? Who knows. 

Ash leaves the cabin and is attacked one last time by the evil. It is for sequels to let us know if he survived. After the sustained horror of the first film, the viewer might not have the stomach to go on to part 2. May we never encounter this kind of evil ever again.