More evils: Cults, ‘possession,’ pornography and child abuse

By Fr. Shay Cullen

The greatest loss for a human person is to have little or no self-awareness and live as an unthinking and uneducated human. Why would thousands of people believe and blindly follow without thinking a charlatan, a cult leader or a suspected drug trafficker and leave their jobs and homes and bring their children to an enclave in the remote mountains to be enslaved, raped and sexually assaulted and abused?  Is it because the educational standards are so low where nine-year old grade school students cannot understand what they read? They apparently have nothing to read but only what they see on a mobile phone.

According to Senator Risa Hontiveros, a cult with thousands of members, called Socorro Bayanihan Services Incorporated or Omega de Salonera, led by a well-armed doomsday preacher, is entrenched in a well-guarded enclave in in the mountains of Socorro, Surigao del Norte with about 3,5000 adults and 1,580 children, many of whom have been raped, violently assaulted and sexually abused by the leader Jey Rence B. Quilario and his cronies. Some of the children escaped and are in government care but no legal or police action has been reported to rescue more children and arrest the accused based on the testimony of at least eight children.

Preaching an imminent end in the world in the mountains of Socorro, Jey Rence B. Quilario, began the cult in 2017 and expanded its membership by brainwashing thousands of people into supporting and following him by frightening stories of the end of the world, creating a kind of “mass hysteria.” Government employees and teachers abandoned their jobs and took their children to his cult headquarters in the mountains and forced them to work as slaves. He persuaded them into surrendering their will and money and to obey him blindly as would a tyrannical wayward politician. Several children have escaped and reported their harrowing accounts of many rapes and sexual assaults by Quilario and his gang.

“This is a harrowing story of rape, sexual violence, child abuse, forced marriage perpetrated on minors by a cult. This cult is armed and dangerous,” Senator Hontiveros said in her speech  “According to direct and firsthand testimonies, Quilario would engage in acts of sexual abuse and violence against minors, including ordering girl children to sleep with him,” the senator alleged. The police and military have so far not moved to rescue the children and confront Quilario.

Observers cannot point to poverty to be the cause of this uneducated mind and heart control of thousands by a cult leader. The middle and upper class of society are also part of their own cults. Why would young, intelligent college students mindlessly subject and surrender themselves freely to the power, control and domination of fraternity leaders to be bullied, insulted, humiliated, beaten with wooden paddles (some have been murdered) and the abuse covered up?

The students’ lives are taken over by the fraternity and they are forbidden to quit or leave. That would be disloyalty and they would be ostracized for the rest of their lives and punished. They are falsely persuaded that membership is necessary for their future careers since fraternities are powerful organizations in society.

Many of this generation’s minds and hearts are all the more being controlled by their fascination with (even addiction to) the contents on social media platforms. Many thousands are glued to their mobile phones and they believe and respond emotionally to anything they read or see there. It is mostly junk, banal, useless content, fake news, empty comments and jokes, or even worse, grooming minors for sexual abuse. There is political recruitment and indoctrination, too, and of course streaming of child and adult sexual explicit images.

Viewing child or adult pornography is seriously detrimental to mental health and emotional maturity. It can be an addiction and can captivate the viewers’ mind and body. It can damage the personality of the viewer, and for many, make them unable to have a mature caring loving family relationship. It persuades the youth that sex is love and that is all they need. They get addicted to the pornography and self-pleasuring and are incapable of making strong emotional bonds with a partner. The break-up of young families is very common.

While reflecting about mind control and so called “mass hysteria,” consider an event in San Jose National High School in Talibon in Bohol province in the Central Visayas region last 15 September 2023 when some of the 159 students in the church attending the mass began to physically react in an unusual manner described a “having seizures.” School authorities described it as “mass hysteria.”

It could have been a reaction by some students, followed by others, due to a priest giving a very terrifying “blood and thunder” sermon, frightening the young innocent students by threats of enduring terrible punishments of burning forever in the flames of hell (which does not exist) if they commit even small sins. That kind of scary preaching is detrimental to the Gospel of love and children can be psychologically abused. However, there is no report of any such scary sermon.

So we can reasonably make the conjecture that the students ate junk contaminated snacks outside the school before going to the church, some, perhaps, even being the favorite brownie cakes containing marijuana. A mild overdose would perfectly explain the “seizures.” No one will admit such a possibility.

However, believing and declaring that the innocent children might be possessed by evil spirits is ludicrous. Branding innocent children or anyone as being possessed by evil spirits (especially during the Holy Mass in the presence of the Lord) is another form of heresy and may be counted as psychological child abuse.

There is no proof of the existence of evil spirits. It is a phrase used in past centuries to try to explain the little understood medical conditions like epilepsy before modern medicine. Such unfounded allegations that children are evil and “possessed” or owned by the power of evil can damage their mental health and violate their moral and civil rights to good character, dignity, self-esteem, and healthy self-understanding. Such tagging or branding children as likely possessed by evil is immoral. It is slander and psychological child abuse. They will be stigmatized and carry that terrible allegation through their lives.

If there are any “evil spirits,” they are the living clerical child sexual abusers hiding behind the robes and thrones of some bishops. That is where exorcism is badly needed in the church.

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