Chai Brady
Fr Pat Collins CM. 
Messages that encourage people to pray a certain amount of times to avert harm are ‘sacrilegious’ and ‘superstitious’, according to a renowned Vincentian priest and exorcist who said people should put their trust in God at this time of crisis.
Dublin-based Fr Pat Collins CM has warned against chain letters or messages which are causing people anxiety particularly during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. They can be are sent in many ways including by text, on social media or via email.
They may ask the receiver to say a certain amount of prayers and send the message to more people. Generally it will say something terrible will happen to an individual who ‘breaks’ the chain and doesn’t forward on the message and say the specific number of prayers.
Fr Collins said: “I’ve often seen it in the past, you’ve to pass this letter on to others and get five people to pray and if you do this a good thing will happen and if you don’t this bad thing will happen.
“That is totally against Catholic thinking. It’s superstitious, it’s an insult to God: that God works according to a formula. I am totally opposed to it.”
He urged people to “immediately have nothing to do with it” and ignore these messages. “It’s sacrilegious because it’s tying God down to formulas and we’re utterly opposed to that,” he said, adding that it comes from the “dark side”.
Fr Collins said: “The Divine Mercy picture with its little saying at the bottom, ‘Jesus I trust in you’, can’t be bettered. I’m not trusting in any ‘chains’, I’m not trusting in numbers of prayers, I’m trusting in the Lord Jesus. That to me is what it’s all about, ‘into thy hands I commit my spirit’.”
Trust
Regarding the coronavirus pandemic, he said it’s more important than ever to have trust in God.
“When you’re in a crisis, and we are in one, this is what tests whether you trust in God or not. God doesn’t want the virus, but as we know many bad things are allowed by God in history and we believe as Christians that God will bring good from the evil one way or the other,” he said.
Fr Pat Collins CM is an Irish Vincentian priest based in Dublin and one of the few priests in the country with experience as an exorcist. His book Freedom from Evil Spirits is available from Columba Books.
