"The devil appeared in his room, but he said this word and disappeared."
Father Donald Calloway is today a well-known American priest and promoter of the devotion to St. Joseph.. But several decades ago, before he was a priest — and even before he was Catholic — he led a messy life that led him to drugs.
At some point, after reading a book of Marian apparitions, his slow process of conversion began which led him, first to Catholicism, and then to the priesthood.
But the devil wasn't willing to let it go so fast. This is what happened to him when he approached Jesus and began to abandon his old life.
In an interview conducted by the Pints of Aquinas program, the priest recounted how the devil tried to prevent him from converting to Catholicism and what he did to defeat him.
The devil appeared in his room, but he said this word and disappeared.
The priest recounts that in his conversion process he began to abandon his old practices and the first thing he did was put an image of Jesus in the room.
"I got down on my knees and said 'I need you, I think you're real and I love you.' What happened next I can only call divine detoxification and romance. God flooded my soul with so much mercy [that] I began to cry”.
So he stayed in the room all day. “When I finally regained all my senses, so to speak, – because it was a totally mystical experience – I got up and lay down on a couch.”
Then, the priest narrates, something happened that left him terrified, to the point that today - 20 years later - he prays that it will never happen to him again. “The devil came,” he said.
"A creature appeared in the room and manifested itself as if it had taken a physical form. I was so scared I couldn't even move, like a night paralysis. [She was] a living creature that claimed me for itself”
"I was so terrified that I had to close my eyes and I couldn't do anything - the priest says and adds - I think the devil thought I belonged to him. What was you gonna do, hit him? That wouldn’t work and still couldn’t: I was petrified.”
Apparently he did the only thing he had to do. "From my soul, I cried, not audibly, in my soul: 'Maria! 'And do you know what happened? Wiped out. The demon was completely wiped out. And I experienced the most incredible peace that I have never experienced before.”
But their mystical experience didn't end there. Suddenly he heard a voice in his soul, “the purest motherly voice spoke to me and said, ‘Donnie, I’m so happy," the priest recounted.
“Nobody but my mom calls me Donnie. The mother of Jesus Christ was telling me that she was my mother too.. “The devil couldn’t touch me, because I was in Mary’s arms”.
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