Father Michał Olszewski is a man of many talents: writer, businessman, exorcist. He attracted attention several years ago when he reported his regular contacts with Satan: “I constantly experience his various tricks, such as threatening text messages from unknown numbers, which are usually sent at 3 p.m. or 3 a.m. But I was particularly scared when he started harassing me at night.”
Exorcisms with the help of brawn
However, the father of the Congregation of Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus became really famous as an exorcist. A case from 2018 in which he tried to exorcise the “demon of vegetarianism” from a young woman brought him dubious fame nationwide. He wrote about his experiences exorcising various kinds of devils in his book “Being Like Job”.
In it, he also describes his interaction with the young woman’s supposed demons: “I ask: ‘Who are you?’ and they say they are demons of vegetarianism. I order them to come out of the woman’s body and they say they don’t want to come out. I ask: ‘What is stopping you from coming out?’ to which they reply: ‘You will not feed her meat.'” The brave man of God did it anyway and fed the young woman with what was at hand: brawn. According to his account, the procedure was successful: the vegetarianism demons were out.
However, this grotesque act can have serious consequences. While, according to Father Olszewski, exorcisms are about “preventing the possessed from harming themselves and others,” psychologists say it is the other way round: exorcisms can cause serious harm to those who are subjected to such a procedure, usually against their will. This is because they are often accompanied by physical and psychological abuse – occasionally also by elements of sexual harassment, which can cause long-lasting trauma. However, nothing is known about the health of the young woman who had to endure the brawn exorcism.
Millions for Poland’s most famous exorcist
Father Michał Olszewski could have continued to perform exorcisms for a long time if he had not discovered a new mission that he then became completely obsessed with: he wanted to take care of crime victims in the future. In this way, the paths of the busy priest crossed with the Polish Ministry of Justice and its “Justice Fund”, which – at least officially – was intended for precisely such purposes.
The religious had already founded the Profeto Foundation in 2014, a very vital and well-functioning media foundation with the ambition to become “the biggest pulpit on the Internet”. It now runs a Catholic online portal, a radio and an evangelization platform. It also organizes conferences, courses and online broadcasts. The linked video shows the exorcist as a free man, preaching to others how to lead an honest, God-pleasing life – a short time later he was arrested for his apparently crooked, not so God-pleasing business dealings.
