The Vicki Ross Case

In the early winter of 1983, an Archdiocese of Boston deliverance team agreed to evaluate the case of a thirty-year-old hospital aide identified in the surviving documentation as Vicki Ross. The woman had been referred by a parish priest in the Dorchester neighborhood after eight months of disturbances at home and at work that had defied a complete psychiatric workup. The case would not become public until more than a decade later, when journalist and scholar Michael Cuneo briefly referenced it in his 2001 book American Exorcism. Even then the details remained sparse. The fuller record was only assembled in the late 2010s, when archdiocesan files were partially opened to researchers under the supervision of the chancery’s office of pastoral records.

Background

The case unfolded against a particular institutional backdrop. Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, then Archbishop of Boston, had in 1981 issued a memorandum tightening the procedures for exorcism within the archdiocese. The memo required, among other things, two independent psychiatric evaluations, a review by a panel of clergy that included at least one moral theologian, and explicit written authorization from the chancellor before any formal rite could proceed. The protocol was a response to the proliferation of unsupervised deliverance ministries in the wake of the popular success of The Exorcist and to several embarrassing incidents involving Catholic clergy who had conducted rites without authorization.

Vicki Ross, by the account of her parish priest, was a quiet, hard-working woman who lived alone in a small apartment in Dorchester and held a steady job at a Catholic-run nursing home. She had a history of childhood trauma but no documented psychiatric illness before the spring of 1982, when she began reporting that something was in her apartment with her at night. She described pressure on her chest, the sensation of being watched and at times touched, and the persistent intrusion into her thoughts of phrases she did not recognize as her own and which she found morally repellent.

The Evaluations

Following the Medeiros protocol, two psychiatrists examined Ross independently. Their reports, summarized in the chancery file, partially overlap and partially diverge. Both physicians agreed that Ross was suffering from severe anxiety and that some form of trauma-related dissociation was likely. They differed on the question of psychotic features. One physician, more inclined to a clinical reading, diagnosed dissociative disorder not otherwise specified and recommended outpatient psychotherapy. The second was struck by the consistency of Ross’s account, by the absence of typical psychotic disorganization, and by the precision with which she could narrate her symptoms outside of the disturbing episodes themselves. He concluded that her condition was unusual and that a religious component to the treatment plan would not be unreasonable, particularly given the framework within which she had grown up.

The clergy panel met in February 1983 and authorized a graduated response. The rite would not begin with the full Roman ritual. Instead, the parish priest would conduct a series of pastoral blessings of Ross’s apartment, accompanied by sustained prayer and counseling. Only if these proved insufficient would more formal interventions be considered.

The Manifestations and the Rite

The pastoral phase extended over six weeks. According to the parish priest’s notes, the immediate disturbances at the apartment did diminish. Ross reported sleeping through the night for the first time in months. The intrusive thoughts, however, persisted, and at sessions in March 1983 she reported new and more troubling phenomena: voices that addressed her directly, naming small details of her childhood that she had never told anyone, and a sense of being physically restrained when she attempted to pray.

The chancery authorized the next stage. A simplified deliverance rite, drawn from the prayers of the Roman Ritual but conducted in English and in a pastoral key, was performed in the parish church on the evenings of April 5, April 19, and May 3, 1983. A psychiatric nurse was present at each session at the explicit request of the cardinal’s office. Ross’s responses varied. She wept during the first session and reported afterwards a feeling of relief. The second was uneventful. The third was the most intense, with Ross at one point speaking in a voice that the attending nurse described in her own report as “not the voice of the woman I had spent two months getting to know.”

After the third session Ross reported that the disturbances had largely stopped. She continued in psychotherapy for another year and was followed pastorally by the parish for several years more. By all accounts she returned to ordinary life and remained well.

Skeptical Analysis

Mainstream psychiatric opinion would read the case as a successful instance of integrated treatment in which the religious component carried therapeutic weight precisely because it spoke to Ross’s framework for understanding her own experience. The dissociative phenomena and intrusive cognitions are consistent with severe complex post-traumatic stress, and the structured ritual offered a containing context within which they could be addressed. The voice change reported during the third session is, of course, exactly the sort of phenomenon for which different observers will reach for different vocabularies.

The case’s significance is procedural. The Boston archdiocese has cited the Ross case in subsequent training materials as an example of the post-Medeiros protocol working as intended: medical and pastoral resources brought to bear in coordination, no premature recourse to dramatic ritual, full documentation, and a measured outcome. It bears comparison with the very different trajectory of the Michael Taylor case in Ossett in 1974 and with the more recent Latoya Ammons case in Indiana, where institutional structures responded with varying degrees of caution.

Sources

• Cuneo, Michael. American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty. Doubleday, 2001.
• Archdiocese of Boston Chancery Records, partial release, 2018.
• Medeiros, Humberto. “Memorandum on Procedures Concerning Exorcism.” Archdiocese of Boston, 1981.
• Cardin, Anne. “Pastoral Psychiatry and the Exorcism Question.” New England Journal of Pastoral Care, 1992.