Witches in the suburbs. Exorcisms in ordinary rooms. Rites performed in the small hours, against things that answered back.
For more than fifty years, Father Antony Brennan stood on the front line of a war most Catholics are told no longer exists. A parish priest, monastic scholar, and one of the most experienced practitioners of deliverance ministry in his diocese, he was called again and again to the places polite society pretends do not exist — quiet streets where covens gathered after dark, ordinary rooms where the demonically afflicted writhed beneath his stole, parish houses thick with a presence no seminary had prepared him to name.
He saw what he saw. He said the prayers. He kept the diary.
Now, in the only book he ever wrote, that diary is told at last.
A Memoir as Gripping as Any Thriller — and Considerably More Disturbing for Being True
A Priest in Interesting Times is at once a spiritual autobiography, a frontline dispatch from a Church under strain, and a quiet act of witness. Spanning six decades of Catholic life, it carries the reader from a wartime boyhood marked by illness through the rigors of monastic formation in a 1970s monastery, the long discipline of seminary, and decades of diocesan ministry — into the diabolical encounters that shadowed Father Brennan’s pastoral work, and the steady, unfashionable faith that carried him through them.
Written with disarming candour, dry observant wit, and the steady hand of a priest who never stopped believing what he was seeing, this is the testimony of a life given to obedience, doubt, and the slow stubborn work of faith — and to standing one’s ground at the strangest frontier of belief.
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Inside this book
- First-hand accounts of exorcisms and deliverance ministry in modern parish life
- The rise of suburban occult and coven activity, as one priest encountered it
- Monastic life under a fierce abbot in the post-Vatican II Church
- The hard, often comic realities of seminary training in the 1970s
- A candid portrait of a Church wrestling with its own loss of nerve
- Reflections from a hermit’s valley, written in the priest’s final years
- The unexpected and the inexplicable — angelic encounters, answered prayer, the long quiet labours of obedience
For Readers Of
Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Devil · Gabriele Amorth’s An Exorcist Tells His Story · Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain · the memoirs of Henri Nouwen and Ronald Rolheiser
Some books about the supernatural are written to frighten. This one was written to bear witness.
About the Author
Father Antony Brennan (1942–2025) was a Catholic priest, monastic scholar, and one of the most experienced practitioners of deliverance ministry in his diocese. Ordained after early formation in a 1970s monastery, he served for more than fifty years in parishes, senior diocesan roles, and finally as a hermit in the valley, where he wrote, prayed, and continued to receive those who came to him in need. A Priest in Interesting Times is his only book, completed in the year before his death.
