There’s a number quietly climbing in the background of ordinary parish life, and almost nobody outside the diocese has been tracking it. Requests for exorcisms in the Pittsburgh diocese have gone up sharply over five years. Not doubled once and leveled off. A steady climb, year over year, reported by the person whose actual job is to field the calls.
That person is Adam Blai, the lay consultant who screens and assists with exorcism requests for the Pittsburgh diocese. He also trains exorcists at the Pope Leo XIII Institute at Mundelein Seminary and belongs to the International Association of Exorcists — which means when he says the requests are rising, he’s not guessing from the outside. He’s the one taking the calls.
What Blai is actually reporting
According to EWTN News, Blai has watched the volume of requests climb steadily over the past five years in his role with the Pittsburgh diocese. The report was independently picked up and corroborated the same week in secondary coverage, which matters here — this isn’t one outlet’s framing of a vague trend.
He names a specific driver, too, and it’s not the one you’d expect. Ouija boards. Not horror movies, not internet rumor mills — a game sold in toy aisles for decades, still showing up as a starting point in the cases crossing his desk.
If that sounds almost too ordinary to be the cause of something this serious, that’s worth sitting with rather than dismissing. The ordinary objects are often exactly the ones nobody warns you about.
Why a rising number isn’t the whole story
It’s tempting to read “requests are up” as “something dark is winning.” Blai doesn’t frame it that way, and neither should you.
Here’s his actual quote, in full: “For some reason, there’s an increase. But the more important, beautiful part is the Holy Spirit is raising up this ministry.” Read that twice. He names the increase honestly. Then he reframes what it means.
A ministry growing to meet a need isn’t evidence the need is winning. It’s evidence the Church is paying attention.
The quiet infrastructure behind that one sentence
Most people have no idea a diocese has a formal screening process for this at all. It’s not a priest showing up alone with a stole and a prayer book. It’s a structured role — a lay consultant trained specifically to evaluate requests before anything escalates.
Blai’s training role at Mundelein Seminary is part of that same structure. He’s not just handling Pittsburgh’s cases; he’s teaching the next generation of people who will handle other dioceses’ cases too.
That’s the part of this story that rarely makes it past the headline. The ministry isn’t improvised. It’s built, deliberately, by people who take the screening seriously precisely because most requests turn out to need something other than an exorcism.
What actually gets screened out
This is the detail that should reassure you more than the rising number unsettles you. The formal role Blai holds exists specifically to separate genuine cases from everything else — grief, trauma, undiagnosed mental illness, ordinary fear dressed up as something supernatural.
A trained consultant’s first job isn’t performing a rite. It’s asking hard, careful questions before anyone gets near one.
So when the number of requests rises, it doesn’t mean the number of actual cases is rising at the same rate. It may simply mean more people know there’s a real, structured place to bring the question at all.
Ouija boards specifically, and why he keeps naming them
If you grew up with a Ouija board in a closet somewhere, this detail probably lands differently than it would for someone who’s never touched one. Blai’s naming of it isn’t a scare tactic — it’s the specific, recurring detail he’s seeing often enough to mention by name.
You don’t have to accept every framework behind that claim to notice the pattern he’s describing: an object treated as harmless entertainment, showing up again and again as a starting point in cases serious enough to reach a diocesan consultant.
Take it as information, not alarm. Knowing a pattern exists is different from needing to panic about it.
Why this is news, not devotion dressed up as news
This is the piece worth separating out clearly. This isn’t a reflection on faith in the abstract — it’s a named person, in a named institutional role, reporting a measurable trend over a defined five-year window, independently corroborated.
That’s the difference between a devotional thought and an actual event happening in the world. One asks you to feel something. The other tells you something true and dated that you didn’t know before you read it.
What this means if you’re the one making the call
If you’re ever the person on the other end of a request like this — for yourself, a child, or someone you love — the existence of a formal screening process should change how you think about reaching out. You’re not calling into chaos. You’re calling into a structure built by people trained specifically for this.
That doesn’t mean every fear deserves a formal case. Most won’t need one. But it means the fear itself doesn’t have to sit alone in your head with nowhere real to take it.
Rest as worship: letting the ministry be what it actually is
It would be easy to walk away from a number like this feeling like the world has gotten darker on your watch. That’s not quite the honest read, and it’s not the one Blai himself is offering.
A ministry built to meet a rising need is itself a form of the Church functioning the way it’s supposed to — showing up, training people, taking requests seriously instead of dismissing them or treating them carelessly. That’s not a sign of losing ground. It’s a sign of someone doing the quiet, structural work most people never see.
You don’t have to carry this story as dread. You’re allowed to read it the way Blai does: an honest number, held next to a more important truth about what’s being built in response to it.
1) Name the trend honestly before you reframe it. Blai didn’t hide the increase to make the story more comfortable. He said it plainly, then explained what it actually means.
2) The ordinary objects are the ones worth a second look. A Ouija board sold as a party game is still the recurring detail in the cases he’s describing.
3) Structure is the quiet proof of care. A trained screening process, built over years at an actual seminary, is what separates a real ministry from improvisation.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Womens Overview editors prior to publication.