Latin West
The Latin West
The Western church before the Reformation divided it — the trunk from which Sarum, Rome and everything Protestant descends.
In its own terms
What this body is doing
A node rather than a body with positions. Its exorcistic practice is not one thing to be summarised: it is the many local uses, of which the corpus holds Sarum, and which the 1614 Rituale later consolidated. Recording it as a node keeps the tree honest about where Rome and the English uses actually stand in relation to one another — siblings out of a common trunk rather than parent and child.
Where it stands in the tree
Descent
Separated from
The undivided church · 1054The same separation, seen from the other side.
Bodies that separated from it
- The Sarum Use1078
Not a split but a use: a local variant of the Latin rite, established at Salisbury after the Conquest and followed across much of England and Wales until it was suppressed.
- Lutheran1517
Justification, authority and the sacraments. As with the Great Schism, demonology was not the question — and as with the Great Schism, the answers moved anyway.
- Church of England1534
Royal supremacy first and doctrine after. The Elizabethan settlement of 1559 is what suppressed the Sarum use and replaced its books with the Book of Common Prayer.
- Reformed1523
The same three questions as Wittenberg, answered further. Zurich and Geneva went past Luther on the supper and on what in worship required scriptural warrant, and the two Reformations never reunited.
- Roman Catholic1614
Standardisation rather than separation. Trent set in motion the replacement of local uses with one book, and Title X of the 1614 Rituale is what the many Western forms were consolidated into.
The same questions asked of every body
What the corpus cannot yet say
This body is carried without positions, on purpose. It is either a junction in the tree — a stage every later body descends through rather than a party to the argument — or one the corpus holds no primary text for. Filling six answers in from general knowledge would produce exactly the confident, uncitable summary this site exists against.
Are the gifts still given?
Not established here. Not an exorcism question, and the one that decides the rest. A body holding the gifts ceased with the apostles has no room for a deliverance ministry; a body holding they continue has no reason to license one.
Who may act?
Not established here. The first thing a rite settles, usually in its opening rubric, and the sharpest divide between an office and a gift.
What counts as evidence?
Not established here. Where a tradition decides it is dealing with a spirit rather than an illness, a grief, or nothing at all.
Where is the spirit?
Not established here. All four inherit gospel scenes in which spirits are in people. What each adds beyond that is the largest difference between them.
Whom do the words address?
Not established here. A formal difference a reader can check by counting clauses rather than by weighing tone.
What restraint is written in?
Not established here. Every one of these traditions knows the practice can harm. What each does about that is what popular accounts leave out.
What closes the matter?
Not established here. Whether the encounter ends, and who declares it, separates a rite from an ongoing practice.
This page records what a body holds and where that is written down. It takes no position on whether any of it is true, and nothing here is instruction — the rites are described by what they contain, never as something to follow.