[4] His prayer was granted, and for more than twenty years he was harassed by evil spirits, experiencing hallucinations, seizures and temporary paralysis, and slowly losing his power of speech.
At times he was unable to use his hands, his feet, his eyes, his tongue, or was impelled to commit a thousand extravagances, which even the most charitably inclined deemed foolish.
"During my ministry, the devil passed from the body of the possessed person and entered into mine" he wrote to a friend, the Jesuit father Achille Doni d'Attichy.
It is true he was unable to prepare himself for this by any reading or study, but on entering the pulpit and making the sign of the cross a wonderful transformation was manifest.
His vigorous mind instantly gained the ascendancy; his powerful voice and facile oratory won universal attention and admiration.
He was healed eight years before his death and was thenceforth absorbed in the abundance of Divine communications.Surin enjoyed great celebrity for his virtues, his trials, and his talents as a spiritual director.
[11] He was not universally respected, however, as this excerpt from a letter by Jacques Nau shows:[12] Père Surin, whom I myself knew for twenty years or more, led so deranged and shameful a life that one hardly dares speak of it.
In the end it reached the point where the most wise attributed it all, quite correctly I believe, to madness …I have often seen [him] blaspheme the name of God and walk about naked in the College, soiled with excrement – I would then take him by the hand into the infirmary.
I have seen him lashing out with his fists and for years perform a hundred other insanities, even to the point of trying to trample on the Sacrament of the Eucharist – I did not see this myself but learnt it the next day from witnesses.
When he recovered self-control, he wrote books and letters, visited his neighbor and spoke very well about God, but he never said his prayers, or read his Breviary, said Mass rarely and to his dying day mumped about and gesticulated in a ridiculous and absurd fashion.