The Catholic faith of Abraham Van Helsing, vampire hunter

When one is asked to think of comic book characters, the name Abraham Van Helsing probably does not immediately spring to mind. However, Van Helsing is a comic book character. In the 1970s, Marvel Comics published a series called The Tomb of Dracula. The series focused on Abraham’s granddaughter Rachel Van Helsing, but Abraham also made appearances.

Of course, Van Helsing was not originally a comic book character but was a character in the original, classic vampire novel Dracula by Abraham “Bram” Stoker, published in 1897. In this novel, Van Helsing is not primarily a vampire hunter but is a medical doctor, who has been called in by Dr. John Seward to consult on the strange case of Lucy Westenra (to whom Seward had unsuccessfully proposed marriage) who has come down with an inexplicable disease that is slowly but steadily killing her. Van Helsing is the one who determines that this disease is in fact, vampirism and that Dracula is not only draining Lucy of her blood but turning her into a vampire.

Van Helsing is a Catholic and one who evidently takes his Faith seriously. In his efforts to save Lucy’s life, Van Helsing gives her four blood transfusions. The first is from Seward, followed by Van Helsing, with a third from American Quincey Morris (who, like Seward, had also proposed marriage to Lucy unsuccessfully). The fourth and final transfusion comes from Arthur Holmwood, Lucy’s fiancé, who exclaims that with the exchange of blood, they are now truly married. At this, Van Helsing ruefully explains that if that were the case, then Lucy would be an adulteress as she had already received blood from Seward and Morris and moreover that Van Helsing himself would be an adulterer, as he himself is married. However, he further explains that his wife is actually mentally ill and does not even know who he is, but that he remains married to her because the Church does not see this condition as grounds for an annulment.
Van Helsing is one who explains the traditional weaknesses of vampires to sunlight and garlic as well as a wooden stake and decapitation as the means to kill them permanently. He also explains that since vampires are evil, they can be repelled by the use of crosses, crucifixes and holy water.

All the other characters, with the exception of the American Quincey Morris, are presumably members of the Church of England, with Morris likely being some kind of Protestant. Thus, it is a Catholic who is the one to explain and provide the means and methods for defeating a supernatural evil to Protestants. This is a theme that is hinted at early on, when a Transylvanian peasant woman gives protagonist Jonathan Harker a rosary for protection when tells her that he is going to Dracula’s castle. When Dracula is about to attack Harker when the latter cuts himself while shaving, the vampire is repelled by the crucifix on the rosary around his neck.

Although he was an Irishman, Bram Stoker was not Catholic but was a member of the Protestant Church of England. Nevertheless, living in a country that was predominantly Catholic with a strong Catholic culture clearly had an effect on Stoker. However, it becomes clear that Stoker is an outsider looking in as regards Catholicism.

In the novel, Catholic sacramentals have a tangible power against supernatural evil. In the children’s illustrated classics version that was my first introduction to the story of Dracula, the vampire hunters used crucifixes and garlic to not only repel vampires, but also to make the vampire’s tombs inhospitable to them, so they could not return to them to sleep during the day. (Interestingly, although the text of this version clearly said crucifix, the illustrations that accompanied the story had only the cross without a corpus.) However, in the original novel, in addition to sacramentals, Van Helsing makes use of a sacrament to battle Dracula: specifically, the Blessed Sacrament.

In the novel, Van Helsing uses consecrated Eucharistic Hosts as weapons against Dracula. He crushes the hosts into crumbs and sprinkles them into the vampires boxes of Transylvanian dirt to render them useless to the vampire and later puts Mina Harker, who is slowly succumbing to the same fate as her friend Lucy, in a circle of communion crumbs to protect her from Dracula. Van Helsing states that he has an indulgence from the Vatican in order to make use of the Hosts in such a way.

Of course, the term that Stoker should have used is dispensation but any Catholic knows that absolutely no Pope would give such a dispensation. This is especially true because in the 1890s, when the novel is set, no one but a priest was allowed to even touch the Host. Moreover, while a devout Catholic might hold up the Host to repel a supernatural evil, he would never desecrate it by placing crumbs in a tomb or sprinkling them on the ground.

However, the inclusion of this action is clearly not intended in the context of the novel as disrespect or sacrilege. It simply comes from a Protestant mind trying—and failing—to convey the Catholic belief in the efficacy and power of the Eucharist against evil. Sadly, the supernatural aspects of vampires are continually downplayed in modern versions as is their evil. If they are shown as supernaturally evil, the power of the cross against it is often ineffective and reliance on it played for laughs. This is true even for modern adaptations of the Dracula story. Nevertheless, the character of Abraham Van Helsing, the original and archetypical vampire hunter, stands as a strong representation of the power of the Catholic Church against supernatural evil in classic literature.