Posted on 02/19/2005 6:55:54 PM PST by Coleus
Priests get lesson in exorcism
Lack of qualified clergy prompts Vatican class
ROME – The Roman Catholic Church is facing a shortage that you might not have heard about: qualified exorcists.
Thursday, about 100 priests rose in prayer, asked St. Mary for protection, then sat down to an eight-week study of exorcism and how to distinguish and fight true demonic possession.
The course at Rome’s Regina Apostolorum, a prestigious pontifical university, represents the first time a Vatican-sanctioned study at this level has been dedicated to exorcism.
In Italy, the number of official exorcists has soared in the past 20 years to between 300 and 400, church officials say. But they aren’t enough to handle the avalanche of requests for help from hundreds of tormented people who believe they are possessed. In the United States, the shortage is even more acute.
Only a small percentage of the afflicted are judged to be in need of exorcism, and learning how to tell the difference between demonic infiltration and other psychological or physical traumas is the main goal of the priestly students taking the course at the Regina Apostolorum.
“When you’re dealing with a reality like the devil,” said the Rev. Clement Machado, 39, of Canada, “you can’t just learn the theoretical. You need the pragmatic experience. ... It’s such uncharted territory.”
Italy’s most famous exorcist, the Rev. Gabriele Amorth, is not participating in the program but was full of praise for it.
“It’s very positive,” said Amorth, 79. “I hope it will increase the number of exorcists.” Without a doubt, he said, it will increase interest in the ancient and oft-maligned ritual.
Exorcism – the use of prayer to rid a person or place of the devil or demonic spirits – has its roots in early Christianity. It fell out of a favor about the 18th century, after the Enlightenment and advances in science and modern philosophy, but has experienced something of a revival in the past couple of decades.
The re-emergence is due in part to the current pope’s belief that Satan is a real presence in daily life that must be battled.
Many exorcists avoid publicity, sensitive to the sensationalist portrayal of their practice as seen in Hollywood movies and pulp novels. That made the insights offered in the pontifical course, opened to the media for its inaugural session only, all the more unusual.
“The biggest obstacle has been the lack of training of priests and bishops, who haven’t felt sufficiently equipped to confront” what the church believes is a rising obsession with satanic cults, witchcraft and the occult, said Giuseppe Ferrari, an academic specializing in social-religious phenomena who lectured by videophone from Bologna.
“Satanism is very much in fashion now,” said the Rev. Paulo Scarafoni, rector of the Regina Apostolorum, which is run by the conservative Legionaries of Christ.
The Rev. Gabriele Nanni, an exorcist from the Italian town of Modena, told the priest-students that medical doctors can be consulted to eliminate physical or psychological causes behind a patient’s distress. The symptoms of authentic demonic possession, he said, include utter revulsion to holy symbols such as a crucifix or baptismal oils. Sometimes, he said, the patients enter a deep trance.
The cleansing ritual, he told students, must be kept simple, with much prayer and without pride in one’s accomplishments.
“An exorcism is tantamount to a miracle – an extraordinary intervention of God,” Nanni said. “It’s not that we poor men are so powerful to be able to banish the devil. It’s that God gives us the power.”
The Rev. Francesco Bamonte, another of the new generation of exorcists, has served as an exorcist based in Rome since 2000. Only by virtue of a team that screens potential patients does he avoid being inundated by requests, he said.
The course will not necessarily produce new exorcists, organizers said, but it will teach priests how to discern the maladies and give them the expertise and confidence to send only the most egregious cases on to their local exorcist.
Nowhere is the shortage of exorcists seen as more serious than in the United States, where skepticism about the practice abounds. There are fewer than a dozen official exorcists at U.S. dioceses, and it is a topic that most American priests seem to avoid.
The Rev. Christopher Barak traveled from his headquarters in Lincoln, Neb., to Rome to attend the course.
Priests in Nebraska recently have faced troubling cases from parishioners, including unexplained noises in homes and sightings of ghostlike figures, he said.
“There is a growing awareness in our dioceses” of the need for exorcists, Barak said.
“There are a lot more behaviors and lifestyles that are not of God,” he said. “There’s a lot of relativism. Whatever goes, goes. There’s a big surge in New Age, pantheism, young people playing with Satanism, a lot of drug use, black magic, psychics are so big, pornography, MTV. ... People are not searching for holiness.”
Planning to stay for the entire course which ends in mid-April, Barak said he hoped to take a new understanding and a new battle plan back home to Nebraska.
Well, if you mean it literally, I disagree. As the article says; in exorcism, demons are driven from a person by means of prayer.
Are you Euorpean by any chance? Just kidding.
What I am trying to say is I don't trust fanatics. Not of any stripe. I'm not calling you one since I don't know you.
Hell, most fanatics in this country are secular.
But the most dangerous fanatics in The World now are ones who prevert religon to thier own aims. Do you disagree?
This happend in the past and those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Me either. Most fanatics can more accurately be referred to as radicals.
This happend in the past and those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Right there is a good reason for everyone to remember history.
I sure hope that was't aimed at me. Friends?
Not particularly rabbinical. I've always thought that story somewhat unsettling.
Though may God forgive us, all.
No. I was speaking in general terms. I'm glad to say we have some common ground.
I haven't seen that movie in over twenty years. I bet it would be a hard one to find at a rental store.
I just looked at the TCM website. It looks like they feature a lot of good films. That strikes me as surprising in light of liberal Ted Turners bias.
Anyway, I just read the review of the film on Amazon. They have some used at only $3.50. I'm considering it. Thanks for the tip.
?:^T
Yes, and it's called Islam.. >>
they worship a Pagan god
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