The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist Read Free Page B

short, tasked with investigating the phenomena.
    Interest in exorcism had been steadily growing in Italy since 1998, when the exorcism Ritual , originally set down in the 1614 Roman Ritual , was finally updated, as per the requirements of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, which called for each of the Church's rituals to be updated. (Incidentally, the ritual for exorcism was one of the last of these.) Journalists swarmed, looking for a story, and Father Gabriele Amorth was picture-perfect. The official exorcist of Rome and best-selling author, Father Amorth was already a well-known television personality in Italy and abroad. In books and interviews he condemned a wide range of things as being satanic—including the Harry Potter books—while drawing attention to what he claimed was the growing power that the Devil wielded in a secular world, which increasingly turned to the occult for answers.
    Even worse, in Father Amorth's eyes, was the plight of the exorcist. In an interview published in the Catholic magazine 30 Days in 2001, he said, “Our brother priests who are charged with this delicate task are treated as though they are crazy, as fanatics. Generally speaking they are scarcely even tolerated by the bishops who have appointed them.” Time and time again he chastised bishops and priests alike for their ignorance. “For three centuries, the Latin Church has almost entirely abandoned the ministry of exorcism,” he said. And while the problem might be bad in certain parts of Italy, he believed it to be downright appalling elsewhere. “There are countries in which there is not a single exorcist, for example Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal.” Other countries, such as France, he claimed, had appointed exorcists who didn't even believe in exorcism.
    On May 18, 2001, the Italian bishops’ conference, meeting in plenary assembly in the Vatican, issued an official statement: “We are witnessing a rebirth of divinations, fortunetelling, witchcraft and black magic, often combined with a superstitious use of religion. In certain environments, superstition and magic can coexist with scientific and technological progress, inasmuch as science and technology cannot give answers to the ultimate problems of life.”
    According to the Associazione Comunità Papa Giovanni XXIII (Pope John XXIII Community Association), about 25 percent of Italians, or about 14 million, are involved in some way or another in the occult. In the south of Italy, for instance, certain groups still practice Tarantism, the belief that a person can be possessed by the bite of a spider, while “card-readers” congest the late-night cable channels hawking their prophetic wares and “lucky” amulets. This is not limited to Italy. In 1996, for instance, France's version of the IRS disclosed that during the previous year, 50,000 tax-paying citizens had declared their occupation as healer, medium, or other such practitioner in the occult-related trades. At the time, there were only 36,000 Catholic priests in the entire country.
    However, the Church was most concerned about estimates (some would say exaggerated) that as many as 8,000 satanic sects with more than 600,000 members exist within Italy.

    T HE COURSE “Exorcism and Prayers of Liberation” was the brainchild of Dr. Giuseppe Ferrari, the national secretary of the Gruppo di Ricerca e Informazione Socio-Religiosa (Group for Research and Socio-Religous Information, or GRIS), a Catholic organization located in Bologna, Italy, that deals with cults and other new religions.
    According to Dr. Ferrari, the idea came about in 2003 when he met with a priest from the diocese of Imola who told him that a growing number of his fellow clerics were being inundated by parishioners suffering from problems related to the occult: Either they wanted to quit and couldn't, or they in some way felt afflicted by demonic forces. In many cases, the priests felt so inadequate that they simply sent the people