ROME – The Roman Catholic Church is facing a shortage that you might not have heard about: qualified exorcists.
On Thursday, about 100 priests stood, prayed for protection, then sat down to begin an eight-week study of how to distinguish and fight 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 over 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.
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.
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 around the 18th century, after the Enlightenment and advances in science and modern philosophy, but has experienced something of a revival in the last 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 enters 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.”
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