Interview about Vatican-sponsored courses on exorcism
Here is a very neat interview from 'TIME' with a journalist, Matt Baglio, who stumbled across an exorcism class sponsored by the church while living in Rome. The interview touches briefly on his upcoming book, but is mostly in regards to the course itself. This is a rare topic to find in the news, so I certainly found it worthwhile to post on our paranormal news feed!
NOTE: This is quite a unique topic. It's posted as information, and does not necessarily express the views and opinions of NPI. Here at NPI, we are open to all avenues of the paranormal.
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TIME: The thing that inspired this book was a class on exorcism. Tell me about it.
BAGLIO: I was a freelance journalist living in Rome and had heard about this course called Exorcism and the Prayer of Liberation. It was organized by the Legion of Christ and their school, the Regina Apostolorum, which is Vatican-affiliated. Not knowing anything about exorcism or if the Church even still believed in it, I was intrigued by the idea of a university-level course teaching priests about exorcism.
TIME: When you started the book, did you lean one way or another in terms of whether or not you believed in the possibility of exorcism?
BAGLIO: I came at this topic very journalistically, not having an opinion for or against it. I wanted to really understand what it is and why the church still believes in it. But even exorcists themselves admit that 90% of the people that come to see them don't need an exorcism. There still remains a small percentage of cases, however, involving levitation, mind-reading and other paranormal phenomena that can't be explained through science. Maybe one day.
TIME: You write about how most priests don't even like to talk about exorcism, that they find the idea distasteful. Why is that?
BAGLIO: There's a lot of taboo when it comes to the devil and evil itself. Parishoners don't want to hear about Satan and evil and sin. Father Gary, he's in his 50s, and he was ordained in the late '70s. During that period, you had a lot of turmoil in conjunction with Vatican II shaking up the church and getting rid of many very old traditions, the Latin mass and those sorts of things. But you have to look at priests themselves as being creatures of their environment. Coupled with that were all this these new psychoanalytical approaches that were uncovering a lot of things that in the past were considered to be in the realm of the spiritual. I think a lot of priests saw that and said, Let's just keep becoming more modern and more open and don't worry about all these "medieval things."
TIME: Most of the exorcisms that Father Gary witnesses are fairly low-key. What happens during the dramatic ones?
BAGLIO: If an exorcist sees 100 people, there are only going to be 2 or 3 that are dramatic. And I would characterize those as being when the person actually speaks to the exorcist. Quite often they'll be burping or belching or coughing or yawning. There's moaning and screaming too. But in the stronger cases, in almost every instance, you'll have the voice. The person will speak in a demonic voice, and they'll say things like, "This person belongs to us," "You have no power over us," "You can't defeat us." They are usually very dramatic in the sense that the person will be screaming at the top of their lungs. There can also be shaking. Picture a person sitting in a chair with their arms sticking straight out, their legs sticking straight out, convulsing. That's common.
But usually, the more dramatic cases deal with people who are screaming, using their voice, shoving and punching, getting up, smacking their head against the wall — just very violent. And that voice is beyond a simple mimic of a strange voice. It's very uncanny, very unnatural. And then, of course, there's vomiting, which is common. Father Carmine saw a case where a woman vomited up a small black toad that was still alive. He went to catch it, and it dissolved into saliva. I had another priest who I talked to who dealt with a woman who vomited up seven little black nails, six of which dissolved into this black liquid.
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This is honestly a very neat interview, and this is only a SMALL portion that I've posted here.
I really recommend taking a few minutes to give it a read. The article can be found HERE.
(Source: TIME)
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