Father Gabriele Amorth has carried out more than 70,000 exorcisms but fewer
than 100 have been cases of genuine demonic possession.
The chief exorcist of the diocese of Rome quotes this second figure as if to
comfort me, but to a modern Catholic, convinced that the Devil is just a
face the church has traditionally put to the otherwise intangible presence
of evil in the world, 100 sounds like an awful lot of encounters with
someone I don't believe exists.
I am momentarily struck dumb as we sit on either side of a table in Father
Gabriele's bare-walled office, situated in an anonymous church building on
the outskirts of Rome.
A large crucifix lies between us, resting on a purple
cushion.
I want to ask if he is absolutely sure he wasn't mistaken in those
100 cases, but everything about the manner of this burly, pugnacious priest,
in his mid-80s and with a deeply-lined bulldog face, makes plain he means
every single word.
"It is vital," he continues, "to distinguish two causes [for apparent demonic
possession]: for most people it is an illness of the psyche that can be
cured by psychiatry."
We are getting back onto more familiar, shared ground.
Instead of splashing those who come here to seek his help with holy water
and reading the rite of exorcism, as was the standard practice of the
medieval church, he appears to be accepting the need for referral to a
suitably qualified doctor, much more in keeping with modern, mainstream
Christianity.
"But," says Father Gabriele, "there are the others, the small number of real
possessions. Often they were outwardly normal people, going about their
lives in a normal way."
And when he exorcises them, what exactly happens? "I
have had people vomit up nails during an exorcism," he replies
matter-of-factly, "others pieces of glass, others pieces of radio
equipment."
Radio equipment? It sounds almost comical, but he is not smiling. At no point
during our 30 minutes together does he come anywhere near a smile. And
neither, do I.
"The Devil works through the media," he explains, looking me
straight in the eye, knowing full well I am a journalist.
This chilling encounter with Father Gabriele came back vividly as I watched
The Rite, Hollywood's latest follow-up to The Exorcist, the iconic 1973
horror film that remains fixed in the memory of anyone brave enough to watch
it all the way through.
The Rite explores similar territory as it follows a
young, thoroughly modern American priest, Father Michael Kovak, (Colin
O'Donoghue) who is sent to Rome by his bishop, against his wishes, to attend
a training course for exorcists being run in the headquarters of
Catholicism.
Deeply sceptical about what he sees as the outdated mumbo-jumbo that is
demonology, Father Michael proves so disruptive on the course that he is
referred by his tutor (Ciarán Hinds) to the eminence noire of Rome
exorcists, Father Lucas Trevant (Anthony Hopkins).
"Do you believe in sin?"
Father Lucas barks at his visitor.
It instantly put me in mind of Father
Gabriele.
"I do, but I don't believe the Devil makes us do it," Father
Michael replies with the sort of courage I lacked in my brush with an
old-style exorcist in Rome.
The younger cleric initially sticks to his sane, rational, 21st century guns
over the nonexistence of the Devil.
"She doesn't need a priest," he tells
Father Lucas of one of his tortured charges, her belly swelling, her eyes
rolling and her fiendish screams intensifying, "she needs a shrink".
Yet by
the end of this horror-thriller, Father Michael is as ready to brandish his
crucifix as a weapon against Satan as Father Lucas.
Despite its primary vocation to terrify cinema-goers, The Rite cannot lightly
be dismissed as a piece of shameless exaggeration and sensationalism because
it does manage to get much of the incidental detail right. Such as being set
in Rome.
It was the only place – when I was researching a book on the Devil
– where church exorcists are open about their work.
According to recently
reiterated papal rules, every single one of the 3,000 dioceses of the
Catholic Church around the world must have, among the ranks of its priests,
a trained exorcist, but their identity is cloaked in secrecy.
When I asked
to interview one anywhere in Britain, I was told I would have to demonstrate
prima facie evidence of possession first.
Which, however thorough my
research, would have been stretching it a bit.
That is when I discovered
that in Rome, the rules are rather different and ended up face-to-face with
Father Gabriele.
The Rite is based on the experiences of Father Gary Thomas from Saratoga,
California, a parish priest in suburban Silicon Valley who was dispatched to
Rome in 2005 by his bishop for training so he could fill the vacancy for a
diocesan exorcist.
He arrived deeply distrustful of talk of the Devil, and
like Father Michael in the film, was sent off to meet an old hand.
In
interviews, he hasn't named the senior exorcist in question, and any passing
similarity with Father Gabriele has to be tempered by the Hopkins character
being portrayed as having his own doubts about the reality of the Devil, not
a position my interviewee had ever adopted.
Indeed last year he made
headlines when he produced a memoir claiming that Satan was at work even in
the corridors of the Vatican itself.
The publication of that book caused a few blushes among the papal entourage.
In the modern church, you see, it is just not the done thing to mention the
Devil.
The figure who looms so large in the gospels, whose horned, scaly,
terrifying face adorned the walls of many a medieval church in scenes of the
harrowing of hell, and who has inspired artists from Dante and Bosch through
Milton and Byron and on to Bulgakov and CS Lewis, is now rarely mentioned
from the pulpit.
The last Pope to speak at any length on the Devil was Paul VI in 1972.
In an
address (which Father Gabriele quotes from at length during our meeting), he
personified evil in the figure of the Devil as "an effective agent, a living
spiritual being, perverted and perverting".
By contrast, Pope John Paul II,
in the 27 years of his reign, made only two glancing references to Satan,
both times in larger contexts. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the
comprehensive rulebook that John Paul published in 1993, the Devil figures
in only a handful of the 3,000 entries, and then simply as a "seductive
voice" luring humankind astray.
The logic behind this vow of silence is plain. Church leaders don't like
mentioning the Devil in case it makes them sound medieval, superstitious or
out of touch.
There is also a smattering of remorse in there for the crimes
that the Church has committed down the centuries by invoking the real
presence of the Devil.
When the Inquisition was torturing and murdering
those who dared to disagree with the papal line, its victims (Jews, women,
pagans alike) were usually presented as being in league with Satan.
Yet even in 2011, the Devil is not wholly disowned by the church that did so
much more than any other institution to make him seem frighteningly flesh
and blood.
He remains part of Catholicism but is now treated like the
disreputable relative with a dark past who the family prefers to keep shut
away.
Hence the silence that surrounds the work of exorcists.
It is hard to
downplay talk of the Devil in public when you are simultaneously maintaining
a network of diocesan exorcists around the world.
This is an ambiguity the Church has long lived with. John Paul II, for all his
public reticence about Satan, nevertheless managed in 1982 to carry out an
exorcism himself on a disturbed young woman, an episode recalled in My Six
Popes, the autobiography published in 1993 by the retired head of his
household, French Cardinal Jacques Martin.
And it is not just church leaders who are in two minds about the Devil.
However much I could rationally trace the development of the character of
the Devil as a theological, historical, artist and church-political
construct, a shorthand explanation for what many regard as the evil abroad
in the world, in that moment when I was sitting opposite Father Gabriele in
his office in Rome, and he started talking about the Devil possessing the
media, I felt myself shifting in my chair. Was he about to attempt an
exorcism on me?
And if he did, what was there to worry about because I
didn't share his belief a physical incarnation of evil?
His words would have
no effect. But frightened I was, and I beat a hasty retreat from what I
later heard described as the "delivery room", and gasped with relief when I
got outside the building.
There is a part of us that remains irrationally susceptible to the idea of the
Devil.
Perhaps it is just those who, like me, had a traditional Catholic
upbringing. My Christian Brother teachers were big on the real and imminent
danger of Hell.
But the enduring appeal of Satan spreads beyond my
generation and my particular denomination.
Politicians and public alike,
when faced by a monstrous crime, are still quick to characterise its
perpetrator as the Devil incarnate.
Think of the descriptions routinely used
of the Moors Murderess, Myra Hindley.
"May She Rot in Hell," ran one
headline on the day she died.
Indeed, if there was ever a modern image of
the Devil it was that Medusa-like picture of her taken in 1966, all blond
hair, defiance, and cold, cold eyes.
Confronted with something unthinkably cruel and inhumane, we reach not for the
language of psychiatry but for medieval demonology and scapegoating.
As does
the Church. Benedict XVI, generally as reluctant as his predecessor to
mention the Devil in public, did nevertheless last June talk about the
orchestrating role of "the enemy" in the paedophile priest scandal that has
so damaged the Church's moral standing.
The Devil can still be a convenient get-out clause, whether it be from
culpability for unspeakable crimes against children, or more mundane
problems. I remember once attending a prayer group where young Evangelical
Anglicans had gathered to share the trials and tribulations of their week,
and how Jesus would shape their lives if they let him.
"I've had a terrible
few days," one twentysomething confided, "the Devil has made me spend all my
money."
She said it without a hint of irony or self-knowledge. She was
taking no responsibility herself.
That same reaction can be glimpsed in remarks made by Father Gary Thomas, in
interviews he has given to mark the release of The Rite in the United
States.
Since he successfully completed his training as an exorcist in Rome,
he has dealt with five cases he describes as genuine possession by the
Devil.
His work with those individuals, he confides, has left him vulnerable
himself to Satan.
"My celibacy gets attacked a lot," he remarks.
Rather than
locate any problems he may have with the Catholic rule that priests must be
celibate within, either himself or the church, Father Gary evidently prefers
to externalise them and project them onto the Devil.
The connection between sex and Devil is almost as old as Christianity.
Familiar figures in the medieval church iconography were incubus and
succubus, copulating demons who would seduce both women and men and
impregnate females with children of the Devil.
So is Satan in the 21st century being relegated to the extreme fringes of
Christianity that still prefer a literal interpretation of the Bible?
Apparently not.
He's still right there in the mainstream churches.
Indeed,
in the opening titles for The Rite, the film-makers draw attention to a New
York Times report on a conference of US Catholic bishops that took place in
November 2010 to debate growing demand from their congregations for
exorcism, and the absence of sufficient suitably-qualified priests to
service them.
Unlike Father Gabriele, most of this secret army of priest-exorcists prefer to
operate away from the spotlight, but for all that there is no question that
the Devil is real.
If they ever break cover and are confronted about their
work, they have a standard response, best summed up by the 19th century
French poet, Baudelaire – "the Devil's deepest wile is to persuade us that
he does exist".
It is a pretty circular argument. When you counter, as Father Michael does in
the early sections of The Rite, that the absence of proof of the Devil
cannot be taken as proof itself, they just smile knowingly.
While Father
Gabriele didn't even manage a smile when I met him, I am sure the same
justification was going through his head.