Slightly OT
I originally intended this thread to be focused on Chinese (Daoist) exorcism as that does bleed over into the martial arts, especially if you’re in the Wudang lineage. But it is going its own way, as threads often do…
Return of the Devil: Exorcism’s Comeback in the Catholic Church
by Chris Roberts
March 09, 2016
Natasha Dangond
Immaculate Conception Chapel in Bernal Heights.
Every Thursday evening, a few dozen people file into Immaculate Conception Chapel, a small Catholic church on the steep slope of Folsom Street on Bernal Hill’s north face, carrying bottles of water, tubs of protein powder, small bottles of booze, watches, rosaries, and cell phones.
They place these items on small tables and on the rails at the front of the church, below the altar and the figure of Christ nailed to the cross set deep into the chapel’s far wall. Then they find a spot in one of the 13 rows of pews, to sit or kneel as they pray in silence. For a long while, the only noise comes from the wheeze of the 67-Bernal Heights bus as it chugs up the hill or the whir of the church’s HVAC sys flitem.
The people stir a few minutes past 7 p.m. when a tiny man wearing white robes — a long rectangle of cloth with Vegas-worthy golden sparkles hanging around his neck — appears from a door to the left of the altar. A few weeks shy of his 89th birthday, Father Guglielmo Lauriola walks slowly across the raised altar area to a waiting chair. Here he sits, facing away from his congregation in the style of the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass, to read from laminated card prayers and songs devoted to the Virgin Mary. Aside from Jesus on the cross, she is the principal figure of veneration here at the 104-year-old church.
When this is finished, in about half an hour, the two middle-aged Filipinas who serve as Lauriola’s lectors and attendants, towering over his five-foot-ish frame, help him into different robes. Then the Franciscan priest — the pastor of this church for over 40 years — starts a second Mass, this one facing his parishioners.
Everything follows the liturgy, the script that would be recognizable to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics even if Lauriola were speaking in Klingon. He reads from the Bible. He delivers a short sermon, talking about the time he welcomed some Muslims in the neighborhood into the church. (Their god is not so different from his God, he says.) He gets up, the smell of incense thick in the room, to fling water from a small wand onto the personal items arrayed on the table, granting them all — water, booze, phones — a blessing. The parishioners line up to receive Communion, the small wafers of bread that Catholics believe becomes the physical body of Jesus Christ.
Then come — for fidgety schoolchildren or for the rote Catholics eager to get on with their day and go home — the magic words. “The Mass is ended,” Lauriola says, his accent like a thick layer of lacquer over a well-worn pew. “Go in peace.”
Nobody moves. This is when the show really starts.
Two men step forward approach Lauriola, who has shuffled to the center of the altar area, in the same spot where he offered Communion. They stay on the church’s main floor, two steps below, flanking him on either side. The people line up in the same way they did when receiving Communion, but instead of a piece of consecrated bread, this time they’re waiting their turn to hold Lauriola’s hands for about 20 to 30 seconds as he offers each of them a special prayer. As Lauriola murmurs his blessing, the two men hold their hands up behind the person receiving it, their palms held out and a few inches away from the person’s back, as if preparing for a trust fall at a work retreat.
It’s a necessary move. After Lauriola releases his grip, some of the people stagger away as if stricken, caught by the waiting hands. Some need to be helped to the altar, where they kneel to pray. Every once in awhile, the blessed person will fall to the floor as if they fainted. Sometimes they may remain there for as long as 10 or 15 minutes while the rest of the congregation files around them to receive their own blessings, with their own reactions.
When this is all over, the two men come forward again. This time, they help Lauriola down the two steps from the raised altar area. The blessed parishioners, by now back in their pews, rise again, forming a circle around the elf-sized priest as he approaches them. They hold their hands over him, as if receiving his energy. And they pray.
This is not an ordinary Catholic Mass — it’s a healing Mass. The prayers here are for sick people, for deliverance. Some of the prayers are to be rid of evil, of the influence of the devil in their lives — to be free of the hold Satan has on their bodies and souls.
This is exactly the right place for that kind of prayer. This is the house of an exorcist.
Chris Roberts
Father Guglielmo Lauriola, after giving out miniature exorcisms.
Lauriola is one of two Catholic exorcists — priests whose official duty it is to perform the Solemn Rite of Exorcism, the formal casting-out of the devil or a demon from a Catholic’s body and soul — living and working in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, which includes Marin and San Mateo counties as well as the city. (The blessing that Lauriola gave, he explains to me later, is a minor exorcism, one large step below the formal rite.)
In the 21st century, even as Pope Francis embraces progressive ideas like climate change and urges world leaders to do something about income inequality, the rite of exorcism is enjoying a renaissance in the Catholic Church.
“I believe in exorcism,” says Angela Alioto, a former President of the Board of Supervisors and the daughter of Mayor Joe Alioto, who presided over the city in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “I believe people are possessed. I believe what our Lord did in the Gospels. I absolutely believe in that.”
“I think people were hiding [exorcism] more before,” says Alioto, a fervent Catholic and practicing attorney in North Beach. “I think they were still doing it, they just kept it quiet. Now they’re not being as quiet as they used to be.”
Following an official decree from Pope John Paul II in 2004, every diocese (the term for an area of hierarchal control, like a state or a county) in the church has appointed an official exorcist. It’s not clear how many exorcists there are in America — not every diocese is public about it — but there are 185 dioceses in the country. And in California, every diocese but one has an official exorcist.
Lauriola sees as many as eight people a month seeking healing for afflictions modern medicine cannot cure; a counterpart of his in San Jose, Father Gary Thomas, is just as busy.
While some Catholic theologians disagree — and the Archdiocese of San Francisco does not provide official figures, if it has any — a fair number of priests, religious scholars, and faithful agree: Exorcism is back. This seemingly medieval practice — which fell by the wayside as the Church attempted to modernize in the last 50 years, and which took a further hit in 1973, when a young German woman, Anneliese Michel, died after undergoing repeated exorcisms — is creeping into the Catholic mainstream once again. This assertion is repeated in headlines in the Telegraph, U.K. Guardian and other news publications that talk of an “exorcism boom.”
“Almost all exorcists are unanimous in their belief that more people are becoming possessed today than in the recent past,” writes journalist Matt Baglio in The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist, a tome inspired by (and centered on) Thomas’s training in exorcism, undertaken in Rome in 2005.
Skeptics would point out that such a statement is akin to umbrella salesmen agreeing that it’s about to rain. And there are many skeptics. Michael Cueno, a professor at the Catholic Church-affiliated Fordhan University in New York City, attended 50 exorcisms while researching his book American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty. And “never once did I walk away convinced that the person being exorcised was really demonized,” he said in an interview with Evangelical Today.
And not every Catholic theologian agrees with the anecdotes from exorcism practitioners. “There’s no empirical evidence to support that statement,” says Father Jim Bretzke, a former professor at the University of San Francisco who now teaches theology at Boston College. Interest in exorcism “tends to ebb and flow whenever there’s something in the news cycle to provoke it — a book or a movie — but I cannot say that the demonic is on the rise.”
But given the papal decree, it is true that there are more exorcists in the U.S. than before. (Thomas says he has a “confidential list” of at least 90 American exorcists, and occasionally learns of others he did not know practiced the rite.) And anecdotes suggest that there is growing number of people — possibly including the Catholics occupying positions of power in Congress and in City Hall — for whom Satan is not a metaphor or a bogeyman. He’s real — and thanks to a populace less interested in the church and more occupied with New Age philosophy, he’s busier than ever.
continued next post
