Father Amorth was known for his blunt words about the devil and his works, always insisting that Satan's greatest triumph is getting people to believe he doesn't exist.

He also earned worldwide attention last year by attributing the work of the Islamic State terror group to the influence of the devil.

"ISIS is Satan," he said in an April 2015 Facebook post. "Things first happen in the spiritual realms, then they are made concrete on this earth."

"Biblically-speaking we are in the last days and the beast is working furiously," he said.

A prolific writer, Amorth published numerous books during his career, including An Exorcist Tells His Story, Memoirs of an Exorcist: My Life Fighting Satan, An Exorcist: More Stories, and An Exorcist Explains the Demonic: The Antics of Satan and His Army of Fallen Angels.

During his life Father Amorth performed some 70,000 exorcisms, often sacrificing sleep and leisure time to combat the "father of lies." Humanly inexplicable phenomena would accompany cases of demonic possession, Amorth said, including the ability to speak languages that hadn't been studied, superhuman strength, and levitation above the ground.

"Now he rests from his many battles with the devil," Spanish theologian, Father Jose Antonio Fortea told Catholic News Agency Friday.

Father Amorth believed that Satanism was on the rise all over the world, and counseled the faithful to resist Lucifer with prayer and vigilance.

In 2001, journalist Stefano Maria Paci asked Father Amorth about the influence of Satan in the Catholic Church and in the Vatican.

"The smoke of Satan enters everywhere," he replied. "I have no doubt that the devil tempts especially the leaders of the Church, as he tempts all leaders."

Source

• Breitbart
• Belfast Telegraph
• Los Angeles Times
• Catholic News Agency

"There are those who try to turn people into vampires and make them drink other people's blood, or encourage them to have special sexual relations to obtain special powers," said Professor Giuseppe Ferrari at the meeting in Rome, which heard that the number of such possessions is rising globally.

"These groups are attracted by the so-called beautiful young vampires that we've seen so much of in recent years." Continue reading

The Jesuit university is Blatty's alma mater, and his best-selling book and the 1973 blockbuster film The Exorcist were set in Georgetown.

His petition argues that Georgetown has regularly flouted Church teaching and discipline, and failed to provide students with authentic Catholic instruction.

According to Blatty's legal counsel, Manuel Miranda, "Georgetown University has been captured by the ideology of radical autonomy. It pervades everything. Academic freedom is now prisoner to intolerant new orthodoxies, and Catholic moral teaching has surrendered to the dictatorship of moral relativism."

The petition, including 124 witness statements, has been submitted to the Vatican Secretariat of State and to the Congregations for Education and for Religious.

It asks the Vatican to require that Georgetown implement Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the papal constitution governing Catholic colleges, and, if that is now done, to prevent the university from calling itself Catholic.

Blatty and his supporters — more than 2000 of whom have signed the petition — are buoyed by the knowledge that Pope Francis, as chancellor of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, successfully implemented Ex corde Ecclesiae, and also approved of Pope Benedict's 2012 decree removing consent from the University of Peru to call itself Catholic.

Asked to explain why he has backed a petition that could damage the reputation of his alma mater, Blatty said, "Today's Georgetown isn't Georgetown, but more like a living Picture of Dorian Gray."

A spokeswoman for the archdiocese of Washington said it "continues to work with Georgetown to implement Ex Corde Ecclesiae".

But last year an editorial in the archdiocesan newspaper, the Catholic Standard, said at the university "leadership and faculty find their inspiration in sources other than the Gospel and Catholic teaching" and "the vision guiding university choices does not clearly reflect the light of the Gospel and authentic Catholic teaching".

Sources:

National Catholic Register

The Father King Society

Image: Georgetown Clinical Society

Exorcisms in New Zealand are rare, but they do happen - and Catholic Education Office chief executive Pat Lynch said canon law made it obligatory for a bishop to have someone able to perform an exorcism.

"These things, they are not in the realm of fantasy," he said.

He remembered a house, near where he lived in Auckland in the 1970s, where "some sort of black magic was taking place".

"People were getting in touch with the Underworld".

The story was that a one-metre hole would open up in the side of a wall, leaving scorch marks around it.

While parts of the story may have been embellished, a priest with exorcism credentials was brought in to perform the ritual as described in the canon for exorcising spirits.

The ritual apparently worked, he said.

"I have no reason to disbelieve it".

Source

• Stuff.co.nz
• Image: i152.photobucket.com

After celebrating Mass, the Pope blessed several people in wheelchairs. When he held his hands on one man's head, the man shuddered and then slumped in his seat.

Several reporters speculated that the Pope had conducted an exorcism — a suggestion that was strengthened when TV2000, a television station owned by the Italian Catholic bishops, asked several exorcists to watch a video clip of the incident and they concluded: "It was a prayer of liberation from evil or a real exorcism".

But the Vatican said otherwise. The director of the Vatican press office, Father Federico Lombardi, said the Pope had intended simply to give a blessing.

"The Holy Father had no intention to perform any exorcism," he said. "Instead, as he frequently does for the sick and suffering persons who approach him, he simply meant to pray for a suffering person who was presented to him."

The Mexican priest who accompanied the man blessed by the Pope agreed. On his Facebook page, Father Juan Rivas said Pope Francis "prayed over a possessed person. Since no one heard the words he said, and he was right in front of me, we can say he recited a prayer for liberation, nothing more."

But the exorcist for the diocese of Rome disagreed. Father Gabriele Amorth said Pope Francis' act "was an exorcism all right and if Father Lombardi denies this, he clearly does not have a clue".

Father Amorth then revealed that the man concerned — a 43-year-old Mexican husband and father named Angelo, who was incorrectly described in some reports as a boy — had later come to him.

The exorcist said he had ascertained that the man was possessed by four demons and "I performed a long exorcism on him today".

Father Amorth said the man's need for the Pope's "prayer of deliverance" was related to the decriminalisation of abortion in Mexico — confirming a statement by Father Rivas, who said Mexicans had returned the country to "the pagan times of the Aztecs with their human sacrifices".

Sources:

Catholic News Service

ABC News

Catholic News Agency

Vatican Insider

Pope Francis prays over a sick boy in St Peter's Square (video)

Image: Vatican Insider

"At the moment of consecration of the precious blood I asked the Lord to shower his blood upon the youth and to help any young men who may have a vocation to the priesthood."

The instant reaction of one 13-year old boy shocked the young priest, "he fell backwards and started growling. And I thought, ‘I wasn't expecting this!'"

Several years later, and he is one of a new generation of exorcists-in-training following a decision by the U.S. bishops in November 2010 to vastly increase the number of exorcists, which might number as low as 50 in America.

The priest, who is from the U.S. Midwest, spoke to CNA on the basis of anonymity so that he will not be deluged with inquiries. As he explained, "we have set structures to make sure those who most need help get it."

He now finds himself in Rome, sent by his bishop to shadow the work of the six official exorcists of the Rome diocese. In practical terms that means he is "involved in about three exorcisms a day."

And the learning curve has been steep. "No two cases are alike. That's been a real education for me. The rite of exorcism is not a magic formula," he said.

"It is not the devil or the exorcist who is at the center of this but a person is suffering a lot and who is in need of certain liberation through Christ."

As for correct terminology, is it a demon or a devil? "Demon comes from Greek, devil comes from Latin, either is okay," he explained. What you are dealing with "are fallen angels who were created good."

The early Church Fathers, including St. Jerome and St. Augustine, speculated that these angels rebelled "because of the revelation to them of God's plan of incarnation" and their "repulsion at the notion that God, who is pure spirit and infinite, should become a man." Read more

Sources

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Word on Fire

William Peter Blatty, 85, credits a Georgetown scholarship with fostering his writing career, which includes an Academy Award for "The Exorcist," a blockbuster based on his best-selling 1971 novel. In the book and movie, a Jesuit priest at Georgetown, the nation's oldest Catholic university, struggles to save a demon-possessed girl.

"What I owe Georgetown, however, is nothing as compared to what Georgetown owes to its founders and the Christ of faith," Blatty said in a statement.

The author says that Georgetown has violated church teaching for decades by inviting speakers who support abortion rights and refusing to obey instructions the late Pope John Paul II issued in 1990 to church-affiliated colleges and universities.

In response to criticism of the Sebelius speech, Georgetown president John J. DeGioia said this week that the university is "committed to the free exchange of ideas" even if it does not agree with all of them.

Blatty's "indictment" against Georgetown charges the school with failing to recruit Catholic teachers and students, neglecting to instruct students in Catholic morality and failing to act in accord with church doctrine. He expects the suit to be filed in the Archdiocese of Washington's court of canon law this fall.

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