The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist

by Matt Baglio

  It was also true that the priests in the sabbatical program kept a pretty busy schedule, waking up for morning mass at 6:30, followed by breakfast and then classes until lunch, with more classes in the afternoon, then evening prayer and dinner. Afterward Father Gary might have just enough time to run down to the library to check the sports scores on the Internet. A rabid sports fan, he followed the San Francisco 49ers as well as the Giants.

  He got along well with a majority of the priests in the program, most of whom were around his age and hailed from different parts of the United States. As usual, a few were of the more “antisocial” type, which always puzzled Father Gary, whose concept of “priestly identity” could best be described as “being present to people,” but he didn't let the aloofness of others dampen his own spirits.

  One treat that staying at the NAC provided was the chance to rub shoulders with the seminarians who lived there. Like the priests in the sabbatical program, the seminarians represented a broad cross-section of cities and towns across America. Father Gary called them “kids” since most were in their mid-twenties. These were the bright young minds of the Church, priests who might one day become respected canonical lawyers or even bishops (some have nicknamed the NAC “the school of bishops”). Father Gary got into the habit of going out to lunch twice a month with a group of these seminarians, sharing with them some of the hard lessons he'd learned over the years.

  EVEN AT A YOUNG AGE, Father Gary knew he wanted to be a priest. His mother, AnnaMay Thomas, remembers her son at the age of eleven, pretending to say mass in the kitchen of their South San Francisco home—holding aloft the round piece of Wonder Bread, his expression fixed in reverence as he said, “This is my body, I give it up to you …” Gary's younger brother, David, who was six at the time, remembers how seriously his older brother went about it. Everything had to be perfect—the kitchen table covered with a white towel representing the altar, the Bible placed in just the right position, candles arranged appropriately. Gary pressed his little brother into being the altar boy. David's most important task was to make the hosts, which he'd been told had to be flat and perfectly round. Unsure how he was going to accomplish that, Gary let him in on one of his trade secrets: “Use a cookie cutter,” he'd said.

  Gary Thomas was born on November 2, 1953, in San Francisco, California, to San Francisco natives. AnnaMay, whose maiden name was Mahoney was raised in a blue-collar Irish Catholic family in the Mission District. Raymond Thomas, the son of Croatian immigrants with Eastern European Catholic ties, grew up in what is now called Catrero Hills.

  When Gary was four, the family moved to South San Francisco, also known as South City. At the time, South City was still a growing community a decidedly blue-collar town populated mostly by people of Italian descent who'd settled there in the wake of World War II. The year they moved, Gary's younger brother David was born, followed by his sister JoAnn. In South City Ray worked as an electrician, doing mostly private contract work, and once the kids were old enough to go to school, AnnaMay worked as a school secretary. By all accounts, Father Gary had a pretty normal ail-American childhood. He played Little League, mowed lawns, and attended All Souls Catholic Grammar School, where he served as an altar boy until eighth grade.

  Typically Gary's family would be the last ones to leave church, something Gary's dad often ribbed his mother about. For Gary, something about priests made him feel comfortable; he felt a “positive familiarity” when he was around them. He also had literal familiarity; an uncle on his dad's side was a priest and a cousin on his mom's side was a Jesuit.

  In the fifth and sixth grade, when all those in his class put a picture on the bulletin board of what they wanted to be when they grew up, Gary had chosen a picture of a priest. When he told his parents about this, his dad just brushed it off, thinking his son would eventually grow out of it. While this would never happen, when Gary turned fourteen, a chance encounter knocked him off track for a while.

  His mother took him to a funeral at the Nauman Lincoln Roos mortuary. After the service, Mr. Lincoln approached Gary and asked if he wanted to work part-time in the funeral home. Without much hesitation, Gary said yes. His work at Nauman Lincoln consisted of a variety of tasks: washing and waxing the cars, cutting lawns, answering the phones, arranging flowers for the ceremony, even taking people into the chapel. He found the work immediately rewarding. He appreciated the religious component of funerals (he had attended many over the years as an altar boy). Not unlike the role of a priest, the funeral director's job was to comfort people—especially in the days following the death of a loved one, when survivors need the most help.

  Around the time that he was warming up to a career in the funeral business, Gary began to notice that the priesthood might not be everything he'd originally thought. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Catholic Church went through tremendous upheaval in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which advocated that the Church open its windows to the modern world. As a result, many priests began losing the sense of connection they'd once felt to the traditions that had attracted them to the priesthood. This had a disastrous effect. Priests began leaving the Church in large numbers. The entire order of nuns that taught at Gary's high school, Junipero Serra, disbanded. In the midst of this general confusion, Gary became disillusioned about his chosen vocation.

  IN 1972 HE ENROLLED in the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit-run school in the heart of San Francisco. He and a friend, Robert Eagen, would be among the first generation of kids from South City to go to college. Thinking he might one day run his own mortuary, Gary majored in business management.

  The tuition was $1,600 a year, which Gary paid himself by working as a busboy for $250 a month during the school year as well as at the mortuary during the summer. Because of tight finances, he lived at home, commuting to school in a rust-colored 1971 Chevy Càmaro that he bought from a neighbor for $2,000.

  As Gary matured, his responsibilities at the mortuary changed. When he turned eighteen, he went on his first “removal,” mortuary parlance for picking up a dead body. Surprisingly, despite all the funerals he'd attended and his time at the mortuary, he had yet to actually see a naked corpse. This particular body belonged to a patient who'd died at San Francisco General Hospital. To this day Gary remembers that the sight of the corpse, lying bare on the metallic slab down in the morgue, made him nauseous. Eventually, he got used to that, but the experience of performing removals never became routine—especially not when he had to drive to homes and remove a body while under the watchful eyes of a roomful of grieving family members.

  Meanwhile, in the spring semester of his final year at USF, mutual friends set Gary up on a blind date with Lori Driscoll (now Lori Armstrong), a freshman nursing student at San Francisco State. The two immediately hit it off and began dating, usually attending sporting events with groups of friends. “He had this ability to put other people first and make them feel special,” Lori recalls.

  Sometimes, however, Gary's mortuary job threw a kink into their plans. Lori remembers a few occasions when she'd gotten all dressed up, only to have Gary cancel at the last minute because he had to do a removal. Despite being disappointed, she'd soothe her bruised ego by telling herself that if he was to become a funeral director, she'd better get used to this now rather than later.

  In 1975, Gary graduated from USF and immediately entered a year-long program at the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science in order to get his embalming license. He continued to live at home while attending the mortuary school, easily making friends and even picking up a nickname. One course he took was on funeral services as practiced by different religious denominations. Because of his long exposure to Catholic tradition, Gary was asked if he'd be willing to teach it to the other students. Before long, everyone began calling him “Father Thomas.”

  He excelled at the school, finishing the program in only nine months, after which he went to work as an apprentice for a mortuary in South City. Then in 1977, at the age of twen
ty-four, Gary got his embalmer's license and moved to a funeral home in Los Altos. The mortuary had a little cottage on-site, where for the first time in his life, Gary lived on his own.

  During mortuary school, he had discovered a sort of “marvel to the human body as a system,” especially the circulatory system, which embalmers use for draining the blood and inserting the embalming fluid. And rather than being sickened by what he witnessed, if anything the constant exposure to death helped to “elevate” his spiritual life. Oftentimes, while inserting the eye caps—small plastic devices with edged “teeth” that keep the eyes closed—he would find himself staring into the lifeless eyes of the deceased. The first time he did this, he could tell there was something odd about them; a presence was missing. To Gary, this was clear proof that there is eternal life, that the soul leaves the body at death.

  During his time in Los Altos, a feeling Gary thought was long gone began to gnaw at him; he started thinking seriously about the priesthood again. Despite having a rewarding career, he felt deep down somewhere that he was destined to do something different. He began asking himself a hard question: Was the life he had mapped out for himself as a mortician the one God intended?

  There was also his relationship with Lori to consider. In the end he knew he couldn't be fair to her if he continued to harbor doubts. A few weeks later, one September afternoon, he and Lori drove to Vasona Lake Park in Los Gatos for a picnic. Lori had no idea what was coming, though perhaps she should have seen the writing on the wall. For five months, Gary had been dropping hints about his interest in joining the priesthood. Lori's mind, however, had been focused elsewhere. In fact, she had expected to get a ring for her twenty-first birthday in August. At the park, the two wandered out to a shady spot on the grass, overlooking the lake. There they sat for a few minutes, watching the water, each looking at a different world and contemplating a very different future. Gary could see himself alone, a priest dedicating himself to a life of celibacy and service to God. Lori saw herself as a mother and wife of a funeral director. At some point, Gary turned to face her and their worlds collided. Though dumbfounded, Lori realized she could not stand in Gary's way.

  THE YEAR AFTER he broke up with Lori turned into a time of struggle for Gary. He continued working in the funeral business while determining whether or not God was calling him to the priesthood.

  In the summer of 1978, he began meeting regularly with a spiritual director, Father James O'Shaunessy to find out “How is God in all of this?” However, the decision to apply to the seminary didn't come until after he had heard a talk at Saint Joseph's Seminary College in Los Altos on how to recognize a vocation. There, a Marian priest touched on ways a person might recognize the right vocation: “Part of it is desire, part of it is excitement for a service with people,and part of it is an inability to respond to some kind of prompting in any other way than going with what your heart tells you.” The words had a huge impact on Gary. He made his decision to enter the seminary that day.

  When Gary dropped by his parents’ house to tell them the news, Gary's dad was shocked, telling his son that he was “nuts” to be entering the priesthood when everybody else seemed to be leaving. Gary assured him that if he didn't like it he would leave. Ray left it at that, realizing he wouldn't be able to change his son's mind. Gary's mom, on the other hand, was “thrilled.” She knew he was fulfilling his calling.

  Gary entered Saint Patrick's Seminary in August 1979, amid a sea of change—discipline had become lax in recent years and a new rector, Father Howard P. Bleichner S.S., had been brought in to reinstill a sense of order, which he did with an iron fist. As a result, Father Gary remembers little about the seminary as being fun.

  One of the few things he did enjoy was the opportunity to work in a parish, which allowed him to interact with people. It also gave him a taste of his future life as a priest. Unlike some seminarians who preferred losing themselves in intellectual pursuits, Gary loved the fieldwork. He was a natural communicator, thriving on human interaction.

  During his third year he began working fifteen hours a week at O'Connor Hospital in San Jose. He specifically requested to be moved to the “death ward.” He had been around death most of his life, but his experience at O'Connor was something else entirely. Ever conscious of his priestly duty to alleviate suffering, he wanted to know what to say when people were at their most vulnerable and needed comfort. Unlike the priests who shied away from suffering, Gary experienced these as circumstances when a priest was truly called upon to be present. In the end, his hours in the ward taught him that death can sometimes be a lonely experience and that often it is best to say nothing at all.

  GARY WAS ORDAINED in March 1983, during one of the worst storms to hit San Jose in twenty years. Caught out on the highway Gary's parents braved the torrential rains and hurricane-force winds, thinking that there'd be nobody at the cathedral when they finally arrived. However, they were amazed to see the place packed, even though the storm had knocked out the power (which miraculously came back on ten minutes before the ceremony was to start).

  Lori had kept track of Gary's progress over the years and, though she still felt hurt by their breakup, cared too much about Gary to miss his ordination. Newly married, she brought her husband with her.

  The thought of seeing so many of his family and friends in one place made Gary incredibly nervous. The two-hour ordination ceremony for himself and just one other priest flew by. Then, as the procession was filing out of the church, Gary spotted Lori by the door and stopped to give her a hug. Blushing at all the attention, she introduced her husband, Bob, who shook Gary's hand. With that Gary rejoined the procession.

  In the context of the Catholic Church, the priesthood is more akin to an identity than a job. It is not something that a priest can turn his back on or take a vacation from. As Pope John Paul II wrote, “[A] priest, by virtue of the consecration […] is called to love self-lessly to put the needs of his ‘flock’ before those of his own.”

  Father Gary had seemingly internalized very early in life this desire to engage with people. Now that he was a priest, his dedication to this role carried new meaning. Because of his ordination, he felt that he had a responsibility to embrace humanity in all its beauty and ugliness. He already knew he was comfortable with death; now he looked forward to helping his parishioners confront the trials of life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GOING BACK TO SCHOOL

  The Devil is present everywhere that evil things happen within the normal laws of nature. In anyone who says: I don't accept love, the love of my brothers and sisters, the love of God. And in many places, in all massacres, in every murder, in physical catastrophes, in every concentration camp, in all evil. Sometimes he shows himself, strangely, but also in cases of possession. But he's much more dangerous where he doesn't let himself be seen, where he can't be done away with through exorcism.

  —Father Pedro Barrajan, excerpt from interview in Die Welt, December 2, 2005

  When Father Gary first heard about the exorcism course, he'd wondered how such a class might be structured. Obviously the organizers had worked this out carefully and systematically.

  After Dr. Ferrari contacted Father Scarafoni about the idea, they began collaborating on the syllabus and choosing the faculty. The goal was to scrape away all misinformation so priests could relearn what the Church actually taught on these matters. However, in addition to a straightforward course on the theology of demons, the organizers also wanted to ensure that potential exorcists become well rounded and decided to include lectures by a psychiatrist and a criminologist. Students would attend lectures on Satanism and youth culture, on how to discern spirits, on the powers of the Devil, as well as on the Church's teachings regarding angels and demons, taught by a Legionaire theologian. In addition exorcists would be called upon to discuss their ministry and share practical tips. Unfortunately, the International Association of Exorcists had refused Father Scarafoni's request to perform an exorcism live, in front of
the students.

  After the first day of the course, things had improved dramatically for Father Gary. As soon as he'd gotten off the train coming back from the Regina Apostolorum, he'd stalked the halls of the NAC, looking for a priest to translate for him. Yet after a week of chasing leads, he'd struck out. Thinking that the second day might be a waste like the first, he nonetheless took the train out on the morning of October 20, hoping to be proved wrong. As it turned out, the course organizers had scrambled and found a very competent Legionaire seminarian to translate for him, communicating via a microphone and headset. While not perfect (sometimes the seminarian had to abridge in order to keep pace), the system worked pretty well.

  RIGHT OFF THE BAT, Father Gary was amazed to learn that exorcism was actually central to Jesus’ gospel message. In fact in the early Church, every Christian was thought to have the power to perform exorcisms.

  Back at the NAC, as he got to know some of the priests and seminarians better, he quickly realized that he wasn't the only one to have misconceptions about the real nature of exorcism. As he shared the fact that he was a fledgling exorcist, he predictably got mixed reactions. Some complimented him. Another group responded with “You shouldn't have told us. We're not supposed to know.” Perplexed by this, he got in touch with his bishop and asked if his appointment was indeed some kind of “state secret.” The bishop said this was the first he'd heard about it. True to his open nature, Father Gary thought that the priests in the diocese ought to know so they could come to him with questions.