The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist

by Matt Baglio

  ANNA WAS EVENTUALLY LIBERATED in November 2006 (her liberation was recounted in the prologue) and remains free of the symptoms. Father Bamonte believes that her possession was probably caused by a satanic ritual performed four generations ago by members of her family who sought to gain power by sacrificing an infant to a demon (this was the ritual that Anna herself said she saw when Father Alberto prayed over her). And though he was never able to verify the claim, according to Father Bamonte, during the exorcisms, the demon would often hum the singsong chant used by the participants of this ritual. The chant sounded like a jingle used in a TV commercial for a popular aperitif. When the commercial came on TV, Anna would feel compelled to quickly change the channel without realizing why.

  ONE DAY AFTER PERFORMING EXORCISMS, Father Gary decided to stay in San Lorenzo and have dinner with Father Carmine. While he considered Father Carmine to be a “holy man,” there was no denying that there was a distance between them. Much of it was cultural, and because of the language barrier as well. But there was something else, too—a sort of professional wariness that comes from two people meeting to perform an arduous task under unpleasant circumstances.

  They ate inside a horseshoe-shaped dining hall that offered little in the way of decorations beyond the scuffs and dings that come from long continuous use. The meal was staggered in two shifts, with Father Gary and Father Carmine sharing the space with about eight other friars. Since he was the superior, Father Carmine sat at the head of the table, while Father Gary took a place near the end, next to a layman in his seventies, who lived at the convent and taught English as a second language. As Father Gary talked and enjoyed dinner with the layman, he noticed that Father Carmine's demeanor here was very different from what he displayed at his office. He appeared much more relaxed and conversed with the other priests as he presided over the meal. Because the juxtaposition was so striking, Father Gary realized that it must have been hard for Father Carmine and his fellow exorcists to maintain any sense of equilibrium.

  What Father Gary didn't realize was that, even though Father Carmine knew it needed to be done, he didn't like training new exorcists. “Yes, apprenticeships are necessary,” Father Carmine would say later. “In order to become an exorcist, you need to apprentice, to see and have experience; but you can't say it is an enjoyable thing. I prefer to teach beautiful things, good and holy things, things of God. Personally I thank God for this job’ because it puts me in touch with a supernatural world and so my faith grows as a result. However, that does not make it a beautiful job.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A PASTORAL APPROACH

  “We can do only our best, and then we must leave the final decision up to God.”

  —Father Candido Amantini, as quoted in An Exorcist Tells His Story, by Father Gabriele Amorth

  By February Father Gary had settled into a comfortable routine. After morning mass he would usually do some reading, either up in his room or in the NAC library. Then in the evenings on Monday through Thursday he would see exorcisms at San Lorenzo until dinner. On Thursday morning he would head out to the Regina Apos-tolorum and then in the afternoon over to his class on the history of spirituality at the Angelicum.

  About this time, an American exorcist, Father Vince Lampert, from the diocese of Indianapolis, got in touch. In Rome to participate in the continuing education program at the NAC, Father Vince had recently been nominated exorcist and figured that it would be a good idea to participate in a few exorcisms while he was in town. Like Father Gary, when his archbishop had appointed him exorcist, he'd told him that “he had no idea what he was asking [him] to do.”

  A slender, thoughtful man whose unedited bluntness comes off as a bit gruff, Father Vince is nonetheless very personable and quick to laugh at a good joke. Meeting one night for dinner in a trattoria near Saint Peter's, the two priests immediately hit it off. As they got to know each other, Father Vince filled Father Gary in about the circumstances that led to his nomination and his concern (like most American exorcists) that he had no training and wasn't sure where he should begin.

  Father Gary, for his part, was candid about his own background. He had checked with Father Carmine about bringing Father Vince along, but he wanted to prepare him—remembering his own feelings of disappointment alternating with shock.

  As he listened, Father Vince's favorable impression of Father Gary grew. This was not a priest that was out to bag demons and make a name for himself, but somebody who leveled with him and told him that some of the victim's reactions were downright “odd.”

  The two decided they would meet the following Monday at the Casa first and then together go to San Lorenzo on the bus.

  Like any novice, Father Gary included, Father Vince had been growing more and more anxious about what he might see in his first exorcism. He'd spent the previous day readying himself in the only way he knew how, going to confession and spending extra time in prayer. He had purposefully tried to steer clear of films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose (some priests at the NAC had watched it one night) because he didn't want to be prejudiced. Before he left the NAC that afternoon, he told a few fellow priests where he was going; they replied that they would pray for him.

  On the bus, his apprehension grew. Father Gary filled him in on the protocol and what he might expect to see, displaying a demeanor that helped calm his nerves. When they arrived at San Lorenzo, the usual crowd had already gathered in the courtyard. And as they waited, Father Gary gave Father Vince what little history he could on the various people.

  After the first night, the two stopped to have a coffee and decompress. That night had been a particularly violent one. A woman in her early forties with sharp, attractive features and shoulder-length black hair had shaken so violently that Father Vince had seen her levitate five inches off the chair, at which point Father Carmine had simply pushed her back down with the palm of his hand. Father Gary, who was momentarily engrossed in the Ritual book at the time, had missed it.

  Father Vince had several questions. As he was wont to do, Father Carmine had pinched the bridge of the woman's nose, which Father Vince found strange. Father Gary chuckled, telling him that he'd had that same question himself. (Father Carmine would later explain that he pinched the nose because the demon enters through the person's senses.)

  Both Father Gary and Father Vince, thinking ahead to the day when the fate of a person's spiritual well-being would rest in their hands, were keen to learn practical tips. Since the Ritual is imprecise on how an exorcism should be performed, their chief concerns were avoiding mistakes. Father Gary, for one, had read that if the exorcist went about it wrong, he could actually open himself up spiritually to an attack. One author had even gone so far as to suggest that if the exorcist touched the person during an exorcism, the demon could enter into him.

  Father Carmine scoffed at this. ‘Absolutely not. It's not a disease,” he would later say. However, there were dangers. Father Carmine was adamant about not engaging the demon.

  “Whenever the demon talks, you should never listen to him. You should never ask questions to the demon in order to know something hidden; this is a very serious mistake. A priest is not to ask the demon anything that you don't already know the answer to [for instance, “Why did you try to put yourself above God when you know He is all-powerful?”]. Never ask questions so that the demon could be considered a source of information, never! First of all because he is a liar and so what he says can very well be a lie, and second because you can't give him the honor of being your source of information.”

  The Ritual does permit the exorcist to ask the demon his name, which in the ancient Hebrew tradition is believed to give one a kind of power over another, also evidenced by the ancient practice that prohibited writing or pronouncing the name of God.

  The foundation of asking for the demon's name comes from the Bible, where Jesus asked the name of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:9). Early exorcists considered it worthy and codified it in the old 1614 Roman Ritual, which
allows the exorcist to ask “the number and name of the spirits inhabiting the person, the time when they entered into him and the cause.”

  “One of the first things that he struggles to avoid is to confess his name, because to do so is some sort of half defeat for him,” says Father Amorth.

  A demon's name delineates the type of spirit it may be. Sometimes the names are purely functional, such as “anger” or “lust;” at other times they are recognizable names from the Bible, like Beelzebub or Asmodeus.

  Even exorcists admit that there is a lot of mystery to it. For instance, if the demon Asmodeus is present in two or more people that an exorcist sees (actually, it's more than that), why doesn't the demon recognize the exorcist? Shouldn't he be able to say to the exorcist, “Hi, remember me? We met this morning.” In actuality, sometimes it does happen that an exorcist will pray over a person, even in another part of the world, and have the demon say, “We fought each other five years ago in Jerusalem”—referring to an exorcism that the victim knows nothing about. However, this is rare, and the average exorcist (especially in Italy) may see Asmodeus three times in the same week without so much as a “Here we go again!” But according to one Italian exorcist, the actual name isn't that important. It may signify “the army” of that particular evil spirit. In other words, a demon saying “Asmodeus” is like a World War II American G.I. saying “I'm a Marine” or “I'm under Eisenhower.” “All that matters is that they give you a name, any name, so long as they respond to it,” says the exorcist.

  For this reason, many exorcists actually prefer not to talk to the demon at all. Father Dermine, for example, doesn't even ask for the name. “I don't ask anything because I don't believe them. I know this may sound disappointing, but demons are such big liars that I just continue with the prayer almost as if they weren't there.”

  It can also happen that a demon will sometimes give a person's name, such as “Adam.” A great debate exists among exorcists about whether or not the soul of a deceased person can cause a possession. The more theologically inclined exorcists say no (when a person dies, the soul goes straight to heaven, hell, or purgatory), while those who have spent some time in places like Africa (where the belief is widespread) say yes, it is possible. Father Nanni once prayed over a person who claimed to be the soul of a dead Mafia boss. After months of refusing to give any other name, Father Nanni did a little checking and discovered that the person in question never existed. On this occasion, the demon finally relented and confessed that he'd been trying to fool the exorcist all along.

  In addition to the moments when Father Carmine was able to answer a few of their questions, Father Gary and Father Vince made it a habit to have a coffee or try to grab a bite afterward. Through Father Gary's knowledge of the personal histories of the victims and Father Vince's understanding of Italian (since he was fluent in Spanish, he could make out more Italian than Father Gary could), the two would compare notes. During one of their late-night repasts, Father Gary explained to Father Vince something that had taken him weeks to figure out—why Father Carmine touched people on certain parts of their body with the crucifix. He was searching for the points that had been “hit” by a curse. “People will often be dedicated in certain rituals and cursed objects will be placed on the back of their neck.”

  They also discussed actions they felt wouldn't fly in the States, like Father Carmine slapping people at the end of the exorcism. They talked at length about the fact that the majority of bishops in America knew little about the reality of exorcism. Both agreed that bishops needed to be better informed.

  AS HE CONTINUED TO PARTICIPATE IN EXORCISMS, Father Gary came to realize that while they could be grueling affairs, perhaps the most arduous aspect was the endless repetition. Father Carmine ran San Lorenzo as though it were an outpatient clinic. He would pray over people for fifteen to twenty minutes, and then, after scheduling a follow-up appointment, they would go about their day. From talking to Father Daniel, he knew that many of the other exorcists in Rome had similar approaches.

  Later, Father Gary would discover that each exorcist has his own system, in part because almost all had other duties to perform besides being an exorcist. Father Carmine, for example, was the superior at San Lorenzo and was busy with running the day-to-day operations of the basilica and parish, which meant he could schedule people only three to four days a week, usually in the evenings. So Father Carmine tended to lump the more severe cases on certain days and see fewer of them, perhaps five rather than ten. However, people also showed up unannounced looking for a quick blessing. One day a trash collector parked her miniature sanitation truck outside in the courtyard, stomped in wearing her bright green reflective striped uniform, and asked the assembled throng whether Father Carmine was taking walk-in visits. As it turned out, he was not.

  Then Father Gary considered the more entrenched cases, such as Sister Janica. The second time he had seen her, she seemed worse than before. On top of that, he reminded himself that she'd been coming to Father Carmine for nine years. Didn't the prayers of exorcism work?

  People, Father Gary realized, are under a huge misapprehension that exorcism is a one-shot deal; that once an exorcist begins the Ritual, it is a fight to the finish that can last for days on end—until only one is left standing. An American exorcist in Scranton, Pennsylvania, coined the phrase “drive-through exorcisms” to describe this won-and-done approach that the media and Hollywood films have made popular. Not surprisingly, this misconception is held by many who visit exorcists, most of whom go looking for a quick fix.

  “People don't understand what we do,” says Father Gramolazzo. “People come to see us expecting to be healed right away. They think, ‘I have a headache because of the demon,’ ‘My job isn't going well because of the demon.’ People are not properly informed.”

  Instead, as Father Gramolazzo explains, exorcism is more akin to a journey, with the exorcist acting as a kind of “spiritual director” helping the victim to “rediscover the grace of God” through prayer and the sacraments. This is one of the reasons why exorcists believe God allows people to become possessed in the first place. “This message is extremely important,” insists Father Gramolazzo. “This is why it takes so long for people to become liberated. It is a journey of faith for the person, the family, and for the parish.”

  Getting people to see it this way is not always easy for the exorcist. “Half the battle is to change their whole purpose so they don't see it in the light of getting rid of a problem, but see it in the light of being more fully converted or being converted at all,” says English exorcist Father Jeremy Davies. “That's the whole aim. It's what I'm always telling people week by week. And that's the most important thing—the exorcism is secondary to that.”

  Simply put, the prayers of the exorcism weaken the power that the demon has over the person. The healing, however, cannot happen without the full participation of the individual. Victims of possession are exhorted to go to weekly confession, to recite the rosary daily, and above all to receive the Eucharist. “I always say that the exorcism is ten percent of the cure; the remaining ninety percent is the responsibility of the individual. What does this mean? It means that there is a need for much prayer, frequent reception of the sacraments, living a life according to the Gospel, using sacramentàis [exorcised water, oil, and salt],” writes Father Amorth.

  “I have people that I've been exorcising for twenty years,” says Father Amorth. “Saint Alfonso de’ Liguori says a very exact phrase, ‘You don't always get to the liberation; you always get to some kind of relief This means that those people who in the past used to throw themselves on the floor just for a blessing, screaming and yelling, after years of exorcisms are calm; they can live their professional life and their careers. But every once in a while, they feel a little disturbance and so they come, people who in the past used to come every day or once a week, after a few years of exorcism they may come once every two months or every six months. What I mean is that they have a pro
gressive improvement.”

  ON THE NINTH OF FEBRUARY, Father Gary climbed up the beige marble stairs and into the classroom at the Regina Apostolorum for the last time. While the second half of the course hadn't matched the quality of the first half in his mind, he was definitely looking forward to this last lecture, a roundtable discussion lead by three exorcists— Father Bamonte, Father Nanni, Father Amorth—and a fourth priest, Father Alberto, who ran a spiritual listening center called the “centro ascolto.”

  Bringing in the exorcists to talk about their ministries was a compromise for the course organizers. Originally, they had contacted the International Association of Exorcists (IAE) and asked for an exorcist to actually perform an exorcism in the classroom. Father Gramolazzo had told them, however, that while the IAE thought the course was a good idea, exorcism wasn't a spectator sport. Putting a victim on the spot like that would only add to the suffering and cheapen the whole affair.

  Father Gary was very impressed by the three exorcists as they filed into the classroom. The trio appearing together at a lecture was akin to an all-star lineup addressing a group of Little Leaguers. Like Father Bamonte, Father Amorth wore a long black cassock that lent him an air of piety. Bald and wearing glasses, at eighty years old he walked with a slight stoop and took his time climbing the three steps that led up to the podium. He was hardly the larger-than-life figure that the media portrayed him to be, and instead exuded a more jovial and avuncular quality. Thankfully, despite the presence of such luminaries, the media wasn't obtrusive.