May 10, 2005

Go to church. Seriously, go to church.

I've been reading this book called An Exorcist Tells His Story, written by Fr. Gabriele Amorth. He's the chief exorcist of the Rome Diocese and has been exorcising demons for about 20 years. K, this book has me seriously weirded out, not because I don't think possession is impossible, but because I do think it's possible. He talks about how the Catholic Church has kind of fallen behind the times with the whole exorcism thing. Basically, that the Church is kind of in a crisis situation because a lot of clergy don't believe possession is real and , thereby, don't do much to expand the need for exorcism and exorcists. I admit my reasons for starting to read the book were entirely sensational. I wanted to read about all the gruesome details. I was somewhat disappointed because that's not what this book is really about; although, one definitely gets enough information to understand how frightening possession is. However, it doesn't matter that this book isn't about all the gory details because it's scarier to understand the reality of what this man deals with every day.

Fr. Amorth explains that he wrote this book partially in response to people's desire to know what he does, but also to provide a sort of instruction on how to recognize and deal with demonic possession. Some of the ways that people end up possessed comes off as very sort of Old World spell-casting and it's almost unbelieveable to think people actually do these things today. You think we're enlightened now and that people doing things like casting spells and curses stems from a primitive understanding of the world. But, no, according to Fr. Amorth. People do it all the time.

Anyway, maybe you'll all think I'm a complete freak for encouraging people to be aware of this sort of thing, but reading this book made me wonder why is it so easy for people to make the leap of faith required to believe in God, but think it's ridiculous to accept the Devil's existence?

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