What the devil is going on at the Vatican?  The chief exorcist claims the Devil is lurking there

Talk of the Devil came cheap in medieval Christianity. No mystery play was complete without an appearance by God’s great adversary, all horns, cloven hoof and sulphur breath, while every church would boast a depiction of the ‘Harrowing of Hell’, a graphic warning to worshippers of the everlasting torment in the bowels of the earth that awaited unrepentant sinners.

But modern mainstream Christianity has apparently pensioned off Old Nick as an embarrassing reminder of a past when it used too much stick and not enough carrot in spreading the Good News. You have to go back to 1972 to find a Pope offering any detailed reflection on Satan. Paul VI described him as ‘not merely a lack of something, but an effective agent, a living spiritual being, perverted and perverting’.

So the remarks by 85-year-old Father Gabriele Amorth, for decades the chief exorcist in Rome, have taken many by surprise. Far from being superstitious medieval nonsense, Amorth has said in promoting his new book, Memoirs of An Exorcist, the Devil is ‘lodging in the Vatican’ and can be seen in the activities of paedophile priests, over-ambitious clerics and ‘cardinals who don’t believe in Jesus’.

Even Amorth’s title sounds as if it belongs more to Hollywood blockbusters than the contemporary life of the Catholic Church which makes only the most fleeting of references in its encyclopaedic Catechism, published in 1993, to the Devil as the ‘seductive voice’ who tempted Adam and Eve (article 391). But despite its official silence about Lucifer, the fallen angel who was ejected from heaven and will, according to the Book of Revelation, roam the earth until the final day of Judgement spreading evil and lies, the Vatican has never dismantled its medieval network of exorcists in every diocese. It just prefers not to mention them – until Father Amorth blew their cover.  Read Article

By Peter Stanford