The Devil and Father Amorth: Witnessing “the Vatican Exorcist” at Work
SOURCE
When he made his 1973 classic, The Exorcist, William Friedkin had never seen an exorcism. For decades he wondered how close he had come to reality. So, last May, he followed “the Dean of Exorcists” as he fought to expel Satan from an Italian woman.
We have a clergy today who no longer believe in the devil, in exorcism, in the exceptional Evil the devil can instill or even in the power that Jesus bestowed to cast out demons. —FATHER GABRIELE AMORTH
Sunday morning, May 1 of this year, was Father Amorth’s 91st birthday,
but he had no plans to celebrate. He awoke just after dawn, said his
usual morning prayers and one to Joseph of Cupertino, a 17th-century
saint, and another to the late Father Candido Amantini, his mentor.
Clutching a walking aid, he shuffled from his cell-like room to the
dining room on the third floor of the Paulist Fathers residence, south
of Rome’s historic center.
After his usual breakfast of caffè latte and biscotti, Father Amorth
returned to his room, which had a tall window, a hospital bed, two
chairs, and a wooden desk cluttered with pictures of the Virgin Mary and
Padre Pio, a priest-mystic who experienced stigmata—bleeding wounds,
corresponding to those inflicted on Jesus Christ on the Cross. For the
next six hours, Father Amorth reviewed the mail requesting his services
from around the world. Each letter contained tragic questions and
appeals from people who knew Amorth only by name and reputation. He
answered the letters, writing with a fountain pen, licking the envelopes
and stamps himself. At two P.M., he knelt again to pray, then arose with
difficulty, took up his walking aid, and made his way to an elevator,
which took him to the first floor, where the small room dedicated to his
work was located. The hallway was empty and dark. Whispering voices and
footsteps could be heard, as from a tomb.
His old adversary was waiting.
At exactly three P.M. he began to conduct the ritual of exorcism. The
possessed woman, Rosa, was in her late 30s, tall and slender, with
raven-black hair. She was as dark and attractive as an Italian movie
star—Sophia Loren or Silvana Mangano, with a quiet demeanor. She had a
college degree but couldn’t work because of the fits and behavioral
changes that came over her, most severely on the Christian holidays,
such as Palm Sunday, Ash Wednesday, Easter, and Pentecost. This was her
ninth exorcism with Father Amorth. As with traditional psychiatry, the
patient is usually not “cured” after the first session. Father Amorth
had been exorcising one man for 16 years.
Rosa arrived with her mother and father and her boyfriend, Giuliano. Her
parents were in their late 50s, her father tall, white-haired, with an
aristocratic bearing, her mother short, a bit plump, friendly. Giuliano
was over six feet, with the build of a heavyweight boxer and short
close-cropped hair. He was warm and considerate of Rosa, but I sensed a
strangeness about him.
With them was Roberto (Rosa, Giuliano, and Roberto are all pseudonyms),
about 50, an insurance agent in Rome. In 2012, his sister, in her 30s,
was suffering from depression. One day, Roberto saw her on the floor,
convulsively twisting her body and growling like a wolf. When this
continued for several days Roberto took her to a psychiatrist, who was
unable to help her and suggested she see Father Amorth. She required
four exorcisms before she was healed.
It was Roberto who noticed Rosa at Mass, acting disturbed and
disoriented the way his sister had. He brought her to Father Amorth in
August of 2015.
Now, for Rosa’s ninth exorcism, Father Amorth shuffled into the small,
high-ceilinged room with five burly men. Four were middle-aged priests.
The fifth, Alessandro, stocky and strong with short red curly hair, was
Father Amorth’s personal assistant of seven years. For this exorcism
Father Amorth had granted me permission to attend and film it.
Father Amorth thumbed his nose at the demon within Rosa, and the
exorcism began. Rosa’s motivation was not a death drive. She had come to
this room for the past nine months to be set free of something that had
been visited upon her.
Father Amorth insisted that anyone who came to him first seek the help
of traditional medicine and psychiatry. “Out of a hundred people who
seek my help,” he explained, “one or two at the most may be
possessed.”
DEVILISH WORK
“Rosa” ’s ninth exorcism, which began at three p.m. on May 1 of this year.
Photographs by William Friedkin.
Rosa had no apparent medical symptoms. It was Father Amorth’s belief
that her affliction stemmed from a curse brought against her by her
brother’s girlfriend, said to be a witch. The brother and his girlfriend
were members of a powerful demonic cult, Father Amorth believed.
I sat two feet away from Rosa as her torment became visible. Her family
stood against a wall to my right. Father Amorth invited everyone to join
him in saying the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary. Then he invoked Saint
Joseph, Padre Pio, Father Amantini, and the Blessed Virgin, asking for
their protection.
Rosa’s head began to nod involuntarily. Her eyes rolled back, and she
fell into a deep trance. Father Amorth spoke in Latin in a loud, clear
voice, using the Roman ritual of Paul V, from 1614. He asked the Lord to
set her free from demonic infestation. “EXORCIZO DEO IMMUNDISSIMUS
SPIRITUS.” (I exorcize, O God, this unclean spirit.)
Rosa’s body began to throb, and she cried out, before falling back into
a trance. Father Amorth placed his right hand over her heart. “INFER
TIBI LIBERA.” (Set yourself free.)
She lost consciousness. “TIME SATANA INIMICI FIDEM.” (Be afraid of
Satan and the enemies of faith.)
Without warning, Rosa began to thrash violently. The five male helpers
had all they could do to hold her down. A foam formed at her lips.
“RECEDE IN NOMINI PATRIS!” (Leave in the name of the Father.) Rosa’s
features slowly altered into a mask of despair, as her body continued to
writhe. She was trying to rise and, clearly, to attack.
“SANCTISSIMO DOMINE MIGRA.” (Let him go, O God Almighty.) Rosa did not
speak or understand Latin, but she thrust forward and screamed in Father
Amorth’s face: “MAI!!” (Never!!)
A low buzzing sound began, like a swarm of bees, as the others in the
room prayed quietly. “SPIRITO DEL SIGNORE. SPIRITO, SPIRITO SANCTO
SANCTISSIMA TRINITA.” (God’s spirit, Holy Spirit, Holy Trinity. . . .
Look after Rosa, O Lord, destroy this evil force so that Rosa might be
well and do good for others. Keep evil away from her.)
Then Father Amorth called out the satanic cults, the superstition, the
black magic that had possessed her. She reacted, growling, and screamed
“MAAAAAAIIIIII!!!” The scream filled the room.
Another voice from deep within her shouted in his face: “DON’T TOUCH
HER! DON’T EVER TOUCH HER!!” Her eyes were still closed. Father Amorth
yelled, “CEDE! CEDE!” (Surrender!)
She reacted violently: “IO SONO SATANA.” (I am Satan.)
The buzzing continued. Rosa grew more defiant and agitated. The room was
cold, but everyone was sweating.
Except Rosa.
“RECEDE ERGO NUNC!” (Leave her now.)
“MAAAAAAAIIIIIII!”
“Answer me!”
“NO!!” “SATANA! SATANA!”
“How many demons are you?”
“Eighty legions!”
“IN NOMINE DEO QUANDO TU EXIS?” (In the name of God, when are you
leaving?)
“MAAAAAAI!!!” And then, “SHE IS MINE! SHE BELONGS TO ME!”
“She belongs to Jesus Christ!”
“WE ARE AN ARMY!!!!”
“Requie creatue Dei” (Rest, creature of God), Father Amorth said
quietly.
Rosa slowly awoke and sat up. She was disheveled and had no memory of
what had happened. One of the priests led her into a corner as her
mother received a blessing from Father Amorth. Suddenly Rosa began to
rage again, cursing and screaming, while one man held her firmly by the
neck and another held her legs. Gradually she returned to a normal state
and, in fact, seemed beatific to me.
Father Amorth smiled, as the mood in the room changed.
Everyone sang “Happy Birthday” to him, in Italian.
Everyone but Rosa.
“Many things happened over the years that made me believe I was
possessed,” Rosa told me afterward. “There is a time when you can’t
bear or postpone it anymore. After two years, I had to do something.”
I asked her if she had been treated by physicians or psychoanalysts.
“It was useless to go to doctors,” she replied. “My problem is caused
by evil spirits.” She had also been to see other priests, “but Father
Amorth is the only one who helps me.”
I asked Rosa if she felt better after the exorcism. “Each time, it
feels like I’m becoming free. I can feel the Devil suffering inside
me,” she said.
Linda Blair, Max von Sydow, and Jason Miller in Friedkin’s The Exorcist, 1973.
From AF Archive/Alamy.
Lucifer Rising
Father Amorth was born Gabriele Amorth, the son of a lawyer, in the town
of Modena, in the north of Italy. In his teens, during the Second World
War, he joined the Italian Resistance, and then he became Giulio
Andreotti’s deputy in the youth wing of the Christian Democratic Party,
a Roman Catholic centrist party. He left that position and was ordained
in 1951. In 1986 he was assigned by the vicar of Rome to assist Father
Candido Amantini, then the chief exorcist in Rome. When Father Amantini
died, in 1992, Father Amorth was named his successor. In the years that
followed he has variously been referred to as “the Vatican Exorcist,”
“Rome’s chief exorcist,” and “the Dean of Exorcists.” He has
performed thousands of exorcisms successfully, and in 1990, he founded
and led the International Association of Exorcists. Currently there are
4 exorcists in Rome and some 300 around the world within the Catholic
Church, Father Amorth said, many of them trained by him.
I had been curious to meet Father Amorth for many years. In the early
1970s, when I directed the film The Exorcist, I had not witnessed an
exorcism. Maybe this would be an opportunity to complete the circle, to
see how close we who worked on the film came to reality or to discover
that what we created was sheer invention.
I am an agnostic. I believe the power of God and the human soul are
unknowable. I don’t associate the teachings of Jesus with the politics
of the Roman Catholic Church. The authors of the New Testament—none of
whom, it is now generally believed by historians, actually knew
Jesus—were creating a religion, not writing history.
I had no particular interest in the spiritual or the supernatural when
the writer Bill Blatty asked me to direct the film of his novel, The
Exorcist. Six years before, I had told him one of his scripts was
terrible. As a result, he believed I was the only director who would
tell him the truth. We didn’t know each other well at the time, and I
had no credits that would suggest I could manage a difficult film such
as The Exorcist. Then my film The French Connection opened successfully
and the studio came on board.
Blatty had started writing his novel 20 years after hearing about a case
of possession involving a 14-year-old boy in Cottage City, Maryland. The
case had been chronicled at great length in 1949 by The Washington Post,
which quoted Catholic sources saying that the boy had been possessed and
was successfully exorcised. The reporter, Bill Brinkley, was given
extraordinary access to the Washington, D.C., diocese. But Blatty, then
an undergraduate at Georgetown University, couldn’t get anyone involved
to divulge the facts of the case, so he wrote it as fiction and out of
his own deep faith.
Blatty and I wanted the film to be as realistic as possible, with the
flavor of a documentary. We had a technical adviser for the exorcism
scenes, Rev. John Nicola, assistant director of the National Shrine of
the Immaculate Conception in Washington. He was considered an expert on
the ritual, though he had never seen or performed one himself—few
people, including priests, have.
More than any film I’ve directed, The Exorcist inspired me to the point
of obsession each day as I made it. I rejected all constraints, creative
and financial. The studio, Warner Bros., thought I had taken leave of my
senses. I may have. I made the film believing in the reality of exorcism
and never, to this day, thought of it as a horror film.
The Science of Evil
Last April, I was in Lucca, Italy, to receive the Puccini Prize for my
work in opera. On an impulse, I e-mailed a friend in Rome, Andrea Monda,
who is a religious scholar. I asked him if he thought Father Amorth
would meet with me. Word came back shortly: “FATHER AMORTH CAN SEE YOU
AT 9 AM ON APRIL 5 AT THE SOCIETÀ SAN PAOLO IN HIS RESIDENCE.”
Through Andrea, I was able to hire a translator/assistant, a talented
young man named Francesco Zippel, and a few days after Easter, the
holiest day on the Christian calendar, Francesco and I met with Father
Amorth in his residence, in the room that’s dedicated to his work.
He was short, bald, and frail. His face was heavily lined, his voice and
movements were weak, but his mind was razor-sharp and his manner jovial.
We shook hands warmly. He smiled and said, “The Devil has made me
famous all over the world.”
He had agreed to meet with me because he admired my movie. In his book
An Exorcist Tells His Story, published in 1990, he wrote:
It is thanks to the movies that we find a renewed interest in Exorcisms. Vatican Radio, on February 2, 1975, interviewed William Friedkin, the director of the movie, The Exorcist. . . . The director stated that he wanted to tell the facts of an episode, narrated in a book, that had actually happened in 1949. When a Jesuit priest was asked [on the same program] if The Exorcist was just one of many horror movies or something altogether different, he emphatically maintained that it was the latter. He cited the great impact the movie had made on audiences throughout the world.
“Father, you write of dialogues you’ve had with Satan. Have you ever
seen him?” I asked Father Amorth.
“Satan is pure spirit. He often appears as something else, to mislead.
He appeared to Padre Pio as Jesus, to frighten him. He sometimes appears
as a raging animal. The ritual of exorcism is not practiced by an
ordinary priest. An exorcist requires specific training and must be
thought to have a personal sanctity. He can be exposed to dangerous
behavior and personal threat. His prayers often cause a violent response
as he attempts to shine a beam of light into the darkness.”
“You’ve said publicly that you believe, referring to the current Church
scandals, that Satan is in the Vatican. Do you still believe this?”
“Yes. Today Satan rules the world. The masses no longer believe in God.
And, yes, Satan is in the Vatican.”
Belief in possession by spirits appears as early as 3100 B.C., in the
Sumerian culture of ancient Mesopotamia, now parts of Syria, Iraq, and
Kuwait. In the New Testament, demons are cast out by Jesus. Exorcisms
were common in the Middle Ages. Perhaps every society needs explanations
for things that cannot be explained. As Hamlet said to Horatio, “There
are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dream’t of in your
philosophie.”
I wanted to get credible scientific opinion about what I had witnessed.
A skeptic’s explanation for the “possession phenomenon” is
“unconscious fraud,” wherein a suggestible person is aware of the
behavior that’s expected of him or her and performs it out of social
compliance, as a child does when a parent shows approval.
I showed the video of Rosa’s exorcism to two of the world’s leading
neurosurgeons and researchers in California and to a group of prominent
psychiatrists in New York.
Dr. Neil Martin is chief of neurosurgery at the UCLA Medical Center. He
has performed more than 5,000 brain surgeries and is regularly cited as
in the top 1 percent of his specialty. On August 3, I showed him the
video of Rosa’s exorcism. This is his response: “Absolutely amazing.
There’s a major force at work within her somehow. I don’t know the
underlying origin of it. She’s not separated from the environment. She’s
not in a catatonic state. She’s responding to the priest and is aware of
the context. The energy she shows is amazing. The priest on the right is
struggling to control her. He’s holding her down, as are the others, and
the sweat is dripping off his face at a time when she’s not sweating.
This doesn’t seem to be hallucinations. She appears to be engaged in the
process but resisting. You can see she has no ability to pull herself
back.”
I asked Dr. Martin if this was some kind of brain disorder. “It doesn’t
look like schizophrenia or epilepsy,” he said. “It could be delirium,
an agitated disconnection from normal behavior. But the powerful
verbalization we’re hearing, that’s not what you get with delirium. With
delirium you see the struggling, maybe the yelling, but this guttural
voice seems like it’s coming from someplace else. I’ve done thousands of
surgeries, on brain tumors, traumatic brain injuries, ruptured brain
aneurysms, infections affecting the brain, and I haven’t seen this kind
of consequence from any of those disorders. This goes beyond anything
I’ve ever experienced—that’s for certain.”
I also showed the video to Dr. Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon and clinical
specialist in epilepsy surgery, seizure disorder, and the study of human
memory. He is based at both UCLA and the Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical
Center. This was his conclusion: “It looks like something authentic.
She is like a caged animal. I don’t think there’s a loss of
consciousness or contact, because she’s in contact with the people. She
appears to respond to the people who talk to her. It’s a striking change
in behavior. I believe everything originates in the brain. So which part
of the brain could serve this type of behavior? The limbic system, which
has to do with emotional processing of stimuli, and the temporal lobe. I
don’t see this as epilepsy. It’s not necessarily a lesion. It’s a
physiological state. It seems to be associated with religious things. In
the temporal lobe there’s something called hyper-religiosity. You
probably won’t have this in somebody who has no religious background.
Can I characterize it? Maybe. Can I treat it? No.”
I asked Dr. Fried if he believed in God, and he took a long pause before
answering: “I do believe there is a limit to human understanding.
Beyond this limit, I’m willing to recognize an entity called God.”
The reaction of the neurosurgeons took me by surprise. I had expected
they would quickly dismiss Rosa’s symptoms as madness or unintentional
fraud or suggest that she might be cured by brain surgery. They did not.
They wouldn’t come out and say, “Of course this woman is possessed by
Satan,” but they seemed baffled as to how to define her ailment, and
both agreed it was not something they would attempt to cure with
surgery.
I was eager to pursue another path, one devoted to the treatment and
prevention of mental disorder. I took the video to a group of some of
the leading psychiatrists in the country, all in residence at Columbia
University: Jeffrey Lieberman, director of the New York State
Psychiatric Institute; Michael B. First, professor of clinical
psychiatry; Roberto Lewis-Fernández, president-elect of the World
Association of Cultural Psychiatry; and Ryan Lawrence, M.D., assistant
professor of clinical psychiatry.
After showing the Columbia psychiatrists the video on a 36-inch screen,
they had an open discussion about it for an hour and a half. Here are
some of the highlights synthesized from that discussion:
LIEBERMAN: To be perfectly blunt, this is unconvincing as to anything
that could be supernatural or excused from the laws of nature as we know
them.
ME: Do you think it’s fraud?
ALL: No, no, it’s something real.
FIRST: It fits recognized psychiatric syndromes that have been defined.
It’s classic. I would say she fits into the pattern that we call
Dissociative Trance and Possession Disorder. There is no obvious known
psychopathology. Exorcism as a therapeutic technique could work.
LIEBERMAN: Given our scientific and medical backgrounds, do we
countenance the possibility of there being something that’s spiritual or
supernatural in nature that takes the form of disturbed behavior?
LEWIS-FERNÁNDEZ: The person is expressing a pathology that is understood
as possession. Our field of psychiatry can understand it as possession
just on the virtue of what she’s presenting, without having to take any
kind of stance on whether there actually are demons, spirits.
[Dr. Lewis-Fernández worked on adding the word “possession” to
“Dissociative Identity Disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, relied upon by clinicians, researchers, and
the legal system.]
LAWRENCE: I have a patient now in my unit who’s similar to this in some
ways. She says she’s possessed by the Devil. She speaks in a bizarre
voice. She has a history of trauma. What we’re doing for her is we’re
treating her with medication, giving her psychotherapy, creating a safe
environment. She gets better. We don’t take a position of “Is this
really Satan bothering you or are you just being bothered by your
illness?”
LIEBERMAN: I’ve never believed in ghosts or that stuff, but I’ve had a
couple of cases, one in particular that really just gave me pause. This
was a young girl, in her 20s, from a Catholic family in Brooklyn, and
she was referred to me with schizophrenia, and she definitely had
bizarre and psychotic-like behavior, disorganized thinking, disturbed
attention, hallucinations, but it wasn’t classic schizophrenic
phenomenology. And she responded to nothing,” he added with emphasis.
“Usually you get some response. But there was no response. We started
to do family therapy. All of a sudden, some strange things started
happening, accidents, hearing things. I wasn’t thinking anything of it,
but this unfolded over months. One night, I went to see her and then
conferred with a colleague, and afterwards I went home, and there was a
kind of a blue light in the house, and all of a sudden I had this
piercing pain in my head, and I called my colleague, and she had the
same thing, and this was really weird. The girl’s family was prone to
superstition, and they may have mentioned demon possession or something
like that, but I obviously didn’t believe it, but when this happened I
just got completely freaked out. It wasn’t a psychiatric disorder—you
want to call it a spiritual possession, but somehow, like in The
Exorcist, we were the enemy. This was basically a battle between the
doctors and whatever it was that afflicted the individual.
ME: Do you completely disregard the idea of possession?
LIEBERMAN: No. There was no way I could explain what happened.
Intellectually, I might have said it’s possible, but this was an example
that added credence.
ME: If a patient doesn’t believe in psychiatry, has some resistance to
it, is it likely to work?
LIEBERMAN: If you’re saying you need to believe in religious systems for
something like exorcism to work, the answer is yes. In sum, this isn’t
demon possession, but treating Rosa’s symptoms as demon possession may
not be the worst thing.
FIRST: I think all of us would agree there are things we can’t explain.
I went to these doctors to try to get a rational, scientific explanation
for what I had experienced. I thought they’d say, “This is some sort of
psychosomatic disorder having nothing to do with possession.” That’s
not what I came away with. Forty-five years after I directed The
Exorcist, there’s more acceptance of the possibility of possession than
there was when I made the film.
Father Amorth.
Photograph by William Friedkin.
Devil May Care
Rosa’s 10th exorcism was set for the Fourth of July. I was determined to
record it and follow this story to its end, however long it might take
and to whatever conclusion. I arrived in Rome on the third only to learn
that Rosa had canceled her appointment with Father Amorth. When
Francesco talked to her on the phone she told him she didn’t feel up to
it. She would reschedule when she felt better. Francesco asked her if,
since I had come to Rome, we could film some background footage with
her, to show what appeared to be her otherwise normal life with her
family, friends, and her boyfriend, Giuliano.
She agreed, and we set a time to meet in Rome on July 5. The day before,
I visited Father Amorth again at his residence. He emphasized that he
believed Rosa was one of those rare victims of demonic possession, that
her infestation was made worse by the curse from her brother and his
girlfriend.
Father Amorth told me that even when Rosa appears normal she experiences
mental suffering. “After her ninth exorcism, there was some
improvement, but she is not liberated. Perhaps it won’t be me who is
successful with her,” he said softly. “There’s someone who plants the
seed and someone else who harvests. And Jesus reminds us it is He who
sets people free, not the exorcists.”
After two hours he seemed to tire. We hugged, he gave me his blessing,
and I left. I turned back once to see him smiling and waving.
Rosa canceled our meeting, only to call back and reschedule. She said
she’d meet us in Rome, then called back a few minutes later sounding
angry and frustrated to beg off. Then late in the evening she called to
apologize. She claimed she had forgotten the date of our meeting, but
told Francesco she was looking forward to seeing me again. She asked if
we could meet her in Alatri, a small town close to where she lived, 90
miles southeast of Rome.
We set out for Alatri around 11:30 in the morning. Rosa said she’d meet
us at 1:30 in the public park on top of the town in front of the
basilica. The drive took two hours on the A24 and A1 motorways. We
passed flat fields dotted with bundles of rolled hay.
Alatri is a historic village, perched on a hill, overlooking red-tiled
rooftops and distant mountains. The village dates from the second
millennium B.C. and is surrounded by massive, polygonal Etruscan walls,
pieced together without mortar, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The narrow
alleyways and cobblestone streets are lined with small houses, many of
them adorned with oil paintings of the saints, under glass. This is a
religious town in an old-world way. We had to walk to the top of the
hill to the acropolis. Within it is the cathedral, considered a sacred
place. We were to meet her in the park in front of the 12th-century
basilica.
1:30. Rosa hadn’t arrived.
1:45. The heat was infernal and there was no shade. The temperature was
over 100 degrees, with no humidity. We went into the basilica. The
wood-paneled interior was in the shape of a cross with three aisles and
a raised transept across the nave. It was dark, cavernous, and empty.
2:00. We went back outside. A half-dozen young boys lazily kicked a
soccer ball around. There was no other movement.
Francesco called Rosa on her cell phone. She answered quickly, sounding
angry. “Where are you?” she screamed.
“We’re at the park,” Francesco answered. “Where are you?”
“I’m where I told you I’d be, at Santa Maria Maggiore, the church in
the town square.”
Drenched in sweat, we walked back down the steep road a quarter of a
mile. The limestone church of Santa Maria Maggiore dominates the public
square. Completed in the fifth century, it was built over the ruins of a
temple to Venus. A four-story bell tower adjoins the pointed façade. Two
smaller arched doorways flank a large center door under a rose window.
We entered the door on the right, at the base of the bell tower.
For the next 15 minutes we were trapped in a living nightmare. Just
within the entrance, Rosa, her mother, and Giuliano were sitting on
dirty, plastic thrift-shop chairs. Her mother was crying. Giuliano stood
over Rosa, holding her tightly to her chair, one hand around her neck
and shoulders, the other around her waist. She was growling and
screaming, struggling to break free. But this was not Rosa. It was a
monstrous, ugly, despairing creature with a gravelly voice filled with
anger and anguish. It was the voice of the damned. She was far worse
than during the exorcism, but there was no priest to control her
behavior. The church was otherwise empty but for this tableau of horror.
Francesco and I watched in stunned silence as Rosa slid around the
floor, pulling Giuliano and the chair with her. For a moment, she stared
at me with a malevolent grin I will never forget. Then came a sad,
painful moan as she collapsed into a trance. Then a terrifying roar that
burst from her whole body. RAAAAARRRRGGGGGHHH!!
The color drained from her face. Her disheveled hair flew wildly in all
directions. Foamy spittle formed on her pale lips. She made a shrill
wailing sound, over which her mother yelled at me, in Italian, “Give us
back the film!”
To which Rosa shouted, “NO! NO! NON VOGLIO.” (I don’t want it.)
She collapsed again, with a tearful, exhausted expression.
Giuliano (clutching her tightly): “YOUR FILM MUST NEVER BE SEEN!”
Francesco, riveted, breathing with difficulty, translated everything
quickly.
Rosa: “SI! SI IO VOGLIO.” (Yes! I want it seen.)
Mother: “What will happen to my son if the film is shown?”
It struck me as odd that she was concerned more about her son than about
her daughter, who was under his curse. Rosa shouted furiously again.
I tried to appear calm, but I was terrified. I said, “I’m not going to
give you the film.”
Giuliano: “I KNOW WHY YOU WANT TO SHOW THIS. TO MAKE A FAMOUS FILM
ABOUT SATAN. YOU DON’T CARE IF SHOWING IT WILL RUIN ROSA’S LIFE!”
Rosa’s attempts to break free from Giuliano’s grip were directed toward
her mother, not me or Francesco. Her leaps and thrusts became more
violent.
I told Francesco to tell them there was no film. It was a video, on a
little card. I thought they would have no idea what I was talking about,
but Giuliano smiled and said, “Oh, it’s an SD card. You must bring it
here and we will burn it.”
“I’ll never give you the video,” I said, raising my voice. “I made it
to show the work of Father Amorth.”
Mother: “We will get lawyers, and we will sue you and Father Amorth.”
Rosa: “IO SONO SATANA!!!” (I am Satan!)
Giuliano: “She is possessed by Satan. If you show it, it will be used
by Satan’s followers.”
Rosa (writhing and kicking): “NO! NO! I WANT IT TO BE SEEN. I WANT IT
TO BE SEEN.”
Giuliano: “If you don’t give it back to us, we will kill you! Satan
will kill you! We will find your family, and we will kill you all!”
It was the first time anyone had threatened my life. Rosa had fallen
back into a trance. I looked directly at the mother and Giuliano: “I’m
not going to bullshit you. I will never give you the video.”
I turned to Francesco: “Let’s go. We’re done here.”
And I walked out into the scorching white heat. Francesco followed a few
moments later, and I could hear the screaming inside before the heavy
wooden door slammed shut.
We said little as we drove back to Rome, the fear and the sweat clinging
to us.
Rosa disappeared from Father Amorth’s radar. She didn’t return calls or
messages or schedule another exorcism with him. It was believed that
Giuliano and her brother now had control over her. It would be flippant
to say I didn’t take their threat seriously. The memory of what happened
in Alatri hovers in my consciousness to this day.
I held to the hope that Rosa would eventually re-unite with Father
Amorth and that he would free her of her demons, but in late July Father
Amorth had difficulty breathing. He had to cancel his appointments and
was admitted to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with a pulmonary
condition and pneumonia. On Friday, September 16, at 7:37 P.M., he died.
When I heard the news I was devastated, as were all who loved him. But I
thought he’d be O.K. I remembered something he had said to me: “Do you
know why the Devil is afraid of me? Because I’m uglier than he is.”
The funeral was held at Santa Maria Regina Degli Apostoli alla
Montagnola. It was a cloudy morning, but the sun appeared as the Requiem
Mass began, at three P.M. A thousand people filled the church and stood
outside. Roberto, Alessandro, and Francesco were there, as were many of
the patients Father Amorth had liberated. All the mourners approached
the coffin and kissed it. Rosa was nowhere to be seen.
Before dying, Father Amorth had told Roberto, “When I get to the Good
Place I will continue to fight the Devil even harder.”
Venafro is another hillside town of fewer than 12,000 people, in
southeastern Italy, near Alatri. There, according to Roberto, a
clergyman recently performed an exorcism on Rosa. In the middle of the
ritual, the clergyman called on the spirit of Father Amorth for
intercession. Rosa began to writhe and screamed, “DON’T! DON’T CALL
HIM!”
Father Amorth and Rosa’s work is not yet finished.