We should remember what is written in Revelation (12:7, etc.) : "Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world - he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.... And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman", who was "dressed like the sun", from whom Jesus was born (it is very clear that we are also talking about the Most Holy Virgin Mary). When the dragon realized that his efforts had failed, "he went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus."
During a May 24, 1987, visit to the Sanctuary of Saint Michael the Archangel, John Paul II said, "The battle against the devil, which is the principal task of Saint Michael the archangel, is still being fought today, because the devil is still alive and active in the world. The evil that surrounds us today, the disorders that plague our society, man's inconsistency and brokenness, are not only the results of original sin, but also the result of Satan's pervasive and dark action."
The last sentence is a clear reference to God's condemnation of the serpent, in Genesis (3:15): "1 will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." Is Satan already in hell? When did the battle between angels and devils take place?
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Fr Gabriele Amorth told Italy's La Stampa newspaper that the Pope had carried out his first exorcism in 1982.
"This girl was rolling around on the ground. People in the Vatican had never seen anything like it. For us exorcists it is run of the mill," Amorth said.
The Pope has since taken part in two more exorcisms, including that of a 20-year-old woman in September, to underline the importance of the ceremony.
"He carried out these exorcisms because he wanted to give a powerful example. He wanted to give the message that we must once again start exorcising those who are possessed by demons," Amorth said.
"I have seen many strange things...objects such as nails spat out. The devil told a woman that he would make her spit out a transistor radio and lo and behold she started spitting out bits and pieces of a radio transistor," he said.
Catholic News
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Modern communications enabled the Pope not only to lead but also to intervene in the affairs of local churches as never before. Archbishop Milingo of Lusaka found himself summoned to Rome and placed under virtual house arrest following complaints by his fellow bishops that his exorcisms contained an element of black magic; he became a permanent embarrassment, contracting a brief marriage to a Moonie in America before returning to obedience.
[...]
In Italy, the Pope's two political interventions, attempts to halt an abortion bill and to save the Christian Democrats in the 1994 general election, failed ignominiously. A decision to open the Holy See's accounts to public scrutiny was vitiated by the revelation that the Vatican Bank had lost billions of dollars through its connection with the Freemason Roberto Calvi, who was found hanged beneath Blackfriars Bridge. The refusal to permit the Italian police to question the bank's head, Archbishop Marcinkus, before his return to America did little to reassure the faithful.
Telegraph UK
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Pope John Paul II has performed three exorcisms, the ancient rite of casting out demons from the souls of the possessed, during his 23 years in the Vatican, according to one of the Catholic Church's top exorcists. He performed the last one in September.
In that battle, the pope sprinkled holy water and commanded the devil to leave the body of a possessed 20-year-old woman, the Rev. Gabriele Amorth said.
But the devil still lingers within the woman, who hails from Milan, Italy, and has undergone several more exorcisms since the pope tried to banish her demon.
"It's a very serious case," Amorth told La Stampa, a well-respected Italian newspaper. "A series of curses."
The Vatican had no immediate response to Amorth's reported claims, which came a day after the pope warned that the devil was leading Catholics into temptation.
"The devil, the 'prince of this world,' even today continues his insidious actions," the pontiff said in last Sunday's sermon. "Each and every man ... is tempted by the devil when he least expects it."
Amorth said the pope performed his first exorcism in 1982 when he drove a demon from a woman who began thrashing on the ground during a Vatican audience.
"This girl was rolling around on the ground," Amorth said. "People in the Vatican had never seen anything like it. For us exorcists, it is run of the mill."
The pontiff prayed over the girl until she calmed down. "He carried out these exorcisms because he wanted to give a powerful example," Amorth said. "He wanted to give the message that we must once again start exorcising those who are possessed by demons."
Exorcisms are rare, but the archdiocese of New York has one exorcist on staff, spokesman Joe Zwilling said.
Godliness appears no deterrent to a determined demon. Even saintly Mother Teresa reportedly underwent an exorcism after Satan invaded her soul shortly before she died of a heart attack in 1997, the archbishop of Calcutta said.
In the Catholic rite, exorcism starts with a blessing and prayers followed by sprinkling of holy water. Then the priest lays his hands on the possessed, makes the sign of the cross and commands the devil to go.
Columbia Daily Tribune
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The image of that tiny Albanian woman being exorcised by gravely serious priests...
We should remember that madness is no great impediment to worldly success. And we should notice whether or not, and how fully the new Pope supports the empire, whose emissaries were photographed gravely, and prominently, kneeling before the old Pope's splendorous catafalque. Although Jimmy Carter wasn't as central to the tableau as Condoleeza Rice and the elder Bush.
The new Pope's likely to be a friend of modern, as well as ancient Israel. He won't have much to say about Iraq, or China either. And he probably won't be all that keen on recognizing the remnants of Liberation Theology, especially in Latin America.
As far as the devil goes - it's odd the way these guys talk about him being "the prince of this world". What does that mean? When they treat possession like it's a virus and accept the wealth of iniquity as their due. Where's Las Vegas in all that?
And oil.
Cars.
Mordor.
Castle Gandolfo is one of the pope's traditional summer residences. Tolkein was working one of the edges of white magic. But the frame's Biblical. And it's important that things stay inside the frame.
So the aboriginals, the few scattered bands that still survive close to the ground, stay outside the frame. They're the seed corn of the human race, a phrase that means nothing to most people now; but you can't profess to love and care about humanity and ignore that, and you'd expect someone who hates the human race to want them gone.
The obvious outcome of torment, and oppression, as we see in the desperate acts of the "enemies" of "democracy" is hatred, and hatred is so easy to fit into this schema.
Anything that hates us hates the human race, the devil hates the human race, the ones who hate us are the devil.
Palestinian rage is demonic because it's directed at the Chosen People.
Yet there is evil in the world, and horror - a concept I'm putting ahead of terror on the list of things to be against. I want a war on horror.
What makes me suspicious about the Manichaean divide, the black-and-white of moral distinction, is the air that we breathed when I was young was divided that way, between communism and what went by many convenient and relatively stirring terms but was at its heart capitalism. These were the teams on the field, and the fate of the world hung on who would win the game. The Viet Nam war was the last clearly discernible play in that contest, though its outcome, when it was finally over, was anything but clear.
Communism and capitalism were walking by the river, communism fell in; who was left?
It turned out that the same largely invisible group was behind both systems. They were going to win no matter the outcome on the field.
This template is visible in professional sports, where team rivalries are mostly show, performed by professionals whose employment can shift to the opposite team in the space of a year; and the real combat's between the majority of underpaid players and the owners, who make up the highest-paid per capita team in sports - and it takes place in lawyers' offices mostly, on phones and in the bars and restaurants of the economic elite.
Yet there is evil in the world. And horror.
Poppy Brite, Anne Rice, Thomas Harris, Peter Straub, King, lots of others. Writers who've given us glimpses into the absolute dark, what it is mostly is biology, under the fantastic costumes the attachment of the thinking soul to its meat, but out past that we still have these dynamics of loss and gain, spirits of different color and allegiance contesting the larger prize.
And it all keeps coming back to this, here - earth, and the presence of innocence, and its violation. The bloodless crucifixions of Terri Schiavo and Michael Jackson are both about that, in more than the obvious ways - it's the thing at the heart of what's wrong - the people's innocent regard of the world, and their rage at anything that threatens, an infantile semi-consciousness made out of linked wires and minds, fussing at its wetness and discomfort, unaware of much but seeing everything, hearing but not understanding, and only able to respond with anger and love, amusement and rejection.
Yet there is horror in the world, and evil.
The same people who wait for the catharsis of Jackson's entrance to prison, or his death, who held their shallow breath while Schiavo's body released the last bits of electro-magnetic coding that was once her personality - are blind to the children of the Middle East who die for them, and for their simple amusement - not directly not visibly, but to feed the dogs that guard them, and the god that sits above the guard towers, watching its dominion grow.
It's that horrible - and that's why it's invisible to the mass that enables it. The horror would paralyze the consumers that drive the machine every day, that keep it running and maintained.
Some of the aptness of the dark imagery of Catholicism in its older iterations was that contained horror, the celebration of suffering making it possible for those who suffered to stay inside the congregation. Because that's what happens with intense suffering, it isolates and amplifies the self.
When I was an altar boy, serving at early morning daily mass in the old-style service, with the rich vestments and the long black robe and the gold and the colors changing with the seasons and the Latin esoteric ritual inside the altar rail - there was a woman who came most days to the side chapel in the mission, and she came to receive communion every day that she came to mass.
She was tall and fashionably thin, very expensively dressed and made-up. She wore elegant jewelry - and as we passed along the line of communicants, the priest and I, him with the chalice full of the white embossed wafers of the body of Christ soaked in the wine of His blood, me with the little round gold paten like a plate it was my duty to place just under the chin of the receivers, without hitting them - best if it didn't quite touch them - to catch the crumbs and spills, I'd catch the scent of her perfume above the cheaper smells of cashmere bouquet and cigarettes and home kitchens.
We came down the line of kneeling souls with their heads bowed and their hands folded forearms resting on the rail; we were working from God's right to left, and one by one their heads would raise as the priest and I stopped before them and he said his prayer of blessing, in Latin, "This is my body...", and their tongues would stick out, some of them abruptly, some of them slowly, some would hardly open their mouths at all, from guilt or shame or embarrassment and feelings of unworth.
I remember the first time, for me, that we stood in front of her - her neck bent in submission, head bowed toward the altar so that her crown and long glamorously wavy hair were all that showed above the green dress she wore that day. And then she raised up her head to receive the communion and I saw how her lower lip was gone completely, below her perfect eyes and perfect nose and perfect cheeks and above her perfect neck, even the upper lip still there, but below it only the exposed flesh that should have been inside her perfect mouth, her teeth were there, of course, and her tongue came out to take the bread that was the body of Christ, and then it was over and we went on down the line dispensing the body and blood of the Son of God, the priest with his knowing and me with my shock, then back to the altar and the rest of the ritual.
Later it became a test of strength, something I was good at then - I believed with what I had to believe with, and I was serving, it was my duty. Neither my mom nor my aunt, who knew a lot about things, would explain it to me. And it wasn't until I was much older, grown up, that I caught that full blow.
Behind her suddenly I could see the well-connected man, jealous, vindictive, cold-hearted and dispassionately cruel. She broke the rules, and she paid for it.
There is evil in the world, and horror; and the problem all the way through, from the tiniest most trivial slip to the Apocalypse - is selfishness.
Aggregated or lone-wolf, subsumed in the needs of the group or the family or the gang or the nation, or autonomous; individual greed raging against the limits of human living or drones, clotted up in a hive of vespic creatures, devoted selflessly to the thing they make together.
Human evil, against the uncaring evil of things. The sea isn't evil, though if a man were as heartless and coldly unforgiving of mistakes we'd say he was.
Stepping outside the bonds of humanity in order to survive, there's where it begins, and that's why the occult has all that blood at the door, the sacrifice of innocence to appetite - it takes the neophyte away from the paths of being human, and delivers a fresh new creature to the dark hive.
There is evil in the world, and horror, and your rational mind won't get you through the contest against them. Your heart may, if it's strong.
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Two earlier papal commentaries here
and here
