The Roman Catholic Church is looking for a few good men — to battle Satan.
The church in the US has become so short of priests who know how to perform an exorcism that it began an emergency two-day meeting yesterday to teach clerics how to properly cast out demons.
A group of 56 bishops and 66 priests — including an assistant to New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan — have gathered in Baltimore for the Conference on the Liturgical and Pastoral Practice of Exorcism. The mystical meeting was focused on a lot more than just dodging green vomit and stopping heads from spinning.
“Learning the liturgical rite is not difficult,” said Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, archbishop of Houston, who is attending the conference. “The problem is the discernment that the exorcist needs before he would ever attempt the rite.”
The number of US clerics who know how to do an exorcism has dropped dramatically in recent years, ever since the holy procedure became a laughingstock thanks to Linda Blair’s head-spinning performance as a possessed girl in the 1973 film “The Exorcist.”
The situation has gotten so hellacious that only five or six priests are left in the country with the knowledge to properly carry out an exorcism, the Catholic News Service reported.
But with numerous Catholic immigrants coming to the Uinited States from nations where exorcisms are taken seriously, the church’s handful of exorcists are being overwhelmed.
“There’s this small group of priests who say they get requests from all over the continental US,” Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki told the Catholic News Service.
And though some non-Catholics may snicker, exorcisms are an important church rite. Pope John Paul II is said to have performed one, and the Bible talks of Jesus casting out demons.
“We don’t think that’s poetic metaphor,” Paprocki said.
It can be hard to know who really needs an exorcism. The US church gets about 400 inquiries a year for the religious rite, but only two or three are performed, according to a book by Catholic writer Neal Lozano.
New York’s Father Dennis McManus, an assistant to Archbishop Dolan, is expected to speak at the conference, which started yesterday and ends today. The New York archdiocese did not respond to questions about what McManus will say, but according to the Catholic News Service, he likely will be discussing how to tell if someone is possessed by a demon.
Before any exorcism can take place, a priest must look for the telltale signs, such as a violent reaction to holy water, super strength, aversion to the name of Jesus or Mary and speaking in tongues.
Also, the possibly possessed person must be checked out by a psychologist to make sure they are not mentally ill before a bishop will allow an exorcism to proceed.
Once an exorcism is initiated, the priest will try to drive the demon out of the possessed person by sprinkling holy water, reciting psalms and laying on hands.