It’s not on a regular basis that an exorcist pens a movie review, but last month a bunch of demon removers did just that.
“Unreliable … splatter cinema,” the International Association of Exorcists declared of the brand new movie “The Pope’s Exorcist,” starring Russell Crowe, which hits theaters Friday.
The 29-year-old Catholic organization added: “The final result is to instill the conviction that exorcism is an abnormal, monstrous and frightening phenomenon, whose only protagonist is the devil, whose violent reactions will be faced with great difficulty.”
There’s more to their ire than Hollywood’s flair for exaggeration. The IAE, it seems, has a private beef with the movie.
The supernatural horror film takes its inspiration from their late founder, Father Gabriele Amorth (played by Crowe), who held the title of chief exorcist of the Vatican for greater than twenty years.
If an individual was believed to be inhabited by Devil or one other nefarious force, he was their go-to guy.
Firebrand Amorth claimed to have presided over some 160,000 exorcisms during his lifetime.
“I speak with the Devil day-after-day,” Amorth, who died in 2016 at age 91, told the Sunday Telegraph in 2004. “I confer with him in Latin. He answers in Italian. I even have been wrestling with him, day in day trip.”
Born in 1925 in Modena, Italy, Amorth got into demon demolition in 1986 after he was unexpectedly made the assistant to Father Candido Amantini, then Italy’s only exorcist.
“From that day, I dropped every little thing and dedicated myself entirely to exorcism,” he told the Telegraph. When Amantini died in 1992, Amorth was promoted to the highest job.
The priest said only about 94 of the hundreds of exorcisms he performed represented full possession — cases varied in severity — and that a part of the job was determining if any individual was simply in poor health or needed a psychiatrist. But he dramatically described, no less than in his estimation, legitimate tussles with the devil.
In his book “An Exorcist Tells His Story,” Amorth said he commonly witnessed possessed souls exhibit superhuman strength. There was a boy who, irrespective of what number of burly men attempted to lift him, couldn’t be moved from the bottom. And there was a person who was given “enough sleeping pills to sedate an elephant,” but never fell unconscious.
Amorth also said he once saw a young man who drooled excessively while referring to himself as Lucifer after which hovered three feet above his bed.
His technique was not far faraway from Hollywood’s frequent depiction: The priest carried a briefcase crammed with crucifixes, holy water and oil and a book of specific prayers approved for exorcisms. A phrase he would yell in Latin: “Exorcizo Deo immundissimus spiritus!” (Or, “I exorcize, O God, this unclean spirit!”). Some exorcisms would take half-hour, while more severe ones might involve multiple sessions over months and even years.
Amorth became a lightning rod of controversy during his years within the role. He claimed onstage at a movie festival in 2011 that “practicing yoga is satanic, it results in evil identical to reading Harry Potter” and suggested that Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin had been possessed by the devil.
And he didn’t keep the inner workings of his gig a secret. He wrote greater than 30 books, including “An Exorcist Tells His Story” and 2018’s posthumously published “Father Amorth: My Battle Against Devil.”
Although the IAE has decried “The Pope’s Exorcist,” Amorth himself saw movies as useful tools to tell the world of his plight.
He wrote of the 1973 classic “The Exorcist” that “the film had dealt very soberly with the issue of evil, reawakening an interest in exorcisms that had been all but forgotten.”
Amorth would finally meet that movie’s director, William Friedkin, a few years later when the Hollywood titan filmed Amorth performing an exorcism. He then wrote concerning the “frightening” experience for Vanity Fair.
Friedkin chillingly describes meeting a girl called Rosa, on whom Amorth had performed nine exorcisms.
“This was not Rosa,” Friedkin said of the Italian woman in her thirties. “It was a monstrous, ugly, despairing creature with a gravelly voice crammed with anger and anguish. It was the voice of the damned.”
Amorth also revealed in a 2002 interview that Pope John Paul II had performed three exorcisms as pontiff, including considered one of a 20-year-old woman.
“This girl was rolling around on the bottom,” Amorth said of the papal purge. “People within the Vatican had never seen anything prefer it … For us exorcists, it’s run of the mill.”
The exorcist was also well-known for his humorousness. And despite his devotion to vanquishing Devil, Amorth said he had no issue with the tradition of dressing up “as witches and devils” on Halloween, a custom more popular in America during his life than in Italy.
“Nothing happens on October 31,” he said. “Here it’s on Christmas Eve that the Satanists have their orgies.”