The Problems with Possession

By Fr. Dwight Longenecker; The Standing On My Head Blog at Patheos

She was sixteen years old. She knocked on my door early on a Saturday morning, disheveled and frightened. “There is something around me. It’s like a shadow or something and it talks to me. It’s weird and I’m scared!” I asked a few questions and found she had been hanging around with the members of a witch’s coven in the town. I picked up the phone to call a more experienced priest and she started screaming, “It’s inside me. It’s inside me!” At that point her appearance changed. The pretty teenaged girl looked like a malevolent and sick old woman.

The Devil Is Real

I was skeptical about whether the exorcisms I performed were doing anything–until an unseen force grabbed my hand.

BY: the Rev. Lloyd Prator; Beliefnet.com

Nearly twenty years ago, when I was a young rector on the West Coast, the Bishop of California called me called me with an unusual story about illness, spiritual possession, and evil. An interracial couple was being harassed by bizarre, untraceable telephone calls in odd foreign tongues. Hideous noises in the house kept them sleepless. Unexplainable foul odors made the couple reluctant to use some rooms in their home. The young woman, pregnant with their second child, was beginning to have mysterious

Doors Will Bang Open: A Brief Exorcism Handbook

A controversial exorcist describes logistical precautions taken before casting out demons.

BY: Malachi Martin; Beliefnet.com

The place of the exorcism is usually the home of the possessed person, for generally it is only relatives or closest friends who will give care and love in the dreadful circumstances associated with possession. The actual room chosen is most often one that has had some special signigcance for the possessed person, not infrequently his or her own bedroom or den. In this connection, one aspect of possession and of spirit makes itself apparent: the close connection between spirit and

Booting the Devil: A Brief History of Exorcism

Exorcism went out of fashion after the Enlightenment, but is now back in style.

BY: John L. Allen Jr. Beliefnet.com

The first mention of “exorcist” as an office in the church comes in a letter of Pope Cornelius in 253. In early medieval liturgies, according to historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, three kinds of exorcisms were common: exorcism of objects (such as houses), of candidates for baptism, and of people believed possessed by demons. In many parts of Europe, medieval rites of exorcism included not only a renunciation of the devil but also of pre-Christian deities such as Thor and Wotan.

The office of exorcist continued as a “minor order,” a step on the road to priesthood, until 1972, when Paul VI suppressed this order. Canon law once specified that each diocesan bishop must designate an exorcist, but with the revision of the code in 1983

City Panicked by Wave of Suspected Ritual Killings

In the last two weeks, 18 mutilated bodies have been found, all slain in the same manner as were the victims of ritualistic killings by occultists that ended in the 1970’s
By Tapang Ivo Tanku, Special for CNN Tuesday January 22, 2013 Yaounde, Cameroon (CNN) — Michele Mbala Mvogo, a 17-year-old
high school student, left home to go to school one morning, and she
never came back.