We need men who fear nothing except God standing up against the deconstructionists and dissenters who claim that all that happened prior to 1965 in the Church was an embarrassment.
by Brian O’Neel, September 20, 2016 Catholic World Report
This past Friday brought sad tidings, the news of the passing of yet another person of note in a year when there seems to have been a great preponderance of last breaths drawn by those who have shaped our culture and world.
And yet this passing will likely be noted by few in the world outside the Catholic Church. While unfortunate, it’s sadder that many even within the Church will take little note of the fact that this giant is no longer with us. He was a man and, more important still, a loyal follower of Christ, going wherever it was that conscience and the Magisterium told him to go.
That man is Fr. Gabriel Amorth, who left this life at age 91 in Rome, where he had spent the last 30 years as diocesan exorcist. His work as an exorcist was not inconsiderable. What’s more, one could make a very strong case that there are as many exorcists in the Church today because of him. (There are still not enough. Each diocese is supposed to have one, but many do not.)
He made exorcism respectable again after too many wanted to relegate it – not to mention belief in the devil and in the existence of objective evil – to the ash heap as an embarrassing relic of the past. Indeed Fr. Amorth believed the “greatest victory” of the devil is to persuade us that he does not exist. Thus he fought against this.
This isn’t to say he saw Beelzebub in every corner.
According to Dr. Robert Moynihan’s moving obituary, in various interviews Fr. Amorth said he had carried out more than 50,000 exorcisms over the years, some taking just a few minutes, others taking many hours of prayer.
“Amorth also said that he had only been faced with about 100 cases of real demonic possession in all those tens of thousands of cases [emphasis added]. Most of the cases, he said, were either ‘disturbances’ caused by the devil or simple mental illnesses.”
Most exorcists would agree. Still, possession is real, and this writer knows several trustworthy souls who have been present at exorcisms and who say one gives up the notion of demons as fairy tales of figments of imagination very quickly. Read the rest of this story at Catholic World Report
Saint Michael's Journal 