It’s not everyday that an exorcist pens a movie review, but last month a group of demon removers did just that.
“Unreliable … splatter cinema,” the International Association of Exorcists declared of the new movie “The Pope’s Exorcist,” starring Russell Crowe, which hits theaters Friday.
The 29-year-old Catholic organization added: “The end result is to instill the conviction that exorcism is an abnormal, monstrous and frightening phenomenon, whose only protagonist is the devil, whose violent reactions can be faced with great difficulty.”
There’s more to their ire than Hollywood’s flair for exaggeration. The IAE, it turns out, has a personal 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 more than two decades.
If a person was believed to be inhabited by Satan or another 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 every day,” Amorth, who died in 2016 at age 91, told the Sunday Telegraph in 2004. “I talk to him in Latin. He answers in Italian. I have been wrestling with him, day in day out.”
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 everything and dedicated myself entirely to exorcism,” he told the Telegraph. When Amantini died in 1992, Amorth was promoted to the top job.
The priest said only about 94 of the thousands of exorcisms he performed represented full possession — cases varied in severity — and that part of the job was determining if somebody was simply ill or needed a psychiatrist. But he dramatically described, at least 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, no matter how many burly men attempted to lift him, could not be moved from the ground. And there was a man 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 and then hovered three feet above his bed.
His technique was not far removed from Hollywood’s frequent depiction: The priest carried a briefcase filled 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 30 minutes, while more severe ones might involve multiple sessions over months or even years.
Amorth became a lightning rod of controversy during his years in the role. He claimed onstage at a film festival in 2011 that “practicing yoga is satanic, it leads to evil just like 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 more than 30 books, including “An Exorcist Tells His Story” and 2018’s posthumously published “Father Amorth: My Battle Against Satan.”
Although the IAE has decried “The Pope’s Exorcist,” Amorth himself saw movies as useful tools to inform the world of his plight.
He wrote of the 1973 classic “The Exorcist” that “the film had dealt very soberly with the problem of evil, reawakening an interest in exorcisms that had been all but forgotten.”
Amorth would finally meet that movie’s director, William Friedkin, many years later when the Hollywood titan filmed Amorth performing an exorcism. He then wrote about the “frightening” experience for Vanity Fair.
Friedkin chillingly describes meeting a woman 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 filled 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 one of a 20-year-old woman.
“This girl was rolling around on the ground,” Amorth said of the papal purge. “People in the Vatican had never seen anything like it … For us exorcists, it is run of the mill.”
The exorcist was also well-known for his sense of humor. And despite his devotion to vanquishing Satan, 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 is on Christmas Eve that the Satanists have their orgies.”
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