Pope Benedict's Chief Exorcist says that Satan is in the Vatican

"It is not generally known that Saint Julien tired of his mission early in life... When he cast out devils, they simply entered the bodies of those who watched the miracles." - Peter Ackroyd

Richard Owen reports for the London Times:  Sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are proof that that "the Devil is at work inside the Vatican," according to the Holy See's chief exorcist.  Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican's chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession (Seventy thousand? That's a lot of devils), insists that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon."  He added: "When one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' [a phrase coined by Pope Paul VI in 1972] in the holy rooms, it is all true..."  Father Amorth, who has just published Memoirs of an Exorcist, a series of interviews with the Vatican journalist Marco Tosatti, said that the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981 had been the work of the Devil, as had an incident last Christmas when a mentally disturbed woman threw herself at Pope Benedict XVI at the start of Midnight Mass, pulling him to the ground.

Father José Antonio Fortea Cucurull, yet another Vatican-based exorcist, disputed Amorth's allegations of large-scale demonic infestation.  He contends that his rival spirit wrangler has "gone well beyond the evidence" in claiming that Satan and his minions are roaming the corridors of St. Peter's. 

Father Amorth told La Repubblica that the devil was "pure spirit, invisible. But he manifests himself with blasphemies and afflictions in the person he possesses. He can remain hidden, or speak in different languages, transform himself or appear to be agreeable. At times he makes fun of me."  (If that's the case, I suppose Old Scratch is guiding my fingers across the keyboard right now.)  Father Amorth was ordained in 1954 and became an official exorcist in 1986. In the past he has suggested that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were possessed by the Devil. He was among Vatican officials who warned that J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels made a "false distinction between black and white magic."  He approves, however, of the 1973 film The Exorcist, which although "exaggerated" offered a "substantially exact" picture of possession.

I wasn't able to find Amorth's "just published" tome, Memoirs of an Exorcist, listed on Amazon.com - but apparently the good father has written two previous books dealing with devil extermination which are currently available for purchase online.  One is An Exorcist Tells His Story, printed in 1999, used paperbacks starting at $8.49; and the other is called An Exorcist: More Stories, published in 2002.  Hey, a guy's got to earn a living.   

Comments

[Trent]

If Satan exists, and if he's anywhere, that's where he is.

[Bee Girl]

... or inside the Mormon Temple in SLC.

[Dzugavili]

Let's do the math.

85 years old. 70,000 exorcisms.
At 3 exorcisms per day, that's about 1,000 a year.

Surely the CDC would have caught on by now.