Word: churches
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...abroad as Pope yet his first to Africa. Almost everyone, including supporters, acknowledges that Benedict's controversial decision in January to lift the excommunication of four bishops from a defiant, ultra-traditionalist faction - including a Holocaust denier - caused unprecedented damage to his leadership of the 1.1 billion-strong Catholic Church. Indeed, in a letter to bishops last week, the Pope both openly admitted to errors in managing the affair and laid blame on some inside the church for undermining...
...understand more and more about multiple personalities, epilepsy, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, doesn't demonic possession get explained away? There's a definite degree to which that's true. You can't deny the fact that many illnesses in the past were misunderstood. The church has to be very careful about confusing mental illness with demonic possession...
...started the book, did you lean one way or another in terms of whether or not you believed in the possibility of exorcism? I came at this topic very journalistically, not having an opinion for or against it. I wanted to really understand what it is and why the church still believes in it. But even exorcists themselves admit that 90% of the people that come to see them don't need an exorcism. There still remains a small percentage of cases, however, involving levitation, mind-reading and other paranormal phenomena that can't be explained through science. Maybe...
...devil and evil itself. Parishioners don't want to hear about Satan and evil and sin. Father Gary, he's in his 50s, and he was ordained in the late '70s. During that period, you had a lot of turmoil in conjunction with Vatican II shaking up the church and getting rid of many very old traditions, the Latin mass and those sorts of things. But you have to look at priests themselves as being creatures of their environment. Coupled with that were all this these new psychoanalytical approaches that were uncovering a lot of things that in the past...
...result, many exorcists are marginalized within the church. I had priests tell me that their superiors belittled the fact that they were exorcists. Interestingly, though, the newer generation of priests are more responsive to the reality of the devil, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that John Paul II was and Pope Benedict XVI is a little more conservative, so the younger seminarians are a little less apt to ridicule. The older priests of Father Gary's generation didn't want to talk about...