Word: devil
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Devil Theory. That suspicion has been fanned largely by one fact: after three months of Arab embargo, blaring crisis headlines, long lines at gas stations and airline and auto-plant layoffs, the stocks of refined products held in the U.S. by oil companies are on the whole higher than they were a year ago. The latest figures from the American Petroleum Institute show that on Jan. 4 stocks of gasoline and residual oil (used to power factories and electric utility plants) were slightly lower than a year earlier. But inventories of jet fuels were slightly above those of early...
Crowds of the curious are invading Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., these days, and the Jesuit school's telephones are busy with calls on subjects that not long ago would have embarrassed thinking Roman Catholics: the devil, demonic possession and exorcism of evil spirits. The reason: part of the movie made from William Peter Blatty's novel, The Exorcist (TIME, Jan. 14), was filmed at Georgetown...
...sympathetically portrayed. "I don't think it is a religious film," says Ryan, but he does think it will produce "a great deal of thought," especially about the battle between good and evil that the demonic encounter portrays. "There is probably more debate right now about the devil than at any time since Rosemary's Baby." At Loyola-Marymount University in Los Angeles, where Blatty once worked in public relations, Jesuit John O'Neill thinks that some of the film's explicitness might be excused as a device "to show the power of evil...
...movie's most articulate critics is Dominican Father Richard Woods, a young expert on occultism at Chicago's Loyola University who recently published a book called The Devil (Thomas More Press). Woods encountered 23 cases of people who thought they were possessed by the devil after reading The Exorcist; he now fears another wave of hysteria from moviegoers. "The movie is going to cause so many pastoral problems I wish they had never made it." Beyond that, argues Woods, the film never really grapples with the problem of evil. "The devil's true work is temptation...
Both Woods and the Rev. Juan Cortes, a Jesuit psychology teacher at Georgetown, point out that in traditional Catholic teaching on possession, the evil spirit was considered to be a lesser demon, not the devil himself. Cortes doubts the existence of such lesser demons, seeing them merely as archaic religious interpretations of what are now recognized as mental and psychological disturbances. Though Cortes believes in a personal devil who incites evil, he does not believe in possession. Thus, he says, the movie results in "a victory for the devil, because people will believe he can actually possess them...