Word: jesuitic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nine came from the committee's liberal Democrats, including Rodino. For months the White House has been complaining that these devout Democrats are as prejudiced against Nixon as a lynch mob that has already tossed its rope over a lamppost. Indeed, Massachusetts' Robert F. Drinan, 53, a Jesuit priest, last July became the first Congressman to introduce a resolution calling for Nixon's impeachment. (Father Drinan recently received a message saying: "If you can't impeach him, exorcise him.") California's Jerome R. Waldie, 49, has backed several impeachment resolutions, and Detroit's John...
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...
Many reviewers have panned the movie, but Catholic spokesmen are divided on its worth. Father Edmund Ryan, executive vice president of Georgetown, Blatty's alma mater, is pleased that Jesuit priests, who are the exorcists and their colleagues in the movie, are 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...
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...
Even the film's defenders warn children and impressionable adolescents to stay away. "Students say they wish they had never seen the film," says Jesuit Richard Robin of Loyola-Marymount in Los Angeles. Worse, he says, "I saw ten-year-olds in the theater with their parents. That is nothing short of a crime...