Word: rites
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...sound, it is the third reported instance of John Paul's attempting to cast out a demon (the others took place in 1978 and 1982). At a time when official exorcists are being added by several American dioceses, it suggests a remarkable comeback for an all-but-abandoned church rite. As if to illustrate the trend, the 1973 film The Exorcist has just been rereleased in theaters...
Most religions acknowledge that humans can be possessed by what exorcism chronicler Malachi Martin called "personal and intelligent evil," and most prescribe measures to win back the victim. Jesus cast out demons on six occasions; a transdenominational echo of the rite is found in Christian godparents' promise that their godchild will renounce the devil and all his works and ways. For centuries every Roman Catholic priest's ordination included an explicit induction into the Order of the Exorcist...
...century of Freudian psychology and medical progress was harsh on exorcism. Conditions previously thought diabolical, such as Tourette's syndrome, proved medically treatable. In the wake of Vatican II, many American Catholics "wanted to restrict things to only a scientific way of knowing" and shied away from the rite's supernatural literalism, says the Rev. Kazimierz Kowalski, an exorcist in Manhattan. Notes the Rev. James LeBar, who took up the work in 1989: "The whole thing kind of went down to embers...
Officially the rite is called Recognition. On April 4, a delegation of bishops and monsignors in full regalia arrived at Rome's Basilica of St. Lawrence Outside the Walls. They descended to the 6th century cathedral's crypt and were led to a white stone tomb. A casket was opened for them. At this point, wrote Monsignor Carlo Liberati of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints, "there was a moment of profound and intense commotion." The body within, that of 19th century Pope Pius IX, was "almost perfectly conserved." Pius, known universally in Rome as Pio Nono...
...first thing to mistrust, should you be an American thinking of going to Australia for the first time, is your idea of the place and its people. Probably you think the 2000 Sydney Olympics is a vastly important event for all of us, a huge national rite that will "put us on the map" - the same map, presumably, on which the last Australian Olympics, in Melbourne in 1956, failed to inscribe...