Word: vatican
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Popes don't need to worry about approval polls, but Benedict XVI must have been happy on Tuesday to leave the Vatican for a weeklong visit to Cameroon and Angola, his 11th trip 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...
...feel besieged," a Vatican official says of the Pope. Many offices within the Holy See, according to this source, are now working "in great fear" of making further missteps (which have recently included controversies in Brazil and Austria). "The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing," he says. The good news on Tuesday, at least, was that Benedict's Alitalia flight lifted off on time. (See pictures of the Supreme Pontiff...
When he first heard about a Vatican-sponsored course on exorcism for priests, journalist Matt Baglio was intrigued by the idea of this ancient ritual taking place in the modern world. In his new book, The Rite, Baglio follows American priest Father Gary - sent to Rome to train as an exorcist - and his apprenticeship with Father Carmine. Baglio talked to TIME about belief, skeptical priests and the particulars of the exorcism ritual. (Read "The Exorcist," one of the top 25 horror movies...
...this book was a class on exorcism. Tell me about it. BAGLIO: I was a freelance journalist living in Rome and had heard about this course called Exorcism and the Prayer of Liberation. It was organized by the Legion of Christ and their school, the Regina Apostolorum, which is Vatican-affiliated. Not knowing anything about exorcism or if the Church even still believed in it, I was intrigued by the idea of a university-level course teaching priests about exorcism...
...taboo when it comes to the 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...