Go get'm Father Amorth!

Father Gabriele Amorth, the man who has served as the Vatican's chief exorcist for 25 years, says the signs are there -- the devil has infiltrated the Vatican!

I found this piece of no-news on my web's opening page (thanks be to AOL) this afternoon.

Many of Amorth's claims are made in his autobiography, titled "Memoirs of an Exorcist." AOL referred to this as a "new" autobiography, but if you visit Amorth's space on Amazon, you won't find anything newer than 2002.

In a world in which people suffer seemingly needlessly from earthquakes and tsunamis (of late), and in which science cannot provide 100% explanation (or relief), the demonic is as good a archetype as any for understanding the inexplicable. How many of you remember that 1970’s film, The Exorcist? Was anything explained in the end?

Certainly, people should be free to seek relief wherever they can find it, but Amorth’s spooky interpretation of a number of coincidences involving the deaths of a couple of Swiss Guards at the Vatican and the Church’s well-publicized problems with many of its priests worldwide should not divert our (spelled: “you, me and every human on earth”) own sins to being the work of demonic influences.

I won’t take that cop-out and neither should anyone else!

For my own sins, I would be loath to say “the Devil made me do it!” and the Vatican, good, bad or lukewarm is not likely to take the evasive action of a highly publicized exorcism either. My reading of the Good Book suggests that only Jesus (also believed by many of us to be the only begotten Son of God) chased demons (who took refuge in the bellies of pigs, I seem to recall) into a nearby lake.

And fortunately (for me and most of us, I think), that same Jesus of Nazareth died to forgive us of all of our sins ... and the devil can crawl around the musty corners of St. Peter’s Basilica all he wishes as far as I’m concerned.

He’ll get his just rewards without the help of some priest who has been given Papal authority to chase demons out of the Vatican's darker corners with or without the imagination and talents of some Hollywood special effects department. (The DeVinci Code was still fun to watch, though.)

Read the Book of Revelation for starters.