Angelo Battisti: The Man Who Fell Silent

I knew his hands twice, and both times they were carrying something that did not belong to them.

The first time it was a letter. November 1962: Rome crowded with bishops for the Council, and one of them — forty-two, from Kraków, a name nobody would have recognised — wrote in Latin to a Capuchin friar in Apulia. Not about himself. A woman in his diocese was dying: Wanda Półtawska, physician and psychiatrist, mother of four, survivor of five years in a German camp, who now had a tumour and a surgery date and very little else. He asked for prayer, the one currency never counterfeited.

Angelo Battisti carried it. He worked in the Secretariat of State, and he was administrator and first president of the hospital Padre Pio had raised out of that stony country. He put the letter into the friar's hands, and Padre Pio read it and said that to this one, no cannot be said. Eleven days later a second letter said that on the twenty-first, before the surgeons ever opened her, the thing had simply gone.

Padre Pio told Angelo to keep both; one day, he said, they would matter. Angelo kept them sixteen years without knowing why, and then on an evening in October 1978 a name was read out from a balcony over St Peter's Square, and he knew.

Hold that man a moment: daily Mass, and the old fast kept so exactly that he would not take water after midnight if he meant to receive in the morning.

The second man had the same hands, and for seven years they held nothing but a small paper image of Michael the Archangel.

May 1981, his last working day: a private goodbye from Cardinal Casaroli, then five minutes of prayer in the little church of Sant'Anna just inside the gate. He came out of those five minutes as someone else, and left the Vatican without saying goodbye to anyone.

Then silence. Three months in which he said almost nothing and had to be fed. He would not wash, would not go out, would not see the friends at the door. He stopped going to church — he, of all men. Neurologists found nothing; psychiatrists found nothing; the drugs made him slow without making him well.

At night, between two and three, the house came apart. His wife Dora was hurt again and again: a sheet of metal off the terrace opened her forehead a few millimetres from her eyes; she was pushed down the stairs; a bookcase came over and very nearly finished it. There is a way of telling such things that flatters the enemy, and I have no use for it.

In the rare hours when he surfaced he took hold of the image of Michael and asked the one who has already won to win again. He asked for nothing else, and never once turned on me.

Now the strange thing.

Fr. Candido Amantini, who had spent decades at the Scala Santa doing this work, came with young Gabriele Amorth, and they were met by a man washed, dressed, courteous, glad of the visit, who prayed the Our Father with them slowly and devoutly. Amorth went back down the stairs certain there was nothing wrong with him. On those stairs Candido said quietly: that was not him.

The next morning Dora telephoned. The moment the door shut behind the two priests, her husband had begun to scream that he hated them.

That is what it did for seven years: it hid exactly where the light was. During the exorcisms he sat with eyes closed and did not move, did not answer, did not react — nothing to photograph, nothing anyone could carry away and sell. It had learned that spectacle costs it souls.

And there was no door. They looked for one, as they are trained to: a séance, a spell, a curse, a sin held back. Nothing. Candido, who had seen more of this than almost any man alive, said he had never met such a case, and used the only word left — purification, permitted.

I will say what he could not say from where he stood. A body can be besieged; a will cannot be entered. Through seven years of that house, in the wreckage at two in the morning, Angelo Battisti never once consented, and so nothing was taken from him but time. All of it happened outside a gate that never opened.

The end came the way I most often work — without anyone noticing who did it. In 1988 a swelling came up in his throat and frightened him. Candido sent him to Verniana, a village parish in the diocese of Arezzo, to a priest called Angelo Fantoni, who had a gift and no reputation he was interested in keeping. Fantoni saw him coming from a distance and raised an arm as though he had been expecting him all week. He said the swelling was nothing and would pass, then walked into his church and said no more. It passed. Angelo took home one thing: a holy card of the Madonna delle Vertighe, whose sanctuary stands near Monte San Savino.

In November he came back and stayed about a month in those hills. He never went to look for Fantoni. Not once. He was not prayed over, not commanded, not questioned. He simply stayed near, and afterwards told his wife that he had felt them leaving hour by hour, the way a fever leaves.

Then he went home to Rome a free man, and stopped on the way to buy roses for Dora.

Fantoni was never told what he had done and never asked. The case they called unique was untied by a man who did not know he had hold of the string. I do very little of my best work through the people you would expect.

Ask which of the two men I loved more and you have misunderstood the question. They were one man — mine on the day the letter came saying she is well, and mine on the night he could not say his wife's name. The letters he was told to keep are still kept. So is he. He died some time afterwards, in peace.

The Record

Angelo Battisti was an official of the Vatican Secretariat of State and served as administrator and first president of Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the hospital founded at San Giovanni Rotondo by Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, with whom he was on close personal terms. His case is recounted by Fr. Gabriele Amorth (1925–2016), exorcist of the Diocese of Rome, in three separate books published across nearly thirty years: An Exorcist Tells His Story (1990), El signo del exorcista (with Paolo Rodari, 2013), and Padre Amorth: My Battle Against Satan (with Elisabetta Fezzi, 2017). Amorth names him openly, dates the affliction 1981–1988, and identifies Mons. Angelo Fantoni of Monte San Savino (Arezzo) as the priest through whom the deliverance came.

The 1962 correspondence is independently documented and does not rest on Amorth's testimony. On 17 November 1962, Bishop Karol Wojtyła, then in Rome for the first session of the Second Vatican Council, wrote in Latin to Padre Pio asking his prayers for Wanda Półtawska (b. 1921), a Kraków physician and psychiatrist, survivor of five years in the Ravensbrück concentration camp and mother of four, who had been diagnosed with a malignant tumour. A second letter of 28 November 1962 reported that she had been found free of the tumour on 21 November, before the scheduled operation. Battisti delivered the letters personally and, on Padre Pio's instruction, preserved them; their significance became public when Wojtyła was elected Pope John Paul II on 16 October 1978. Półtawska later served on the Pontifical Council for the Family and the Pontifical Academy for Life and testified in Padre Pio's canonisation process. The letters are kept at San Giovanni Rotondo.

On the exorcists: Fr. Candido Amantini, C.P. (1914–1992), of the Passionist community at the Scala Santa in Rome, was for some thirty-six years the principal exorcist of the city and Amorth's teacher in the ministry. Amorth's account is notable for the features he stresses as anomalous — the complete absence of any identifiable cause (no occult involvement, curse, or grave sin was ever found), the total inertia of the subject during the rite, and above all the inversion by which the affliction concealed itself precisely in the exorcist's presence and resumed once he had left. Amantini read the case as a purification permitted by God in a devout man rather than as a punishment, and described it as without parallel in his experience.

Mons. Angelo Fantoni was born at Freggina, in the Casentino, on 2 May 1903, ordained on 18 March 1930, and served as parish priest of Verniana, in the diocese of Arezzo, from 1948; he was locally reputed to have a charism of healing and was dead by the time Amorth published the case. The Marian sanctuary of the Madonna delle Vertighe stands near Monte San Savino, on a site whose documented history reaches back to a priory recorded in 1073.

The Church distinguishes ordinary temptation from the rare condition of demonic possession and requires that medical, psychological, and psychiatric causes be excluded before the solemn rite is used; the exorcism of the baptised is governed by De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam (1614; revised 1998, editio typica emendata 2004) and is reserved to a priest with the express permission of the local Ordinary (CCC 1673; CIC c. 1172). Amorth's constant teaching, repeated across all his books, is that the devil may afflict the body but can never take the soul without the person's own consent — the distinction that governs how any case of this kind is to be read.

A note on the evidence: outside the 1962 letters, this account descends from Amorth's testimony and from what Amantini told him. It is the subject of no ecclesiastical judgement, and the Church proposes no private case of possession or deliverance for belief. The 1981–1988 chronology, the medical negatives, the injuries to Dora Battisti, and the events near Monte San Savino are reported consistently across the three books but rest on that single chain of witness.