Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery
13 documented wonders in the chamber of Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery — each with its place, its period and the sources behind it.
Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · c. AD 53–55, during Paul's third missionary journey
The Sons of Sceva
In Ephesus, seven sons of a Jewish chief priest tried to expel a demon by invoking the name of Jesus as a magic formula, without faith or the Spirit who alone gives that Name its power; the possessed man overpowered and stripped them, and the terrified city burned its books of magic. The episode revealed that Christ's name cannot be wielded as a spell.
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · c. AD 34–36, shortly after the martyrdom of Stephen
Simon Magus
Simon, a sorcerer who had astonished Samaria with magic, believed and was baptized under Philip's preaching, but then offered Peter and John money to purchase the power of imparting the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands. Peter rebuked him sharply, and the sorcerer's name became the root of the word 'simony,' the buying or selling of what belongs to God alone.
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · c. AD 49-51, during Paul's second missionary journey
The Slave Girl at Philippi
In the Roman colony of Philippi, a slave girl possessed by a spirit of divination followed Paul and his companions for many days, proclaiming true words about their mission until Paul, wearied by an endorsement from an alien source, cast the spirit out in the name of Jesus Christ; her enslavers, their profit from her divination gone, had Paul and Silas beaten and imprisoned.
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · c. AD 45-47, during Paul's first missionary journey
Elymas the Sorcerer
On Cyprus, the sorcerer Bar-Jesus, called Elymas, opposed Paul before the proconsul Sergius Paulus and tried to turn him from the faith; Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, denounced him and struck him with temporary blindness measured to match the darkness he had sold to others, and the astonished proconsul believed the teaching of the Lord.
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · First century AD, during and after Christ's Galilean ministry
Mary Magdalene and the Seven Demons
Luke and Mark record that seven demons went out of Mary of Magdala, who became a woman of means supporting Christ's ministry, stood at the cross when most had fled, and was the first witness of the Resurrection; medieval Western tradition wrongly conflated her with the sinful woman of Luke 7 and with Mary of Bethany, a conflation the 1969 Roman Calendar reform corrected.
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · 1884-1890
The Vision of Leo XIII
Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) is traditionally said to have seen, during a Mass of thanksgiving in the Vatican, a vision of demonic spirits converging on Rome, and to have composed in its aftermath the short prayer to St Michael the Archangel, sent to the bishops of the world in 1886 and recited kneeling after every Low Mass until the liturgical reform of 1964. He also wrote the long Exorcism against Satan and the Apostate Angels (1890), placed in the Roman Ritual and restricted to authorised priests. The account of the vision survives only in two mid-twentieth-century recollections.
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · 1913–1920
The Exorcism of Piacenza
An unnamed married woman of Piacenza, mother of two, was afflicted from 23 April 1913 until 23 June 1920, when she was delivered at the friars' convent of Santa Maria di Campagna. The exorcism was ordered by Bishop Giovanni Maria Pellizzari over the hesitation of the exorcist, Fr. Pier Paolo Veronesi, attended by the hospital director Dr. Lupi under a pact of mutual honesty and taken down in shorthand by Fr. Giustino — documentation rare for 1920, transmitted through Renzo Allegri's reportage and retold by Gabriele Amorth in L'ultimo esorcista (2012).
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · 1981–1988
Angelo Battisti: The Man Who Fell Silent
Angelo Battisti was an official of the Vatican Secretariat of State and the administrator and first president of Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, the hospital founded by Padre Pio, whose intimate friend he was; in 1962 he personally carried to San Giovanni Rotondo the letters in which Bishop Karol Wojtyła asked Padre Pio's prayers for the dying Kraków physician Wanda Półtawska. From May 1981 until 1988 he was held by the exorcists who attended him to be demonically possessed — a case with no discoverable cause, marked by mutism, nightly violence in his home, and no reaction whatever during the rite. He was freed near Monte San Savino in 1988 without a single exorcism being performed there, by mere proximity to a parish priest he never once sought out. Fr. Gabriele Amorth reports the case in three separate books.
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · 1987
The Demon Who Named the Hour
On 21 February 1987, in the Antonianum complex on the Via Merulana in Rome, Fr. Gabriele Amorth performed the first exorcism of his career without his master Fr. Candido Amantini beside him. The subject was a young farm worker from the Roman countryside who in trance spoke only English, a language he did not know. At the Ritual's commanding prayer the spirit gave its name as Lucifer, the man went rigid and rose about half a metre above his chair — the only levitation Amorth reported in thirty years of the ministry — and, falling back, announced in English that it would leave on 21 June. Amorth deliberately left that week free; at the next appointment the man was calm, prayed a whole Hail Mary, and recounted that at the named hour, alone on his tractor in the fields, he had cried out and felt himself free. The two published versions of the account give different hours for the same day, a divergence recorded here rather than resolved.
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · 1987
The White Bird
In 1987, in an Italian parish whose diocese had no exorcist available, two prayerful priests agreed at his parents' request to bless an eleven-year-old boy who showed no abnormal signs at all. At the first prayer in the sacristy the child screamed, blasphemed and struck out; over two sessions fifteen days apart the priests used only what any priest may use — the sign of the Cross, holy water, blessed candles, incense — and invoked Our Lady, St Francis, St Benedict and St Michael. The demon called on Lucifer and on all the damned and received no help; then it cried out against Our Lady, and against a 'White Bird' it named as the most powerful of all its enemies. The boy was freed and grew up serving at Mass. Fr Gabriele Amorth, who recorded the case in 1992, suggested in a parenthesis that the Bird may have been a manifestation of the Holy Spirit.
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · July 1988
Laura of Cassino
In July 1988 Laura, a fourteen-year-old from Cassino in southern Lazio, was led at night by a schoolmate to a farmhouse outside the town where about ten hooded people were conducting a séance; the single hour she spent there ended, the same night, with the girl cursing, spitting at and biting her own parents. Her father, a practising Catholic, drove her to Rome before dawn and was waiting when the friars opened the Scala Santa at six; sent on to Fr. Gabriele Amorth, she was freed in roughly ten minutes and went straight down to play ball in the courtyard. Amorth recorded the case in L'ultimo esorcista (2012) as his clearest instance of a possession caught before it could take root — and of what a father's speed is worth.
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · 20th century
The Handkerchief of Marília
At a Catholic secondary school near Marília, in the interior of São Paulo, Brazil, an Italian missionary sister found a small folded handkerchief hidden in a pupil's schoolbook and a second one sewn inside her pillow, together with the girl's own cut hair — a hex laid on her by a woman who had promised her in marriage to her son. The sister burned the objects in the schoolyard incinerator while praying, took the girl to confession first of all, and the wasting, sleeplessness and failing schoolwork ended. Recorded by Gabriele Amorth as the testimony of the sister herself, who says she had never before believed such things were real.
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Exorcisms & Failed Sorcery · 1991–1999
Freed at Lourdes
In May 1991 a widow from Campania, called only Federica in the published account, brought her two adult sons — Pasquale, 22, and Fabrizio, 20 — to Fr. Gabriele Amorth, exorcist of the Diocese of Rome. Years earlier she had been drawn into a satanic cult, violated, and consecrated to Satan, and had afterwards brought the boys, then aged five and three, to be consecrated with her while they were sedated. Amorth exorcised the three separately for eight years, obtaining relief but never release, and concluded that spirits which had entered together would have to be expelled together. In October 1999 a pilgrimage train carried all three to Lourdes, and at the grotto of Massabielle they collapsed and cried out at the same moment and were freed. It is the central case of Amorth's last book, El signo del exorcista (2013).
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