Freed at Lourdes

They never got past the second step.

Their mother took them to Mass, and every week the two brothers climbed one step, or two, and stopped as though the air had thickened, and blasphemed together — the same words at the same instant, the way children recite a verse they were made to learn. Their faces went briefly wrong. Then it lifted, and they remembered none of it, and stood wondering why people were staring.

I will say the necessary thing before the account gets long. Neither of those men had chosen it. What was done to them was done when they were too small to spell their own names, and I have never once regarded them as guilty of it.

Rome, May 1991. Call her Federica; the priest who wrote this down gave her no other name, so that she would stay a person and not a case. She was from Campania, a widow, and she came with ailments the doctors had exhausted: vomiting after every meal, asthma attacks that ended in the emergency room, a dermatitis nothing would close. Her sons were twenty-two and twenty. They came because she asked, and joked in the corridor about a horror film.

Fr. Gabriele Amorth listened and concluded that he had two irreligious young men in front of him and one frightened mother. He was right to be slow. He agreed to a short prayer, mostly for her sake.

Nothing came through the opening prayers. Then the holy water, and a flinch. Then both heads went back at the same moment, the eyes turned up white, and out of two throats came a single low moan, held far too long. He commanded in the old form — Praecipio tibi, I command you — sealed the rite, and stopped, and understood that he would not sleep much that year.

I let it be seen. What shows itself has begun to end.

What followed took eight years. Spitting, roaring, voices belonging to nobody in the room; three grown men holding one boy down and losing. A woman's hoarse voice out of Fabrizio. Under adjuration the things inside them conceded the shape of the matter: there had been a pact, and there had been a consecration.

Then, in the middle of one session, the spirit in Fabrizio said to ask her — and at the back of the room the mother, who had seemed all afternoon merely unwell, lifted her head and answered in a cavernous voice that was not her own.

Look at her now, and look the way I look, because everything in this account turns there.

She had been an orphan, put to service as a child in the house of a grandmother she hated, honestly and with reasons. She married a mechanic and buried him young, of a tumour, at an age when other women are still choosing curtains. Out of all that she drew one conclusion, and it was against Me. She did not go looking for the devil. She went looking for somewhere to send the bill, which is a shorter road and better lit.

It reached her through what she was told were "oriental philosophies," then sessions that called themselves therapy, then an invitation to a house in the country. I will state what happened there in plain clauses and not one word past them, because the enemy's work is not entertainment and I refuse to stage it. She was violated. She was made to drink from their cup. She was consecrated to Satan. She was paid, and then she was owned. Some time afterwards she brought her two sons, five years old and three, and had them consecrated as well, sedated so that they would not remember. They never did.

I do not excuse it. I also will not let you hold it up as the whole of her. A woman who has been shattered will shatter what stands nearest, and what stood nearest were her children — a grief I have carried with her ever since. Years later she ran: she moved to another city, which was all the escape she could work out alone. She was still wearing the ring.

It had been put on her the night they consecrated her: twenty years on her left hand, beside her wedding ring, grown too tight to lift. Amorth worked it loose with holy oil, and she fainted as it came free, and he carried it to the garden and broke it with a hammer. She woke raging. And under command the thing gave its name at last: Asmodeus — the killer of husbands, the ruin of the bridal chamber — with Legion and Balam beside him. Three spirits, one for each of them, invited on a single night by a woman who wanted to wound Me and had no idea where the blow would land.

He exorcised them one at a time for years after that. Each time relief; never release. And in the end the old priest understood what I had been waiting for him to understand: they were not three cases. They had gone in together, and they would have to come out together.

In October 1999 a pilgrimage train carried the three of them down the Ligurian coast and up into the Pyrenees.

I had prepared that place a hundred and forty-one years earlier through an illiterate girl who dug in the mud with her bare hands while a crowd laughed at her, and I have not turned the water off since.

At the grotto of Massabielle the mother and both sons went down together — the trance, the collapse, the trembling — and then all three cried out at once, up at the strip of open sky above the rock. And the cry ended.

They stood up smiling. Nothing further happened for the rest of the pilgrimage; they were ordinary; they ate their meals and slept. A short rite back in Rome confirmed what everyone had already seen. All three. Of everything.

Understand what was lifted at that rock. Not a headache. A vow sworn against Me by a woman with every earthly reason to swear it, and two children signed away in their sleep.

I am stronger than what was done to her.

I am also stronger than what she did.

The Record

This case is the central narrative of El signo del exorcista (2013), the last book of Fr. Gabriele Amorth (1925–2016), written with the Italian journalist Paolo Rodari. Amorth, a Pauline priest, was appointed an exorcist of the Diocese of Rome in 1986 and served under Fr. Candido Amantini, the Passionist exorcist at the Scala Santa whom he always named as his master; in 1990 he founded the International Association of Exorcists, whose statutes the Holy See approved in 2014. As with all the penitents in his books, the family here appears under first names only — Federica, Pasquale, Fabrizio — and the surname and town are withheld.

The sequence as Amorth records it: an appointment in Rome in May 1991; a first, exploratory rite in which the brothers reacted together; sessions over the following years in which the diagnosis widened from the two sons to the mother; the private disclosure of her own consecration; the removal and destruction of the ring worn twenty years on her left ring finger; and, in October 1999, a pilgrimage by train to Lourdes at which all three were freed at the grotto of Massabielle. Eight years elapsed between the first rite and the last.

The presenting symptoms were of the mixed kind an exorcist is trained to weigh: somatic complaints with no medical resolution (post-prandial vomiting, asthma crises, an intractable dermatitis) alongside the classical diagnostic sign of aversion to the sacred — here the brothers' identical blasphemy on the church steps, followed by amnesia. Catholic practice requires that medical and psychiatric causes be excluded first, and Amorth's own initial judgement in this case was that no exorcism was warranted.

The sacramentals named in the account are the ordinary furniture of the Roman rite: the purple stole, holy water, blessed oil, the crucifix, the medal of St Benedict, Psalm 54 (Deus, in nomine tuo salvum me fac), the Rosary prayed aloud by assistants during the rite, and fasting by the exorcist. The imperative form Praecipio tibi belongs to the deprecatory-imperative structure of the De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam.

Asmodeus is named in the Book of Tobit as the demon who killed Sarah's seven husbands before the marriage could be consummated, and who is driven off in the bridal chamber by Tobias at the angel Raphael's instruction (Tobit 3:8; 8:1–3) — the scriptural basis for his later association with the destruction of marriages. "Legion" is the self-given name of the spirits in the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:9). Balam (Balaam) is a figure of the demonological compendia rather than of Scripture, and names of this kind are recorded by exorcists as extorted under adjuration, not as doctrine.

Amorth taught repeatedly that liberation seldom occurs during the exorcism itself; the rite weakens the hold, while the moment of release commonly falls elsewhere, and very often at a Marian shrine. He attributed the practice to Fr. Candido, who habitually sent the afflicted to Lourdes and to Loreto for that reason. A parallel case appears in his second collection, An Exorcist Tells His Story 2: More Stories (1992), in which a woman unable to keep food down vomited small balls wound with red thread at the grotto and afterwards began to eat normally.

On the theology: the Catechism treats exorcism at CCC 1673, reserving the solemn rite to a priest with the permission of the bishop and requiring prudent discernment from illness, which is the physician's province. Catholic teaching holds that diabolical possession can afflict the body and its faculties but cannot seize the free will or take possession of the soul; consent, not affliction, is what constitutes sin. On that principle the two brothers, consecrated while sedated at three and five years old, bore no guilt whatever for what was done over them, and the mother — who acted, repented, and was absolved — was never for a moment outside the reach of mercy.

A note on evidentiary standing. Nothing in this account carries a canonical judgement. The Lourdes Medical Bureau examines claimed organic cures and does not adjudicate deliverances, and no ecclesiastical process has ever been opened on this family. What is recorded here rests on the testimony of the exorcist who conducted the rites, published under his own name in his last book.