The Demon Who Named the Hour

He came a few minutes early, and he came alone.

Begin there, not with the thing that lifted off the chair. A priest of sixty-one letting himself into a room in the Antonianum on the Via Merulana, carrying a book he had rehearsed at home for months in a language he hoped never to use in earnest. Candido Amantini had told him that morning that nobody is ever ready for this, and that he was ready enough.

Then the door. A Croatian friar, and behind him a thin young man of about twenty-five from the fields outside Rome, with the hands I know well — knuckles enlarged, the skin split along the creases, earth worked in past washing. I have a tenderness for those hands. I made the ground they work.

Then a third man, unannounced. Who are you? The translator — because in trance this farmer spoke English, a language he had never learned. That is one of the signs the old book tells an exorcist to watch for, and it was in the room before any prayer began.

He put on the stole, took up the crucifix and the holy water, and began in Latin. The farmer sat like a pillar of salt, eyes on the floor. Then the psalm — Deus, in nomine tuo salvum me fac, save me, O God, by thy name. Nothing. Then the supplications. And I let the young man lift his head.

What came out of him was not his voice and not his language, and it was aimed at the priest: stop, be quiet, be quiet. Then the spitting. Then a howl that seemed to come up through the floor of the world. And the air went cold. He had been warned about the cold; being warned is not the same as standing in it.

He kept on for over an hour, and reached the words Candido had called the most feared and the most effective: Praecipio tibi. I command you. And notice what the priest is told to demand of a liar — his name, the day and the hour of his going, and a sign.

It answered, one syllable set down after another so the room would have time to be afraid: I am Lucifer.

I let that be said. To surrender a name is already to have lost, and the enemy of your souls has never once grasped that he is most defeated at the moment he is most impressive.

Then the impressive part. The young man went stiff as a felled tree, legs straight out, head thrown back, and rose — half a metre above the back of the chair, level, motionless, for several minutes. The friar stepped away; the translator was already at the wall. Amorth stayed where he was, then remembered the stole, touched the suspended body with the tip of it, and read on to the end. Amen. A crash, and the man was back in the chair, muttering, and then the English sentence: he would go out on the twenty-first of June, at the hour he named. Then the eyes came back, a poor farmer's eyes, wet.

Thirty years of this work lay ahead of that priest. He never saw a body leave the ground again.

Weekly after that, the same room and the same scene. And when the calendar came round, Amorth deliberately left the week of the twenty-first empty — not from trust, he did not trust it and was right not to, but because he had learned whose timing a liberation runs on, and it is not the exorcist's.

At the appointment afterwards the young man walked in calm. Holy water: nothing. Amorth asked him to pray a Hail Mary, and he prayed the whole of it, every word, without breaking.

He had gone out to the field alone, as on any day, and climbed up on the tractor. At the hour that had been named a cry rose in him and he let it out — a terrible cry, he thought, though there was nobody in that field to hear it — and when it ended he was free. He could not explain it. He was free.

Now put your attention where it belongs. Not on the half-metre — anyone can be impressed by a half-metre.

Look at the field.

That man's deliverance did not happen in the room with the stole and the Latin. It happened where the work is: a tractor, an ordinary weekday, diesel and turned soil, no witnesses, nothing to photograph. The battle was fought in the Antonianum; the freedom was handed over in a field. That is not a demotion — it is my signature. I moved over the face of the waters before there was any altar to stand at. Most of what I do for you, I do while you are at work.

And the wonder is not the levitation. It is that an appointment was kept by someone who never wanted to keep it. He did not go on the twenty-first of June because he had said so. He went because he was made to say so, and made to go.

Five months, February to a shout in a field. He never had it that fast again — and he went on exorcising the young man a while longer anyway, the way you keep testing ice you have already crossed.

But the twenty-first of June was true.

The Record

Fr. Gabriele Amorth (1925–2016), a priest of the Society of St Paul, began working under Fr. Candido Amantini in June 1986. Amantini, a Passionist attached to the Scala Santa, had been exorcist of the Diocese of Rome since 1961 and was Amorth's only teacher in the ministry. Amorth went on to become the most publicly known exorcist of his generation and founded the International Association of Exorcists in 1990. The case described here was the first exorcism he conducted without his master present: 21 February 1987, in a room of the Antonianum complex on the Via Merulana, a short distance from St John Lateran. The subject was a young farm worker from the Roman countryside, brought by a Croatian Franciscan whom the accounts name as Fr. Maximilian; Fr. Candido, having no time for the case, sent his new assistant in his place. The farm worker is never named, and no independent documentation of the case exists — as with nearly all contemporary exorcism accounts, it rests on the exorcist's testimony alone.

Amorth told the story twice, and the two tellings do not agree on the hour. In the account given to Paolo Rodari and published as L'ultimo esorcista (2012), the demon announces its departure for 21 June at three in the afternoon, and the farmer afterwards describes crying out at three while on his tractor. In the account given to Elisabetta Fezzi, published in English as Padre Amorth: My Battle Against Satan (2017), the announcement is for 21 June at eleven in the morning, and the man reports being freed at precisely eleven. The day is the same in both books; the hour is not. Smaller details diverge as well: the earlier book gives the man's age as about twenty-five, the later as twenty-six or twenty-seven; the later adds a Brother Sebastian and three or four strong men restraining him during the sessions. Both are Amorth's own recollections, given some twenty-five and thirty years after the events. This encyclopaedia records the discrepancy rather than quietly selecting a version.

The rite used was the Rituale Romanum of 1614, Title XII (De exorcizandis obsessis a daemonio), which remained the rite in force until De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam was promulgated in 1998 (editio typica 1999); Amorth criticised the revised rite publicly and, like many exorcists of his generation, continued with the older one. The psalm recited is Psalm 53 in the Vulgate numbering — Psalm 54 in the Hebrew — beginning Deus, in nomine tuo salvum me fac.

The demand for a day and an hour is not a flourish of Amorth's; it is in the Ritual. Among the imperative prayers of Title XII the exorcist commands the unclean spirit to declare its name and the day and hour of its departure, together with a sign. The introductory notes to the same Title impose severe restraint on what follows: the exorcist is not to question out of curiosity, is not to believe what the spirit says, and is warned that the demon speaks in order to deceive. The notes also list the classic indications of genuine possession — speaking or understanding an unknown tongue, knowledge of hidden or distant things, and strength disproportionate to the subject's age and condition. The English of an unlettered farm labourer belongs to the first of these. Levitation does not appear among them, and no ecclesiastical judgement attaches to this individual case; Amorth presents it as the single instance he witnessed in his career.

The Church's discipline on solemn exorcism is set out at CCC 1673: it may be performed only by a priest with the permission of the bishop, with prudence, and after a medical examination has been made to distinguish possession from illness — a boundary Amorth defended in both books, insisting that psychiatric assessment come first. The principle that a liberation belongs to God's timing rather than to the exorcist's technique is Fr. Candido's counsel, repeated in both accounts: prolonged exorcisms accomplish nothing if the moment God has appointed has not come, and the exorcist should not expect to see the liberation happen in front of him. Amorth's own commentary follows the same doctrine — the demon is a liar, but God can compel him to speak the truth; the surrender of a name is itself a defeat; and no departure is to be presumed genuine, since feigned and temporary liberations are common and the return can be worse than the first affliction. Emanuele Angiola's study of the rite and its modern practice provides a scholarly survey of the same material.