Laura of Cassino

Two roads were walked in Cassino that July, and everything I want to put into your hands lies in the difference between them.

The first was short. It went out of the town at night, up through the trees, to a farmhouse — an hour's walk for a girl of fourteen who did not know the way, beside a schoolmate who did. Of the people waiting in that room I will tell you only what happened, and you will repeat only that much: there are places where a name said aloud is a death sentence, and this page names no one. There were about ten of them, hooded. They were calling on spirits. An animal caught that same evening was killed in front of her. Her friend took her hand and would not let it go, and drew her into the doing of it, and she was drawn. One hour. Then the walk back down.

She had gone the way one goes to something silly. A dare. A shiver. A story to have. Understand that Laura carried no doctrine of the occult in her, no rebellion, no hunger for power — she was fourteen, and somebody she liked had said come. That is the sentence I hear at nearly every one of these doors, said afterwards by white-faced children and their parents alike: we were only playing. A door does not ask you why you are opening it.

She came home. And in the house where she had been a daughter for fourteen years she turned on her mother and her father and cursed them to their faces, with a vocabulary that had never once been in her mouth. She spat. She bit. She screamed until the rooms were full of it. Consider those two people standing there — their child in front of them, and their child nowhere in the room.

Now the second road, and this is the one I keep.

Cassino to Rome is a little over a hundred kilometres, and by daylight it is nothing at all. That night it was everything. Her father was a Catholic who actually practised, which on that particular night meant only this: he knew what he was looking at, and did not need a season to decide. He did not wait for morning to see if it passed, or telephone anyone who would tell him to be reasonable. He put his daughter in the car and drove north in the dark.

I was in that car. I want you to see the headlights going up the valley, one man at the wheel with something in the seat behind him that was making a sound he had never heard, and his hands staying on the wheel. He did not know it, but he was outrunning something. Every hour he did not sleep was an hour a thing was not given to settle in her.

He reached Rome before dawn and stood at the doors of the Scala Santa in the dark, waiting for the friars to open them at six. The priest he had come for was unwell that morning; they sent him on across the city with an address. And the man at that address had already prayed two hard exorcisms since sunrise and was finished — he meant to give the girl a short blessing and send them home, and he told the truth about that later, which is why you may believe the rest.

He had barely begun when she came off the chair at him and put her teeth through the skin of his wrist. He looked at the blood on his arm. Then he gathered up what was left of himself and prayed with everything he had.

Ten minutes.

Not ten months, not the ten years I have watched other households spend. And the priest was not stronger that morning than on any other; he was emptier. The difference was not in his arm. It was that the thing in her had had one night, and one night is not enough time to grow roots. Torn out at once, it came away whole, the way a splinter comes out clean in the first hour and has to be cut for in the second week. This is the reason I have kept the story: not the bite, not the hood, not the woods. The clock.

Then she stood up.

She asked, I think, what everyone was looking at. She went down into the courtyard, and someone found her a ball, and she began to play with it in the ordinary morning sun while the men upstairs were still shaking.

Listen to that sound. A ball going down onto flagstones and coming back up. Down, and back up. Down, and back up. It is the most ordinary noise in the world and I would put it in the mouth of an archangel, because it is the sound of a childhood handed back before anyone had finished stealing it — and it was bought, under me and after me, by a father who did not wait until morning.

The Record

The case is recounted by Fr. Gabriele Amorth (1925–2016) in L'ultimo esorcista. La mia battaglia contro Satana, written with the journalist Paolo Rodari and published in 2012. Amorth was appointed an exorcist of the Diocese of Rome in 1986 by Cardinal Ugo Poletti, trained under the Passionist Fr. Candido Amantini, who exorcised at the Sanctuary of the Holy Stairs (Scala Santa) beside the Lateran for more than three decades, and founded the International Association of Exorcists in 1990. Cassino is a town in the province of Frosinone in southern Lazio, below the abbey of Montecassino, about 130 km southeast of Rome.

As with most of the material in Amorth's memoirs, the account rests on his own testimony; the girl is identified by a first name only, and no independent documentation of the case exists or could exist without breaching the confidence under which exorcists work. The episode's evidential weight lies not in its detail but in the pattern Amorth reports from thousands of cases and repeats in every one of his books: severity tracks duration. A possession addressed within hours is, in his account, ordinarily undone within minutes; one left for years commonly requires years of weekly exorcism. This is a practitioner's rule of thumb, not a doctrine of the Church, and it is offered here as that.

What is doctrine is the judgement on the practices that opened the door. The Catechism treats divination and magic under the first commandment: all forms of divination are to be rejected, including recourse to mediums who purport to unveil the future or command occult powers, and all practices of magic and sorcery by which one attempts to tame occult powers are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion (CCC 2116–2117). Amorth applied this without qualification to séances, the ouija board, and the parlour practice Italians call the gioco del bicchiere — the game of the glass — precisely because these arrive dressed as amusements and are entered, most often, by the young and the curious rather than by the deliberate. Scripture had made the same point in Ephesus, where seven men who handled the name of Jesus as though it were a technique were overpowered by the spirit they addressed (Acts 19:13–20); the city's response was to burn its books of magic. The unseen world is not a toy, and it does not grade the invocation by the sincerity of the one making it.

On the father: the Church's Book of Blessings provides orders of blessing to be used by parents within the household, and Amorth taught frequently and insistently that a parent's blessing over a child — he named fathers in particular — carries a real efficacy that Catholic families have largely forgotten. He held, and this narrative illustrates, that the domestic Church acting quickly does what later interventions struggle to do. The major exorcism itself remains reserved: it may be performed only by a priest holding the express and particular permission of the local ordinary, under the norms of the revised rite De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam (1998, corrected 1999), which requires moral certitude of genuine possession and directs that medical and psychiatric causes be excluded first. It is worth noting that Amorth's own initial intention on this morning was a simple blessing, not an exorcism.

One editorial note. Neither the schoolmate nor the people in the farmhouse are named, described, or characterised here beyond what the source reports of the events of that hour, and no inference should be drawn about any person, family, or place. Accusation in such matters has its own long record of destroying the innocent.