THE Roman Catholic Church in the US has become so short of priests who know how to perform an exorcism that it this week held an emergency two-day meeting to teach clerics how to properly cast out demons.
The New York Post reported that a group of 56 bishops and 66 priests - including an assistant to New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan - have gathered in Baltimore for the Conference on the Liturgical and Pastoral Practice of Exorcism.
"Learning the liturgical rite is not difficult," said Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, archbishop of Houston, who was attending the conference.
"The problem is the discernment that the exorcist needs before he would ever attempt the rite."
The number of US clerics who know how to do an exorcism has dropped dramatically in recent years, ever since the holy procedure became a laughing stock thanks to Linda Blair's head-spinning performance as a possessed girl in the 1973 film The Exorcist.
Only five or six priests are left in the country with the knowledge to properly carry out an exorcism, the Catholic News Service reported.
But with numerous Catholic immigrants coming to the United States from nations where exorcisms are taken seriously, the church's handful of exorcists have become overwhelmed.
"There's this small group of priests who say they get requests from all over the continental US," Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki told the Catholic News Service.
And though some non-Catholics may snicker, exorcisms are an important church rite.
The late Pope John Paul II is said to have performed one and the Bible talks of Jesus casting out demons.
"We don't think that's poetic metaphor," Bishop Paprocki said.
SIC: HS/USA
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