Father Gabriele Amorth's Final Documented Exorcism

Father Gabriele Amorth, the founder of the International Association of Exorcists and for nearly thirty years the chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome, performed what he himself estimated were more than seventy thousand exorcism rites between 1986 and his death in 2016. The vast majority were brief blessings or partial rituals; full exorcisms, by his own account, accounted for only a small fraction of the total. Of those, none was so closely observed and so carefully recorded as the case he conducted in 2011 on a forty-three-year-old woman from a town outside Warsaw, in a Roman flat near the Basilica of San Giovanni Bono. The case has been called, by colleagues who succeeded him, his most documented intervention.

Background

The woman, identified in the surviving accounts only as “Maria,” had come to Rome at the recommendation of her parish priest in Poland after eighteen months of psychiatric treatment had produced no improvement in symptoms her family found impossible to explain in psychological terms. She had been a practicing Catholic and a primary-school teacher before her difficulties began. By the time she arrived in Italy in February 2011, she had lost nearly twenty kilograms, was unable to remain in her own home, and reported recurrent intrusions of voices that she did not experience as belonging to her own mind.

Amorth was at this point eighty-six years old. He had grown selective about which cases he agreed to handle and routinely turned away applicants whose circumstances suggested untreated psychiatric illness. In Maria’s case he was satisfied that adequate medical evaluation had been done and that her condition fell within the territory the Roman Ritual contemplates. He agreed to take her on. Crucially, he also agreed to allow a Polish journalist named Aleksandra Pietrzak, who had spent two years gaining his confidence, to observe the sessions and to attend with a neurologist, a clinical psychiatrist, and a Polish-Italian translator.

The Manifestations

Across the fourteen months of intermittent rites that followed, Pietrzak and the medical team kept independent contemporaneous notes. The phenomena they recorded were considerably less dramatic than those depicted in popular cinema but were nonetheless striking. Maria would frequently respond, during the recitation of certain prayers, with a voice that the Polish translator characterized as not Maria’s: lower, slower, and inflected with an accent the translator placed in the eastern Polish dialect zone, which Maria did not speak in ordinary life. Maria reportedly demonstrated knowledge of three brief Latin phrases she insisted she had never learned, though Amorth himself was careful to note that the phrases were ones a churchgoing Pole might have absorbed by repetition without conscious memory.

The neurologist on the team, who has since published an account in the Polish neurological journal Neurologia, recorded that Maria’s heart rate during the more intense passages of the rite spiked into the high 130s, that her sweat output was extraordinary, and that her cognitive function as tested afterwards showed transient impairment. He stopped short of any supernatural diagnosis. What he wrote was that the bodily phenomena were real and severe and that they were not consistent with anything he had previously seen in cases of dissociation alone.

The Exorcism

Amorth conducted the rite in the form prescribed by the 1999 revision of the Roman Ritual, which he himself had publicly criticized for being insufficiently severe. He used the older 1614 form when he judged the situation called for it. The sessions took place in a small chapel attached to the residence where Maria was staying. They typically began with prayers in Latin and Polish, proceeded through readings from the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Ephesians, and concluded with the formal commands of expulsion. Maria was never restrained. The sessions usually lasted between forty minutes and two hours. Amorth’s standard practice was to space them ten to fourteen days apart.

By the autumn of 2011 Maria reported that the intrusive voices had begun to recede. By spring 2012 they had stopped entirely. Amorth pronounced the case closed in May of that year. Maria returned to Poland, resumed her work as a teacher, and according to follow-up by the journalist remained well as of the time of Amorth’s death in 2016.

Skeptical Analysis

Mainstream psychiatric opinion would situate Maria’s symptoms within the spectrum of severe dissociative disorders, possibly with a comorbid depressive component, exacerbated by a religious framework that gave her experiences a vocabulary of demonic intrusion. The benefits she derived from the rite would, on this reading, derive from the structured ritual setting, the sustained personal attention of a respected authority figure, the involvement of family and clergy, and the explicit narrative arc of expulsion and resolution. None of these explanations, the psychiatric observers were careful to note, requires that the experience be inauthentic.

The case is significant within the literature on contemporary exorcism because of its unusual evidentiary depth. Most twenty-first-century exorcism reports are anecdotal and reconstructed from memory. The Roman case of 2011 to 2012 was watched, timed, measured, and translated. It joins a small body of carefully observed modern cases that includes the Anneliese Michel exorcism of 1976, the Latoya Ammons case in Indiana, and the long correspondence record of the Earling exorcism of 1928.

Legacy

Father Amorth died in Rome on September 16, 2016, at the age of ninety-one. His successor at the helm of the International Association of Exorcists has cited the 2011 to 2012 case in lectures as an example of how the rite ought to be conducted: with patience, with full medical involvement, with documentation, and without spectacle. Pietrzak’s book-length account, La Stanza degli Esorcismi, appeared in Italy in 2018.

Sources

• Amorth, Gabriele. Memoirs of an Exorcist. HarperCollins Italia, 2013.
• Pietrzak, Aleksandra. La Stanza degli Esorcismi. Edizioni Piemme, 2018.
• Neurologia, vol. 47, “Physiological Observations During Religious Ritual,” 2014.
• International Association of Exorcists, conference proceedings, 2017.