The Catholic Church apparently has a handbook on exorcism. I think this is wonderful. The new edition of The Vatican's Guide To Exorcism is apparently quite strict on certain things. Exorcisms must be carried out according to the letter of Catholic law, recently updated for the first time since 1614.


Prayer for relief from suffering is quite all right, but group meetings to pray for healing "should not be organised around the cult of an individual." Which is funny, really, since Christianity would seem to me to be organised around the cult of an individual.

There's one born every minute. And they're mostly Catholic.

Anyway, The Manual For Casting Out Satan demands that the atmosphere of an exorcism should be kept calm, the media should be kept out, and "anything resembling hysteria, artificiality, theatricality or sensationalism should be absent from such gatherings, above all on the part of those who are in charge."

Vatican insiders are whispering that all this has been conjured up specifically to control one individual. No, not Satan. Meet the bad exorcist.

Emmanuel Milingo, seventy years old, Milingo is considered by many the most important and experienced exorcist living today. He was summoned to Rome 18 years ago from his native Zambia because European missionaries complained that he was using the practices of African witchdoctors. The Pope believed he could keep a tighter rein on Milingo if he he were near to hand. Spooky Milingo, eighteen years later, is a regular on Italian television, the author of fifteen books and the subject of ten. His hugely popular masses, frewurntly including faith-healing and exorcism, led to attempts by the Vatican to ban him from preaching in Rome and Milan. So he went elsewhere. And the people followed him. Milingo says that he merely follows Jesus' example, including the penchant for impromptu exorcism.

Milingo, it has to be said, isn't all there. Listen; "I have been 24 years combatting evil, and I only came to know this in 1996. I could not believe when I discovered this third dimension of evil. The third dimension is people who follow instructions in satanic sects. This person I am talking about, the founder, Anthony Levy, in the United States. In America they take him for a new messiah. That's how the American Church is. My dear Lord."

Anton LaVey, that is. Dead as a doornail months after this statement, never once acclaimed by America as the new messiah. But he didn't stop there: and this is where we get a look at Milingo's own personal bad world. "The devil in the Catholic Church is so protected now that he is like an animal protected by the government; put on a game preserve that outlaws anyone, especially hunters, from trying to capture or kill it. The devil within the Church today is actually protected by certain Church authorities from the official devil-hunter in the Church-the exorcist. So much so that the exorcist today is forbidden to attack the devil. The devil is so protected that the one who is the hunter, the exorcist, is forbidden to do his job."

Afterwards, Milingo was quietly fired from the Vatican job he'd ostensibly been brought in from Zambia to take.

In answer to the posed question, "Are there men of the Curia who are followers of satan?" Milingo later stated: "Certainly there are priests and bishops. I stop at this level of ecclesiastical hierarchy because I am an archbishop, higher than this I cannot go."

The "imperative formula" of Roman Catholic exorcism begins with "I order you, Satan..." It goes on to denounce Satan as "prince of the world" and "enemy of human salvation".

It concludes with: "Go back, Satan."

Warren Ellis
Southend, England
November 24 2000