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The sun was shining on the Santa Cruz Mountains. The freeway from the San Francisco airport to San Jose was still buzzing in my ears when I stepped into the parking lot of an unassuming church and the most famous exorcist in America walked up.

“Hello, I’m Father Gary Thomas.”  At 57 years old, he has an easy smile, an abiding love for the Giants and strong convictions about the nature of evil.

“You believe there is a devil?”  I ask him as we settle in at a small, beautiful chapel near the church.

“Yes.”

“You believe that this devil acts upon people?”

“Correct.”

He says it with the certainty that I reserve for answers to questions like, “Did you bring your lunch?” but that’s no surprise.  He has faced skeptics many times and never more than now, because his life and training as an exorcist in Rome are the inspiration behind the Hollywood film “The Rite.”

Indeed, at the premiere, as the cameras swirled around the star, Anthony Hopkins, Thomas walked the red carpet alongside him.  This movie, like salvation, is something the priest believes in.

“First of all,” he says, “it was very emotional for me.  I found some of those scenes very riveting.  I found some of them very profound.  They’re very accurate.  That’s what I’ve seen in real life.”

That’s saying something.  “The Rite” is chock-full of heaving, cursing, ranting characters, who, according to the screenplay, are possessed by Satan, people who one moment seem fine and the next are raging against all that is holy.

And yet, Thomas says people who fear that very fate come to him constantly.  “Well, often times they’ll begin the conversation with ‘Father, I need an exorcism.’  And my answer back to them is, ‘I don’t do them on demand.’”

But he does think a lot more of them need to be done.  It is all part of a push by the Vatican to make more exorcists available to the faithful.  Some in the Catholic Church believe the world is facing a rising tide of demonic activity, particularly in America, where millions are moving away from traditional faiths and looking for alternatives.

“A lot of folks dabble in the occult, or they will be involved in practices that … classical Christianity at least would consider to be idolatrous.  People can get themselves involved in Wicca, or people will go see some sort of fortune-teller, or people will go to a séance, or they can go and they can learn how to channel spirits. …”

A vision of politician Christine O’Donnell fills my head and I interrupt.  “But a lot of people would tell you up front, ‘I’m just playing around.’”

“Right.  Absolutely.  And it’s not,” he says, noting that those who feel adrift from the church and from others of faith are more likely to be drawn in.  “Demons are always looking for human beings who have broken relationships.”

Simply put, Thomas believes just as surely as a person can summon God through prayer, through other rituals, the devil can be called, too.

Thomas says an exorcism usually takes from 45 minutes to two hours and involves reciting prayers, reading scriptures and using sacramental objects such as crucifixes and holy water.  Of course, that’s like saying surgery involves a knife and some sponges.

It is vastly more complicated.  Before the rite is even considered, there must be psychological testing by professionals, extended consultations and questions about drug and alcohol addiction.

Thomas says fully 80% of the people he meets claiming demonic possession have actually suffered some kind of abuse.  An exorcism, he says, is the last step in a long process.

“I have a particular situation now,” he says, “where I think this particular person is suffering from a very unique psychological disorder, but she’s also been exposed to satanic cults, and I want to make sure that what we’re dealing with … is satanic or if it is psychological.”

Even when an exorcism is prescribed, it often must be repeated.  Judging from Thomas’ comments, it takes something of a trained eye to decide whether it is even working.

The movie, to be frank, complicates this whole discussion.  Not “The Rite.”  Thomas says he likes that one, and found Anthony Hopkins a “delightful” man.

But rather the movie from 1973.  “The Exorcist” captured America’s imagination about demons taking over a person’s body and profoundly shaped the public’s perceptions about the process of throwing those devils out.  It was lurid, violent and unforgettable.

It was also based on a real exorcism in Washington, which was far less dramatic than the film.  Thomas will tell you emphatically there are no spinning heads, spewing pea soup or levitating bodies.

But he has seen manifestations of possession.  “Sometimes the person’s head will begin to move in very rigid ways.  Sometimes their eyes will roll.  Sometimes there will be epileptic-like seizures,” Thomas said.  “Occasionally people will take on kind of a body language of a serpentine look, and they’ll begin to stick their tongue out and use their tongue in ways that would look snake-like, and they’ll coil up in a snake-like position.”

“And these are things that you have seen in real life?” I ask.

“I have seen that,” he said with a wry smile.

I’ve seen it, too.  A few years ago I went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to report on a Protestant exorcist who was holding a session in a hotel meeting room.  Several dozen people filed in while, no kidding, “The Devil Inside” by INXS played on a stereo system.

Suffice to say, there were plenty of eye-rolling, seizure-like eruptions in the crowd as people cried out and the exorcist confronted them, pressing his Bible against their heads, and demanding that their demons reveal their names.

We talked to some of the participants before and after, talked to the exorcist, too. For all their heartfelt expressions of belief, I can’t help but ask Thomas the same thing I asked that night: Couldn’t all these folks just be acting?

“I don’t think they’re acting out in a conscious sense,” he says, “because many times … they don’t remember the experience itself.”

What’s more, he says, occasionally the person will do something that defies explanation.  “Sometimes the person will begin to speak in a language in which they have no competency in.”

Meaning, for example, someone who knows no German might start speaking precisely and accurately in that language.  Thomas says he has witnessed that, too.

I stopped by the Pew Center in Washington, where some of the best research on religion is done, to ask about all this.  Allison Pond is a charming young researcher who kindly sat me down before delivering some startling news: A Pew survey found more than one in 10 Americans have witnessed an exorcism, and when you narrow it down to Pentecostals it’s about one in three.

“Forty percent of Americans said they completely believe angels and demons are active in the world,” she told me, “with 28% telling us they mostly believe this.”

That is the kind of information that needs more than a priestly explanation, so I roamed over to Georgetown University to talk to Ori Soltes, a theologian.  The problem, he says, is that we can’t know for sure what people mean when they say they’ve seen an exorcism.  Was it a formal ceremony?  A personal revelation?  A changed way of life?

Still, he has no doubt that claims of demonic meddling are high, because, after all, the year 2000 rolled around less than a dozen years ago, and at every millennium fears of the devil’s influence rise.

“My sense is that we are still in the backwash from the millennium,” he says, “but then you know … events have helped to proliferate that:  9/11,  the war in Iraq.  And now as we approach 2012, suddenly everyone is very interested in the Mayan calendar and how we interpret the idea that the apocalypse is coming in December of 2012 at the time of equinox … all that sort of stuff.”

So maybe it’s no wonder that Thomas is getting calls for exorcisms from not only Catholics, but also from followers of other faiths.

“How often?” I ask.

“I would say probably one out of 10.”

Thomas says there are about 50 Catholic exorcists in the United States, and that’s not nearly enough.  He’d like to see one exorcist in every parish.  But until that day, he does not mind explaining over and over what exorcisms are really all about.

“It’s a healing ministry.  It’s not hocus pocus.  It’s not smoke and mirrors.  It’s not magic. But I think if we don’t respond to people who come in their very troubling moments, I think it diminishes us as a church.”

Despite all that Hollywood has done to mythologize exorcisms, he still believes in the power of this rite, a power born not of fear, but of faith.

Source: CNN

Astronomer Copernicus reburied as hero

Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.

His burial in a tomb in the cathedral where he once served as a church canon and doctor indicates how far the church has come in making peace with the scientist whose revolutionary theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun helped usher in the modern scientific age.

Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, died as a little-known astronomer working in what is now Poland, far from Europe’s centers of learning. He had spent years laboring in his free time developing his theory, which was later condemned as heretical by the church because it removed Earth and humanity from their central position in the universe.

His revolutionary model was based on complex mathematical calculations and his naked-eye observations of the heavens because the telescope had not yet been invented.

After his death, his remains rested in an unmarked grave beneath the floor of the cathedral in Frombork, northern Poland, the exact location unknown.

On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland’s highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried the coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005.

A black granite tombstone now identifies him as the founder of the heliocentric theory, but also a church canon, a cleric that ranks below a priest. The tombstone is decorated with a model of the solar system, a golden sun encircled by six of the planets.

At the urging of a local bishop, scientists began searching in 2004 for the astronomer’s remains and eventually turned up a skull and bones of a 70-year-old man — the age Copernicus was when he died. A reconstruction made by forensic police based on the skull showed a broken nose and other features that resemble a self-portrait of Copernicus.

In a later stage of the investigation, DNA taken from teeth and bones matched that from hairs found in one of his books, leading the scientists to conclude with great probability that they had finally found Copernicus.

In recent weeks, a wooden casket holding those remains has lain in state in the nearby city of Olsztyn, and on Friday they were toured around the region to towns linked to his life.

The pageantry comes 18 years after the Vatican rehabilitated the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was persecuted in the Inquisition for carrying the Copernican Revolution forward.

Wojciech Ziemba, the archbishop of the region surrounding Frombork, said the Catholic Church is proud that Copernicus left the region a legacy of “his hard work, devotion and above all of his scientific genius.”

Saturday’s Mass was led by Jozef Kowalczyk, the papal nuncio and newly named Primate of Poland, the highest church authority in this deeply Catholic country.

Poland also is the homeland of John Paul II, the late pope who said in 1992 that the church was wrong in condemning Galileo’s work.

Jacek Jezierski, a local bishop who encouraged the search for Copernicus, said that he considers Copernicus’ burial as part of the church’s broader embrace of science as being compatible with Biblical belief.

“Today’s funeral has symbolic value in that it is a gesture of reconciliation between science and faith,” Jezierski said. “Science and faith can be reconciled.”

Copernicus’ burial in an anonymous grave in the 16th century was not linked to suspicions of heresy. When he died, his ideas were just starting to be discussed by a small group of European astronomers, astrologers and mathematicians, and the church was not yet forcefully condemning the heliocentric world view as heresy, according to Jack Repcheck, author of “Copernicus’ Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began.”

The full attack on those ideas came decades later when the Vatican was waging a massive defense against Martin Luther’s Reformation.

“There is no indication that Copernicus was worried about being declared a heretic and being kicked out of the church for his astronomical views,” Repcheck said.

“Why was he just buried along with everyone else, like every other canon in Frombork? Because at the time of his death he was just any other canon in Frombork. He was not the iconic hero that he has become.”

Copernicus had, however, been at odds with his superiors in the church over other matters.

He was repeatedly reprimanded for keeping a mistress, which violated his vow of celibacy, and was eventually forced to give her up. He also was suspected of harboring sympathies for Lutheranism, which was spreading like wildfire in northern Europe at the time, Repcheck said.

Copernicus’ major treatise — “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” — was published at the very end of his life, and he only received a copy of the printed book on the day he died — May 21, 1543.

Source: AP

Airport security chiefs may have thought they had enough to worry about with shoe bombers, underpants bombers and people who forget to put their toothpaste into those little plastic bags. But, if so, they were reckoning without Benedict XVI.

At a meeting in the Vatican at the weekend, the pope made an authoritative – if entirely unexpected – incursion into the raging debate over the planned use of airport body scanners. He told an audience from the aerospace industry that, notwithstanding the threat from terrorism, “the primary asset to be safeguarded and treasured is the person, in his or her integrity”.

Respect for the principles he enunciated “might seem particularly complex and difficult in the present context”, he told his audience, which included airport managers, airline executives, security workers, pilots, cabin and ground staff.

They had to contend with problems arising “from the economic crisis, which is bringing about problematic effects in the civil aviation sector, and the threat of international terrorism, which is targeting airports and aircraft”. But, he warned: “It is essential never to lose sight of respect for the primacy of the person.”

The pope’s words will delight civil liberties campaigners opposed to a device that strips passengers virtually naked.

But those involved in airport security will no doubt point out that, when he himself travels — on Alitalia – the pope and his entourage are simply waved through security controls.

An exception was in 1984 when a permanently installed detection mechanism in Luxembourg alerted security officials to the fact that John Paul II and his aides were packing significant quantities of metal. It had been activated by their crosses.

Source: Pope enters airport body scanners row (Guardian UK)