Atheist Ireland Forum

May Ian Paisley was right all along...............

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7056689.ece

ah so it was the devil not the priest or the pope, how convenient

All jokes aside, it makes you realise how emotionally disturbed some of these people are. It's rather sad, and I don't mean that in a flippant way, that adults can actually think like this.

It's even more sad that more intelligent and less troubled members of the Church feel they have to shrug their shoulders and turn a blind eye to this sort of inane claim; partly out of embarrassment and partly out of a sense of misguided "respect" for the hierarchy.

70,000 cases? According to Wikipedia, he became an official exorcist in 1986 and retired in 2000 but let's allow that he actually started much earlier and continued much longer. Even if he's been exorcising demons for 35 years, that's 2,000 demons per year or more than five per day, every day. I don't know how long the average exorcism takes but someone must have their numbers wrong. Not that that is in any way the craziest thing about this story, but worth a mention.

The maths is exactly what's worth mentioning.

It's more than 7.6 per day, even if he was only "supervising" or "advising" on many of the cases. Yeah.... I don't think so either. Not even the lowliest B-grade Hollywood flick would come up with such an unlikely story.

In other words: complete bollocks from beginning to end. The thing is this is not new - this is precisely the sort of bizarre & deranged stuff that has been reported by this person for quite some time. Moreover, instead of trying to play it down or (gods forbid) refute it; the Vatican has supported his nonsense squarely even going so far as to require that every diocese has its own exorcist etc, etc. [see: http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/a15.htm ]

I'm not making this up, the Vatican really has endorsed this stuff. There are some bishops that haven't complied with this nonsense, no doubt because they have more intelligence & / or integrity than what the Vatican credits the average good Catholic with.

This amounts to nothing other than pandering to the lowest common denominator.