Vatican Says More Exorcists Needed

Today's Vatican news is interesting, by itself, but also in context of previous news items, like the Vatican's recent approval of Opus Sanctorum Angelorum ( see my blog post The Vatican and Opus Sanctorum Angelorum)

and the Vatican's announcement in September of this year that ET/aliens almost certainly exist.

Reading today's news alerts, we find this item about the church training would be exorcists here in the U.S.:

Overwhelmed with requests for exorcists, U.S. Roman Catholic bishops are holding a special training workshop in Baltimore this weekend to teach clerics the esoteric rite, the Catholic News Service reported.

The church has signed up 56 bishops and 66 priests for the two-day workshop that began on Friday, seeking to boost the small group of just five or six American exorcists that the church currently has on its books. Exorcists wanted: apply to Catholic Church (Reuters)

"Overwhelmed with requests for exorcists." It's interesting there has been an upswing in events that lead some to interpret them as demonic possessions, and in need of exorcists. Bishop Thomas Paprocki,(Illinois) was quoted saying that ". . . each diocese should have its own exorcist," and adding that he doesn't know why "there was increased demand for exorcisms, which he noted were rarely performed."  And yet, the Vatican has given approval to train more exorcists, which implies, heavily, that more exorcisms are needed, which also implies, Satan is ever more visible these days.

The New York Times suggests one reason for the increased need of exorcising priests in the U.S.: Catholic Church Needs Exorcists

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.

The training stresses the importance of addressing the psychological health of the patient victim possessed individual:

...the possibly possessed person must be checked out by a psychologist to make sure they are not mentally ill before a bishop will allow an exorcism to proceed.

But don't misunderstand, while I am no Christian, not religious, and don't believe in any mainstream religious dogma in any way, what some label, or believe to be "Satan," and "demonic," I believe exists. Labels and interpretation, framing within specific religious structures aside, there are negative energies afoot. Maybe some are even the very same ETs the Church has recently extended benign welcoming arms towards.

The world has gone exceedingly mad these past couple of years, no one can argue it hasn't. The questions of our own fears, confusions and  anxieties projected outwards as cause for these signals in our world are expected, eliciting all kinds of metaphysical and esoteric discussions. Or are these fears, confusions, and anxieties responses to the evil we encounter every day? Or some of both, most likely. It's not as simplistic and neat a thing to say, as the rational-skeptical-secular-humanist would, that we're disassociating or labeling pathologies as religious manifestations of demons. It's also not so literal that, yes Virginia, there is a Devil. No there isn't. But really, it's a moot point. There is evil, and nastiness, and negative energies, and entities with malevolent intent, and our own projected fears, all congealing together in a seething mass that we don't know how to control.

The Vatican knows this, and some within the domed infrastructure of seeming altruistic global goodness believe, some don't, but all agree on basic tenets that are innate components of that infrastructure: control, power, and the manipulation of knowledge.