Second Conference Exorcism Planned at Diocese of Tulsa

Source: Dateline Zero

The Diocese of Tulsa has announced a conference for priests on the Rite of Exorcism. The dates are 5-8 February 2012.

There’s clearly a push for better understanding of exorcism in the Catholic church in the United States. At a similar event held in 2010 in Baltimore, more than 50 bishops and 60 priests had signed up to attend. That conference was scheduled for just ahead of the fall meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in Baltimore, to make it easy for as many priests and bishops to attend as possible.

More recently, the Catholic Diocese of San Angelo, Texas, sponsored a seminar on exorcism. The Texas event took place on June 20 of this year. That seminar was led by Father Dennis McManus, from the Archdiocese of New York, and Father Jeffrey Grob, from the Archdiocese of Chicago. Like many other seminars, the presenters hoped “to explain the misunderstanding of the question of exorcisms and the working of the devil in our world.”

Despite strong interest in the training, skepticism about the rite persists within the Catholic church in America. Tulsa World reported that organizers of the Baltimore event were keenly aware of the ridicule that can accompany discussion of the subject.

Exorcists in U.S. dioceses keep a low profile. In 1999, the church updated the Rite of Exorcism, cautioning that “all must be done to avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition.”

The practice is much more accepted by Catholics in parts of Europe and elsewhere overseas. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the longtime private secretary of Pope John Paul II, revealed a few years after the pontiff’s death that John Paul had performed an exorcism on a woman who was brought into the Vatican writhing and screaming in what Dziwisz said was a case of possession by the devil.

Read more, from the full post at Dateline Zero.