An exorcist in Australia

Interesting article in The Australian:

Father Jordan, 80, says he has been performing exorcisms at the rate of around one a week for the past seven years and that demand for his services is rising, especially on the Gold Coast. “I regard the Gold Coast as Sodom and Gomorrah,” he chuckles. “It should be pounded with fire and brimstone.”

But Father Jordan is scathing of those who dismiss as fiction the notion of demonic possession of a person or a home. “It is nothing to do with mental illness when you see a household where the dog refuses to go into the room where there is a problem; where it is distinctly cold for no reason; where physical contact is made by night visitors and where the cat jumps right through the wire door at the back.”

Likewise, Father Jordan says some of the battles he has fought with demons cannot be explained by science. “It does not occur in most everyday exorcisms, but I have seen the sort of stuff which Hollywood would go for. When people react badly to the exorcism, I’ve seen the convulsions, the rigid bodies, the frothing, the gibbering, the [speaking in unknown] tongues.”

Bishop Porteous says most exorcisms are a far cry from those portrayed in Hollywood. “You often go through a prayer of exorcism and nothing external will happen to that person at all and they will say only that they feel a gentle relief. But other times there can be a more dramatic reaction, where the body reacts by swaying or writhing on the floor. The demonic presence can also react with a voice that responds in anger and ridicule at the exorcist. The voice will sometimes be gruffer than the person’s voice with lots of swearing.”

Bishop Porteous is wary of the media’s traditionally sensationalist portrayal of exorcism and he takes some persuading before he agrees to recount his most dramatic experiences. “I have seen things like the face of a woman changing to be like the face of a monkey. The face changed and it was quite eerie. Sometimes I have seen hate in the eyes of someone as they lunged at me. But these are definitely not the normal experiences.”

Earlier this year Father Amorth published Memoirs of an Exorcist, in which he recounts how some of his clients vomited up objects such as nails or glass. “You get used to being vomited over,” he told The Times in Britain. “I once performed an exorcism on a woman who managed to hit me in the face with a stream of vomit from the other side of the room – physically impossible.”

Bishop Elliott says the church is “cautious” about how to respond to the growing number of people who claim to be possessed. “We don’t jump straight into exorcism,” he says. “We always seek a rational explanation for the phenomenon first.” He asks them to first take a psychological test. “We look to see if their experience has a natural cause or psychological origins,” Bishop Elliott says. “We don’t want to be seen to be treating natural phenomena as if they were paranormal. You wouldn’t give an exorcism for the flu.”