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Review at MyShelf.Com |
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The Rite Image Books/Doubleday
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.” (C.S. Lewis). Such is the operative premise of The Rite. Somehow we all have a strange fascination in ghosts and goblins. We want to know if they really exist, but we don’t want to have any personal interaction with them. This too was the operative premise of Father Gary, an American priest sent to Rome to learn how to become an exorcist. This is a fascinating and chilling documentation of his studies and his encounters with demon possession as he studies in Rome and after he returned to the United States. In this well written documentary, Baglio traces the studies and experiences of Father Gary and his teachers as they explain the nature and process of exorcism. There is no sensationalism, no spinning of heads or vomiting pea-green soup, no levitation and sudden appearances of tons of flies. Nonetheless, the stories told raise the same amount and kind of eerie goose bumps—except these stories are true. Baglio takes great pains to show the legitimacy of exorcism and distinguishes trained exorcists from smoke and mirror practitioners. Some people who claim possession, he asserts, are more in need of psychological intervention than spiritual intervention. With that said, he details everything, that we would want to know about the process of exorcism. What left me with a lasting, chilling feeling is the knowledge and the reminder that, much like our human response to learning we have a cancer, we want this removed as quickly as possible. However, he warns, exorcism requires faith, work, perseverance, and time—years, in fact, for some cases. I know more now about exorcism than the totality of Hollywood movies. And I‘m not the least bit comforted by that knowledge. Reviewer's
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2011 |
