A faith-challenged priest enrolls in a new Vatican program to train exorcists and gets more than he bargained for. A fine production, rich in Church traditions and with strong performances by all.
Do yourself a favor, and exorcise a few demons of your own — watch this one.
Medicine cannot cure the possessed, and psychology will not. So we roll out the good old Rite of Exorcism from the Age of the Inquisition. There’s actually quite a strong demand for exorcists these days. What has changed to create these demonic possessions?
One dramatic session doesn’t cure the patient any more but a whole therapy of them is needed, regular sessions lasting months sometimes years. Even then success is not guaranteed no matter how sturdy the individual’s constitution, how stalwart his soul, or how bottomless the Church’s financial pockets are.
This begs the question, why? Lack of discipline is one possible why. Just as 80% of kids are too fat or too dumb to even qualify for Army Basic Training, our culture is so loose any more than demons are spreading like an AIDS of the spirit.
The only antidote is self discipline. We need more challenging schools, more consequences for the confession of sins, less reliance on technology, less dependence on government largess and more reliance of friends, family, and community.
In the modern world, in this narcissistic and egotistical extravaganza we call life, the noble priest is a reviled reminder of just how far we as a species have fallen from grace. We abhor the abomination of priesthood and it’s constant unspoken nag, nagging at our conscience that we can, could, and should be so much more.
The simplest priest is now so infinitely superior to even the best of us that we yearn with every heartbeat of this story for the young priest to plummet into that chasm between us.
Why has science and psychiatry forsaken these deeply disturbed individuals? The same reason why they abandoned their cure for homosexuality? Is political correctness the new God; are pundits and bloggers now our moral authority; is the Church really the only gossamer thread left separating us from Neanderthals?
Anthony Hopkins was a bit too acidic and unconventional with his clients, and his understudy is too blase’. The only character with any real backbone was the lady journalist. Everybody else just limps along on feeble spiritual crutches. Their faith had no traction, no dynamism, no spark of the genuine.
In other words, their heart just wasn’t in their acting roles. The only time we see that depth is when Anthony Hopkins is in his trademark Hannibal Lecter mind set.
A priest pissing in the toilet as he gazes at a crucifix hanging over the commode in the bathroom of his private room at the Vatican. Is nothing sacred in Hollywood? How long before we see women squatting on the toilet and pissing while they read the Bible?
Clearly the writer and director are possessed, and thus experts in foisting this kind of obscene sacrilege off on the trusting, vulnerable public.
The only people who find any dramatic or artistic value in showing a man urinating on screen are gays with an enlarged prostate. You see them running out of the theater after scenes like this to have some group sex in the theater bathroom.
The whole idea of “secret knowledge” that demonic people illustrate, is that alone reason enough to deem a person possessed? Early psychologists had a “secret knowledge” of people, but they weren’t demonized.
And why isn’t the military studying this phenomenon to help us infiltrate terrorist cells, to spy on the Soviets or the Chinese, or to peek inside the secret debt negotiations in Congress?
