An Italian bishop is speaking out after witnessing his first exorcism—an event he said would convince anyone of the existence of the devil.
“All you have to do is witness an exorcism to understand that evil is a specific entity, as well as a reality,” Archbishop Erio Castellucci told the Italian daily Il Resto del Carlino.
The archbishop says he’d seen possessed people but had never witnessed an exorcism.
Then in 2015, he was called by two priest exorcists in his archdiocese to be present during an exorcism for a man considered a “difficult case.”
Archbishop Casellucii says when he walked into the parish church in Modena where exorcisms are performed, the demon-possessed man started to scream, “Get out, get out of here, you will have a bad death.”
After that, he fell into a trance-like state.
“Then it seemed as if he had woken up and, in an instant, drove his fingernails into the back of my hands,” Archbishop Castellucci continued. “He had a diabolical look on his face, and he uttered unrepeatable insults and curses.”
The man “told me I would die in a traffic accident, and while he was saying it, he looked pleased.”
Archbishop Castellucci says he wasn’t concerned about the curses.
“My life is in the hands of the Lord Jesus and certainly not in that demon’s. I wasn’t worried at all. The Word of God teaches that the curses are ineffective,” he explained.
Following the exorcism, Archbishop Castellucci told reporters that discernment is important in cases of alleged possession, because many cases belong more to “the competence of a psychiatrist than an exorcist.”
He went on to stress the importance of prayers of deliverance to help bring healing. {eoa}
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