By NICK PISA Last updated at 17:32pm on 28th August 2006
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Possessed: Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin
Adolf Hitler and Russian leader Stalin were possessed by the Devil, the Vatican’s chief exorcist has claimed.
Father Gabriele Amorth who is Pope Benedict XVI’s ‘caster out of demons’ made his comments during an interview with Vatican Radio.
Father Amorth said: “Of course the Devil exists and he can not only possess a single person but also groups and entire populations.
“I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed. All you have to do is think about what Hitler – and Stalin did. Almost certainly they were possessed by the Devil.
“You can tell by their behaviour and their actions, from the horrors they committed and the atrocities that were committed on their orders. That’s why we need to defend society from demons.”
According to secret Vatican documents recently released wartime pontiff Pope Pius XII attempted a “long distance” exorcism of Hitler which failed to have any effect.
Father Amorth said: “It’s very rare that praying and attempting to carry out an exorcism from distance works.
“Of course you can pray for someone from a distance but in this case it would not have any effect.
“One of the key requirements for an exorcism is to be present in front of the possessed person and that person also has to be consenting and willing.
“Therefore trying to carry out an exorcism on someone who is not present, or consenting and willing would prove very difficult.
“However I have no doubt that Hitler was possessed and so it does not surprise me that Pope Pius XII tried a long distance exorcism.”
In the past Father Amorth has also spoken out against the Harry Potter books, claiming that reading the novels of the teen wizard open children’s minds to dabbling with the occult and black magic.
Father Amorth, who is president of the International Association of Exorcists, said of the JK Rowling books:”Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil.”
He said that Rowling’s books contain innumerable positive references to magic, “the satanic art” and added the books attempt to make a false distinction between black and white magic, when in fact, the distinction “does not exist, because magic is always a turn to the devil.”
Father Amorth is said to have carried out more than 30,000 exorcisms in his career and his favourite film is, according to Italian newspapers The Exorcist.
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One response:
“The Devil made me do it!”
What this does is remove moral culpability for their actions. If you’re possessed by the Devil, you become a moral automaton lacking Free Will. Surely the Vatican didn’t mean to excuse Hitler’s and Stalin’s actions in this way?
Second response:
It certainly doesn’t remove moral culpability, though I think your comment begs the question whether actions, rather than people, can be morally culpable.
There’s a difference between excusing people and excusing their actions.
But I think reducing it to moral culpability misses the main point.
I think the point can be clarified and expanded by a couple of quotes:
The exorcisms at baptism and demonic powers.
Source: Schmemann 1973:69f.
“According to some modern interpreters of Christianity, ‘demonology’ belongs to an antiquated world view and cannot be taken seriously by the man who ‘uses electricity.’ We cannot argue with them here. What we must affirm, what the Church has always affirmed, is that the use of electricity may be ‘demonic,’ as in fact may be the use of anything and of life itself. That is, in other words, the experience of evil which we call _demonic_ is not that of a mere absence of good, or, for that matter, of all sorts of existential alienations and anxieties. It is indeed the _presence_ of a dark and irrational _power_. Hatred is not merely absence of love. It is certainly more than that, and we recognize its presence as an almost physical burden that we feel in ourselves when we hate. In our world in which normal and civilized men ‘used electricity’ to exterminate six million human beings, in this world in which right now some ten million people are in concentration camps because they failed to understand the ‘only way to universal happiness,’ in this world the demonic reality is not a myth.”
The Beast from the Abyss in Revelation 13 and civil government.
Source: Caird 1966:163-164.
Commentary on Rev 13:1-10 – the monster from the abyss
“But is must not be thought that John is writing off all civil government as an invention of the Devil. Whatever Satan may claim, the truth is that ‘the Most High controls the sovereignty of the world and gives it to whom he wills’ (Dan iv. 17). In the war between God and Satan, between good and evil, the state is one of the defences established by God to contain the powers of evil within bounds, part of the order which God the Creator had established in the midst of chaos (cf. Rom xiii. 1-7). But when men worship the state, according to it the absolute loyalty and obedience that are due not to Caesar but to God, then the state goes over to the Enemy. What Satan calls from the abyss is not government, but that abuse of government, the omnicompetent state. It is thus misleading to say that the monster is Rome, for it is both more and less: more, because Rome is only its latest embodiment; and less, because Rome is also, even among all the corruptions of idolatry, ‘God’s agent of punishment, for retribution on the offender’ (Rom. 13. iv).”
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