An acquaintance of mine who’s a fire-breathing atheist insists that forty to fifty children die every year during exorcisms conducted by fundamentalists. I’m a tad skeptical, parictularly since he says he can’t remember where he read it. However, I do remember reading about two such incidents in the local fishwrapper, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution. In one case the child was beaten to death by the mother who was attempting to drive a demon out, and in the second case (IIRC) the child died of hunger and dehydration. Obviously such tragedies sometimes happen, and when you consider how demented some True Believers are it’s something of a wonder they don’t happen more often.
I’ve done a couple of searches on the Net but didn’t turn up anything. Does anybody out there have any information on this?
Not a pleasant subject, I know, but I want to be sure of my facts before I repeat this anywhere else.
I’ve done some reading up on this, and I think your friend was mistaken. While exorcism is becoming more popular and especially with Fundamentalist groups, there have only been a couple of isolated deaths. These cases are fairly well known, from what I’ve read, and are probably the cases you read about. The Catholic church is now, instead of refusing to even acknowledge exorcisms as in past years, trying to regulate them to prevent further deaths. While I’m not saying the practice is or is not good (I don’t want to trounce on anyone’s beliefs), these websites will probably help you:
They provide different sides of the topic, but all talk about the Fundamentalist use of exorcism. A couple of these also talk about the deaths or “murders” from exorcism.
Well, I just found this website ( http://www.religioustolerance.org/ra_real.htm#goth ) and they list six, all of them pretty horrific. I’m not saying it’s common, but so far I haven’t acquired enough enough info even to make a reasonable guess. Thanks for the links, though. They were helpful.
Here in the greater Washington DC area, some imbecile cruelly killed his (or a neighbor’s?) Dog recently on the grounds that it was possessed by Satan. I believe he set it afire. The relevance of this to the post is that I reckon you must somehow differentiate between exorcists who are in their right mind and those who are not, if this is at all possible. Also, can anyone who murders and then claims they did it for the sake of saving the vicitms’ souls claim to be an exorcist, and if so would you count their vicitms in this total of 40 to 50 casualties per year? (I don’t think so.) You’ll remember the John List case; he knocked off his family specifically to send them to heaven —or so he said.
If they’re anything like the phony “exorcism” in the film Stigmata, in which the evil priest made a show of exorcism only as a pretext for murdering the heroine . . .
(Whoops, hope that’s not a “spoiler” . . . nah . . .)