Gabriele Amorth, the priest who made the Vatican take the devil seriously — against its own instincts

The strangest thing about Gabriele Amorth’s decades-long exorcism ministry was not the cases — it was the institution he operated within. The Catholic Church that authorized him was also the institution most resistant to taking his work seriously: skeptical bishops, a revised exorcism rite in 1999 that he publicly criticized as weaker than the 1614 original, and Vatican officials who he claimed were insufficiently prepared for the spiritual battle he described. He operated in that gap for thirty years, filing cases, publishing books, and founding a professional association that the Vatican didn’t formally recognize until 2014. By the time it did, he had already turned the subject into an international literary genre.

He was born in Modena in 1925 into a deeply Catholic family. His first act of consequence was not religious — at eighteen he joined the Italian partisan resistance against the Nazi occupation, a choice that earned him a military cross and the Medal of Liberation, awarded by the prefect of Rome in the presence of Italy’s Minister of Defense. After the war he completed a law degree, worked as a journalist for La Famiglia Cristiana (then the largest Catholic weekly in the world), and in 1947 entered the Society of St. Paul, the Pauline congregation founded by Blessed Giacomo Alberione. He was ordained a priest in 1954 and spent the next three decades specializing in Marian theology, editing the congregation’s devotional magazine La Madre di Dio.

The exorcism work came late and sideways. In 1985 Cardinal Ugo Poletti, Vicar General of the Diocese of Rome under Pope John Paul II, appointed Amorth as assistant to Father Candido Amantini, the city’s established exorcist. Amantini trained him personally. When Amantini died, Amorth took over the position and held it until his own death in 2016, claiming somewhere between 60,000 and 160,000 exorcisms over three decades — numbers his critics found implausibly high, though his defenders noted he worked every day including weekends and took referrals from across Italy.

What made Amorth unusual among exorcists — and what the secular press consistently underreported — was his insistence on psychiatric evaluation. He stated repeatedly that approximately 98% of the people who came to him needed a doctor, not an exorcist. He collaborated with psychiatrists and physicians throughout his ministry, understood dissociative disorders and schizophrenia, and referred the overwhelming majority of his cases elsewhere. The distinction he drew between illness and possession was precise, clinical in its way, and reflected a theological seriousness that did not fit the media’s preferred narrative of an elderly priest hurling holy water at anyone who acted strangely.

He founded the International Association of Exorcists in 1990, the same year he published Un esorcista racconta (published in English by Ignatius Press as An Exorcist Tells His Story), the book that made him internationally known. The follow-up, Nuovi racconti di un esorcista (An Exorcist: More Stories), appeared in 1992. Together they constitute the most widely read modern Catholic texts on possession, translated into dozens of languages and still in print. He would go on to publish approximately thirty-two books total, with the posthumous L’ultimo esorcista appearing in March 2023.

The critical paragraph that any honest account of Amorth must include: his public statements on Harry Potter (“behind Harry Potter lies the signature of the king of darkness”), yoga (“satanic”), and rock music with “hypnotic rhythm” were widely and justifiably mocked. He claimed on Vatican Radio that Hitler and Stalin were “certainly possessed by the devil” — while insisting this did not reduce their personal moral responsibility, a theological nuance that got lost in the coverage. He accused a “Satanic sect” of operating within Vatican walls. These statements made him easy to dismiss and difficult to defend, and they gave his detractors permission to ignore the more substantive parts of his work.

His relationship with cinema was direct and affectionate. William Friedkin‘s The Exorcist (1973) was his stated favorite film. “Of course, the special effects are exaggerated,” he said. “But it is a good film, and substantially exact, based on a respectable novel which mirrored a true story.” Decades later the two men met, and when Friedkin asked why the devil feared him, Amorth reportedly replied: “Do you know why the Devil is afraid of me? Because I’m uglier than he is.” Friedkin was so taken with him that in 2016, near the end of Amorth’s life, he filmed a ninth exorcism of an Italian woman for what became The Devil and Father Amorth, the documentary that premiered at the 74th Venice International Film Festival in August 2017. It was an unlikely coda — the director of the film that had defined the popular image of possession spending his final professional act watching the man who had spent his life insisting that image was, mostly, accurate.

The larger Hollywood reckoning came posthumously. The Pope’s Exorcist (2023), directed by Julius Avery and starring Russell Crowe as Amorth, drew directly on An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories for its narrative architecture. It earned $77 million worldwide and introduced Amorth to audiences who had never heard of him. Whether the film captures the man is another question entirely — the real Amorth was less dramatic and more bureaucratic than his screen version, a priest who filed case notes and advocated for proper canonical procedure alongside whatever else he believed he was confronting.

He died in Rome on September 16, 2016, at ninety-one, having spent sixty-nine years in the Society of St. Paul and approximately thirty as the most publicly visible Catholic exorcist of his era. The Vatican’s formal recognition of the International Association of Exorcists two years before his death — granted in July 2014 by the Congregation for Clergy — was perhaps the closest thing to institutional vindication he received in his lifetime. The books keep selling. The association he founded continues to train priests. And The Devil and Father Amorth remains the only documented footage of a real exorcism conducted by a man who spent three decades arguing that what he was doing mattered more than the Church was willing to admit.

Tags: actors, Russell Crowe, William Friedkin, The Pope's Exorcist, An Exorcist Tells His Story, Catholic exorcism

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