“Pope John Paul has performed three exorcisms during his 23-year pontificate, including one as recently as September, one of the Catholic Church’s leading exorcists said on Monday,” Reuters reports.

“Father Gabriele Amorth told Italy’s La Stampa newspaper that the Pope had carried out his first exorcism in 1982.”

For Roman Catholics, exorcism is the casting out of what is believed to be an evil spirit through prayer and the laying on of hands. Amorth said possession by demons took many shapes.

‘I have seen many strange things…objects such as nails spat out. The devil told a woman that he would make her spit out a transistor radio and lo and behold she started spitting out bits and pieces of a radio transistor,’ he said.

‘I have seen levitations, and a force that needed six or eight men to hold the person still. Such things are rare, but they happen,’ he said.

“Of course, not all exorcisms are successful,” Amorth told La Stampa. “For instance, Pope John Paul was unable to exorcise the vile demon, Mammon, from a twitchy group of Enron executives who recently visited Vatican City, and he’s had absolutely no success whatever with the several E.U. bureaucrats he’s been counseling of late — would-be world leaders whose balls, the Pontiff is convinced, are being held hostage by the evil demons responsible for drawing faulty moral equivalencies…”

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