Can you exorcise a nation?

THE CONVENT OF SAN FRANCISCO in San Luis Potosí was built in the 16th century, when money from gold and silver mining meant that ecclesiastical ambition could stretch beyond adobe. It is a striking 16th century temple, whose imposing exterior hides ancient treasures.

On May 19, 2015, the archbishop of San Luis Potosí, Monsignor Carlos Cabrero, gathered a small team of specialist clerics around an ancient table in the chapter house there. Around him sat Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, a former archbishop of Guadalajara; Father José Antonio Fortea, a Spanish priest; and Father Carlos Spahn, an Argentine priest. All specialized, in various ways, in dealing with evil.

Cabrero and the cardinal knew each other from the higher reaches of the church in Mexico. Spahn and Fortea were among a small group of priests who still specialized in the ancient practice of casting out demons using the power of Christ.

It was a dying art. A long era of peace and stability meant that it had become more comfortable for priests to see Satan and his emissaries as less visceral and more conceptual — a metaphor that could fit into a world that wanted to consider itself rational.

The sputtering torch was passed along by a hardcore of fundamentalist believers that extended in an unbroken line from before Jesus to Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican's exorcist.

By the time the priests gathered in Mexico, Amorth was in his 90s and still performed exorcisms daily. He insisted that anyone who applied to him to be exorcised exhaust conventional medicine and psychology first. At best, two in a hundred returned. In his extended work on those cases, he had seen and heard things that even the most skeptical of his colleagues could not easily explain away.

Something about the era had meant a rise in dark power, he came to feel. “Today Satan rules the world,” he said. If pressed, he would explain that it was indirect. The terror group ISIS, for example, did Satan's bidding, but only as the last step in a process. “Things first happen in the spiritual realms, then they are made concrete on this earth,” he said.

He had personally spread word of the threat and had trained many of the exorcists who still quietly worked on the front lines around the world, including Father Fortea, whom he had first met in 1995. They had last seen each other in 2012. Two years later, Fortea had published a book on a little-known and less-practiced ancient rite that could counter the unseen emergency Father Amorth described — and that Cabrero felt in his daily life.

It was a risky form of exorcism that did not focus on an individual possessed by a demon, but on large groups beset by evil. It was known as Exorcismo Magno. When Cabrero read the book and considered the horrors that had befallen his church and his country, he felt that an Exorcismo Magno was the only way. And it must be soon — the next day, in fact.

He had arranged to have his cathedral closed in the morning and prepared the necessary materials. He and Father Fortea explained the plan to the priests around the table, under the condition of secrecy, and asked their help in staging the complex rite.

It was not a small favor. In cases of individual exorcism, the possessed are capable of extraordinary violence with extraordinary strength, and the priest is nearly always the focus of the malevolence. They often vomit and nearly always scream or rage. Strange things often occur before, during or after the rite. Large black flies gather. The sound of water rises where there is no water. Dark voices float in the air.

Nobody knew what the equivalents might be if an entire possessed nation were targeted. It would require the warrior mentality Father Amorth had lived by. “Do you know why the Devil is afraid of me?" he had asked once. "Because I'm uglier than he is.”

And nobody else must know. The devil's spies were everywhere. Father Spahn thought back to the exorcism he had conducted the day before — the demon who had spoken with the twisted voice of the woman it had inhabited and had raged that he was about to “do something” in two days. The men resolved to keep the secret.

They met the next morning at Cabrero's house and had breakfast. Then, at 11 a.m., “like nothing's happening,” in Sandoval’s recollection, they went next door into the cathedral, silent and vast with its doors locked. They carried a Bible, a cross, and slowly circled the perimeter. They stopped at the points of the compass.

At each, they offered first a prayer to God to vanquish his ancient adversary. “Do not allow your children to be deceived by the father of lies,” they said. “Do not let your servants, whom Christ redeemed with his Blood, be taken captive by the devil.” And then a conjuration to the devil: “I conjure you, Satan, who deceives humankind, recognize the Spirit of truth and grace who repels your snares and confounds your lies.”

Then Father Spahn invoked the holy angels and asked them to join the fight. Sandoval was given the miter and the cross and performed the exorcism rite, designed to prevent demons from leaving hell to make it to earth. “I exorcise you, Ancient Serpent, depart from the Holy Church of God,” he said. “Lord, close the Gate of Hell. Let no infernal powers escape from it to earth. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

Then Father Fortea anointed the doors of the cathedral by tracing two crosses on each, and two more in the central axis of the gate — a symbol that the doors of the church can be a protection against its enemies as well as a welcome to its friends. They closed with a final prayer “to change our attitudes, to lay aside all acts of violence, and to trust, with faith in Christ Jesus, that violence in Mexico will soon end.”

The empty cathedral was silent around them. It was hard to interpret what it might mean. If anyone had been listening. If anything had changed.

There was just one strange feeling. They had originally intended to perform the ceremony in Mexico City but changed their plan. The demon that had confronted Father Spahn had specified that place too. It was a detail soon forgotten. ⸭