Catholicism and the Decline of Magic: Gabriele Amorth and the “Unbelieving Catholic World”

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Famed for his role as an exorcist in the diocese of Rome, in later life Gabriele Amorth (1925-2016) wrote a series of works describing his ministry and making the case for the need to restore the exorcistate. In these works, Amorth sought to explain why exorcisms were no longer routinely performed and attributed this development to local bishops who no longer believed in the devil as a real and active presence in the created order. In so doing, he offered a Catholic priest’s account of the process of “disenchantment” or the decline of magic in the modern world. While this process is often associated with the rise of modern science, which offered an alternative world view, Amorth argued that science is, and has always been compatible with exorcism. The failure of belief in both the devil and exorcism that Amorth decried was, he argued, the result of misguided biblical hermeneutics that was influenced not by science but a misguided scientism.