Pope Benedict has ordered the bishops of the Catholic Church to increase the number of trained exorcists in order to combat the rise of satanism and other occult activities.

As the Daily Mail reported on Dec. 29 in a story that is still developing,

Vatican chiefs are concerned at what they see as an increased interest in the occult.

They have introduced courses for priests to combat what they call the most extreme form of "Godlessness."

Each bishop is to be told to have in his diocese a number of priests trained to fight demonic possession.

Although unbelievers will naturally scoff at the move, I think it is an important cultural event and a positive development in the Catholic Church. After all, given that the church claims that there are such things as demons and that they have evil effects in this world, it should be deadly serious about combatting their influence. It’s a simple matter of living by one’s beliefs.

The announcement was made by Fr. Gabriele Amorth, whom the Daily Mail story refers to as the Vatican’s "exorcist-in-chief." The story quotes Fr. Paolo Scarafoni, who lectures on the Vatican’s exorcism course, as saying that the Church is being "bombarded by requests for exorcisms" but there are not enough priests able to perform them. "You have to hunt high and low for a properly trained exorcist," the story quotes Amorth as saying.

I have read one of Fr. Amorth’s books, as it happens, and I found it quite interesting. An Exorcist Tells His Story is exactly what its title suggests it is: a perfectly calm, reasonable look at the author’s experiences with the phenomenon known as demonic possession.

Amorth’s experiences and insights outlined in the book are consistent with the most credible literature on the phenomenon, which is one of the least scientifically investigated phenomena in the world. Scientists of an atheistic bent naturally ignore the subject as contradicting their fundamental naturalistic premise. Psychologists and medical doctors likewise tend to see it as an entirely natural condition, albeit powerfully destructive and perverse.

And the Catholic Church, which one would think should be immensely interested in studying the subject, has tended to ignore it for the past couple of centuries because, as Amforth and others have observed, most Catholic priests of the past half-century have not believed the devil exists.

Hence Fr. Amorth’s suggests a very serious change of thought among the church’s leadership as it moves to take one of its important doctrines much more seriously.