{"id":7374,"date":"2004-05-01T23:48:34","date_gmt":"2004-05-01T23:48:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_devil_in_uruguay.html"},"modified":"2004-05-01T23:48:34","modified_gmt":"2004-05-01T23:48:34","slug":"the_devil_in_uruguay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_devil_in_uruguay.html","title":{"rendered":"The Devil in Uruguay"},"content":{"rendered":"

A WaPo article about an exorcist<\/a><\/p>\n

The vast majority of people who are referred to him suffer from mental illness, he said. He refers most of them to local psychiatrists and mental health professionals.<\/p>\n

But the Devil does exist, he said, and his emissaries occupy the bodies of people from time to time. Possession is never involuntary. You have to actually court the Devil, to actively seek his dark magic, before he can invade the flesh. Faith is required, if not in God, then certainly in the Devil, he said. <\/p>\n

“Most of the time it is people who are angry with God,” he said. “They broke up with a boyfriend, or someone close to them dies, or they didn’t get a job that they really needed. They become angry. They turn on God and seek evil. It’s not like a cold or the flu. You can’t just catch it.” <\/p>\n

At 74, Elizaga is an iconic and a curious figure in Montevideo. He has traveled to Brazil, Lebanon and other countries studying exorcisms and cults. He writes books on exorcisms. His parish is immensely popular. The police said they have asked his help in solving difficult cases. In 1986, Pope John Paul II named him a consultant to the Vatican on non-Christian cults. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A WaPo article about an exorcist The vast majority of people who are referred to him suffer from mental illness, he said. He refers most of them to local psychiatrists and mental health professionals. But the Devil does exist, he said, and his emissaries occupy the bodies of people from time to time. Possession is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Devil in Uruguay - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_devil_in_uruguay.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Devil in Uruguay - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A WaPo article about an exorcist The vast majority of people who are referred to him suffer from mental illness, he said. 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He refers most of them to local psychiatrists and mental health professionals. But the Devil does exist, he said, and his emissaries occupy the bodies of people from time to time. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}