:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 10.31.2010 ::
:: Exorcist Shortage in Catholic Church ::
The Roman Catholic Church is looking for a few good men -- to battle Satan.
The church in the US has become so short of priests who know how to perform an exorcism that it began an emergency two-day meeting yesterday to teach clerics how to properly cast out demons.
A group of 56 bishops and 66 priests -- including an assistant to New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan -- have gathered in Baltimore for the Conference on the Liturgical and Pastoral Practice of Exorcism. The mystical meeting was focused on a lot more than just dodging green vomit and stopping heads from spinning.
"Learning the liturgical rite is not difficult," said Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, archbishop of Houston, who is attending the conference. "The problem is the discernment that the exorcist needs before he would ever attempt the rite."
The number of US clerics who know how to do an exorcism has dropped dramatically in recent years, ever since the holy procedure became a laughingstock thanks to Linda Blair's head-spinning performance as a possessed girl in the 1973 film "The Exorcist."
The situation has gotten so hellacious that only five or six priests are left in the country with the knowledge to properly carry out an exorcism, the Catholic News Service reported.
But with numerous Catholic immigrants coming to the United States from nations where exorcisms are taken seriously, the church's handful of exorcists are being overwhelmed.
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 3:13:00 PM [+] ::
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