In the care of an exorcist for five years, her clinical examinations are clear. But migraines and blisters won’t leave her.
“I’m fighting and I don’t know when it will be over. I want to shout: help us!” Sandra is a distinguished 45-year-old lady, married, with two adult daughters. She lives in a large city in Northern Italy. For ten years, she tells us almost as if she weren’t speaking about herself, that strange phenomena happen to her. The many clinical examinations she underwent, have not been able to diagnose anything and for five years he has been regularly subjected to exorcisms.
A priest pronounces prayers for her release from the Evil One. “Some days are normal, while others I don’t have the strength to get out of bed, my headaches are so strong, not even ten painkillers will make them go away. The phenomenon gets worse on Christian holidays”.
It all began with a kind of intolerance when I went to church. “I felt restless, I just wanted to get up and leave, to go away. I could no longer get close to a tabernacle. “I had to leave my job. I remember the first time my “friends” - I call them that – manifested themselves. I went to see an exorcist and started laughing hysterically. I was laughing involuntarily and crying inside because I couldn’t stop that unnatural laugh. Then I don’t remember anything anymore, the “friends” with whom I live manifested themselves...”.
“They’ll think you are mad”
Those who believe in God and in the existence of evil personified in Satan listen to Sandra’s story with a certain restlessness. Those who do not believe, explain this kind of phenomena with possible psychic pathologies. But both kinds hear Sandra’s cry, her request for help. “When someone lives an experience like mine, they are bound to isolation. With no friends. Nobody wants to be near you. They either think you are mad or stay away from you because they are afraid that you have a contagious disease. Sandra smiles bitterly.
It is this sense of abandonment that burns her soul. “My husband knows everything, my daughters do not. When the phenomena occur, I tell them that I have a migraine. Even on the holidays, actually those are the days, I must drag myself to church to receive the Eucharist, because it makes me feel better. Even though when I receive it, my palate burns, as if I had swallowed something hot, just out of the oven. Even drinking blessed water causes me a revolting reaction, worse than drinking castor oil. And if I try to wear a blessed necklace, my neck covers up in blisters as if it were incandescent.
The origins
Sandra had never told her story before. She convinced herself, after the reporter insistence, only because she hopes he story may be of some help to others. “I am still in the middle of the shallows, I hold on to the cross. I ask God to have the strength to react. If you ever learn that a friend of yours has “spiritual problems”, stand close to them. Love pushes the devil away, he can’t stand it, because his job is to divide, to create hatred. I wish there were communities with people like me. I wish there were more exorcist priests to listen to us, help us”. “Unfortunately,” the woman says with a veil of sadness on her face, “Sects are the ones willing to listen to us, they do not want to help you but to take you into their group”. Sandra is convinced that at the origin of her evil there is something dark that happened when she was born, when she received the sacrament of baptism: “That same day my godparents consecrated me to Satan”.
Don Aldo Buonaiuto, coordinator of the Anti-sect service of the Community Giovanni XXIII founded by Don Oreste Benzi, is an exorcist and one of the speakers at the exorcist course that is taking place in Rome: “These are stories that disturb and confirm what Pope Francis has just written in his exhortation Gaudete et exsultate, “The devil as a myth, a representation, a symbol, a figure of speech or an idea”. We must approach stories like this with attention and discretion, without sensationalism. There is a need for priests prepared to perform the rite of exorcism as prescribed by the Church”.
