Romanian exorcism

  • There has been some dis­cus­sion — as you well might expect — on the Ortho­dox con­vert list, about this ter­ri­ble story of a Roman­ian priest-monk killing a nun in an attempt to exor­cise demons from her. It’s hor­ri­ble to know that the Ortho­dox Church may make the papers for such a hor­rific case of one aber­rant indi­vid­ual resort­ing to actions that have already made him a can­di­date for excom­mu­ni­ca­tion and got­ten him indicted on crim­i­nal charges.

    I thought these words by one poster named Athana­sios brought a wel­come bit of perspective:

    The bot­tom line is that whether or not the story is accu­rate, it has noth­ing to do with the truth of the Ortho­dox faith. … Reli­gions must be judged on their own mer­its, accord­ing to what they actu­ally teach — not based upon the fail­ings of their indi­vid­ual mem­bers. Oth­er­wise, we would have to reject all reli­gions, because all of them con­tain sin­ners, Ortho­doxy included.

    Or, if you like a shorter, hip­per ver­sion of the same idea, Tom com­mented on GetReligion’s post on the exor­cism by saying:

    As Chris Rock once asked, refer­ring to expla­na­tions of the Columbine killers’ motives, “What­ever hap­pened to ‘crazy’?”

    Another poster on the list had an account from a sup­posed eye-witness that was very dif­fer­ent — far less ter­ri­ble and homi­ci­dal — from the one the news­pa­pers have given. I’m not going to bother to repeat it because it may just turn out to be inac­cu­rate hearsay. It’ll be worth stay­ing tuned to this story as facts (hope­fully) emerge.

    (There have been other very insight­ful posts about this else­where on the Ortho-blogosphere, but for the life of me, I can’t seem to find them now. If yours was one, please e-mail me or post a comment.)


    No related posts.


    June 22nd, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required