Exorcism? It's Child's Play.

I suppose it had to happen. Now someone's gone and turned exorcism into a game. Flying Fish Works will be presenting their latest offering at the Game Connection in Lyon.

It's called Hellion: Mystery of the Inquisition and will be ported to Xbox 360, PS3 and the PC.

Hellion's protagonist is scarfaced Godric of Glastonbury (pictured), a hero who not only wields a mean broadsword but is adept at exorcism. His first mission takes him to a Cistercian monastery in medieval England, where he does battle with pagan sects and heretics as well as Olde Nick himself.

According to the makers, “For the first time we will present our hero’s extraordinary skill – the exorcism. In Hellion the exorcism is a unique upgradeable and storytelling instrument. It is a real main feature as gamer will use this tool continuously in various ways for – attacking, protecting and supporting. It is not comparable to some kind of simple magic in fact it is a powerful talent our hero is blessed with.”

Gamers will be able to face virtual demons, as well as taking part in "political and religious intrigue. The game is "an epic journey through different medieval cultures full of real-life characters, wild animals, rough warriors, powerful Templar knights, deadly assassins and, ultimately, horrifying demons."

You can find out more about Hellion: Mystery of the Inquisition at the official website, www.hellion-game.com.

Another One Bites the Dust

A Connecticut Gayboy in Queen Tyra's Court

The homophobes are at it again. Talk show host Tyra Banks is the latest among high-profile Americans to focus on a perceived link between homosexuality and evil. In other words, gayness is the work of the Devil, and a homosexual can be "cured" by means of an exorcism.

The "victim" in this instance is a 16-year-old Connecticut boy named Jeffrey. The lad is gay and began cross-dressing at the age of 14. He was dating other gay young men as well.

Jeffrey came to prominence in June when he was "exorcised" by a "prophetess" attached to the Manifested Glory Ministries of Bridgeport, CT. It lasted for twenty minutes and was captured on video. It became a YouTube hit but has since been taken down.

Asked to justify the deliverance, Ms McKinney spoke for her congregation when she said that "we believe a man should be with a woman and a woman should be with a man.... We have nothing against homosexuals. I just don't agree with their lifestyle."

She went on to explain that Jeffrey approached her community, not vice versa. "This young man came to us. We didn't go to him.… He was dressing like a woman and everything, and he didn't want to be like that.

Now Jeffrey has achieved even more media coverage courtesy of Tyra Banks. For those among us who don't know the lady, Larry Dobrow, writing in Advertising Age, notes that she "used to model swimsuits and she utters the word 'empower' more than any being on this or any other planet." He describes the Tyra Banks phenomen as "an Oprah-lite media empire," that was built on the premise that she "truly, deeply cares about her empowerable fangirls but is in reality Jerry Springer-ish pulp submerged in a torrent of girl-power bluster and prettified by a killer weave."

Gosh! Not a Tyra fan then. Nevertheless the episode, broadcast on 22 September, was illuminating in many respects. Not least being the extraordinary number of people who commented on Tyra's website expressing solidarity with Ms McKinney and her wacky beliefs.

And Jeffrey? Speaking about his ordeal, he claimed to have been freed of his "homosexual demon" and heaven would now welcome him, rather than slamming the pearly gates in his face. "I'm no longer gay," he said, "but it's still a process that I have to go through to be fully delivered."

Tyra wondered if that meant he was still attracted to other men. "I still have temptation," he told her.

Finally she asked if he was attracted to women now. He hesitated before answering without too much conviction: "Women? Umm, yes."

Exorcism goes back to school in Argentina

It was a tragedy that brought so much grief to her parents in August 2008. Four-year-old Martina died in a car crash. The child was attending nursery school in her home-town of San Martin. The town is situated in the Andes, some 45 km from the border with Chile.

At the time of the accident, Martina was in the back seat and wearing a seat-belt. Her mother was pregnant with her second child. Both she and her husband survived but required hospitalization.

The family recovered from the tragedy, yet it seems that the little dead girl could not bring herself to depart from her school and the friends she’d made there. Time and again, her ghost was seen in the school playground and in the building itself. Witnesses included several teachers and many of Martina’s classmates.

Her presence was benign. When asked whether they felt any fear on seeing the ghost of their dead classmate, the children were emphatic that they felt none at all. Yet all expressed a deep sorrow. It pained them that Martina's soul was not at rest.

The apparitions continued for over a year, and became so frequent that schoolwork was being disrupted. The headmistress decided to engage the services of Father Manuel Acuña. He enjoys a reputation of “healing” and deliverance in the nearby parish of the Good Shepherd.

The priest regarded it as “a very hard case, very difficult to address because it involved a little girl who had a whole life ahead and died violently. Clearly her soul was wedded to the place where she’d been happiest: her school and the playground.”

Father Acuña had several meetings with the headmistress, the teachers and school governors. All concluded that a Mass said in the school would be the best approach. “Our primary objective,” he says, “was that to make the soul of Martina aware of her situation and help her find refuge in the kingdom of Jesus.”

As chance would have it, an outbreak of influenza persuaded the headmistress to close the school for several days. The priest made plans to say a Mass of deliverance in Martina’s classroom.

It followed loosely the rites of Coptic Christians, he says, who conduct services for the dead by way of nine separate ceremonies. Such services are held in the workplace or home of the deceased as a way of obtaining closure and preventing what he calls “these situations of lost souls.”

Father Acuña maintains that such practices were widespread once in the Catholic Church. “For example when a worker dies in a factory while operating a machine, the best place to celebrate a Mass to liberate his spirit would be that very spot. The same applies to any type of violent death.” This was done up until a few decades ago, he says, “but the Church laid aside its own doctrine.”

And so it came about that a Mass was said for a little girl in her classroom. “We asked for the intervention of the angels of God,” the priest says, “to come and rescue the soul of the child and guard it until such time as it achieves its eternal resting place.”

The Mass of deliverance proved very successful. The ghost of little Martina has not been seen since, and the school has returned to normal.

Waterboarding? No, it's exorcism Maori style.

A woman dies in New Zealand following days of torture.

The Maori people call it a makutu. It's supposedly a rite of exorcism designed to lift a curse placed upon a person or home. In October 2007, members of a family living in Wainuiomata, a suburb close to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand's south island, became convinced that one of their number had incurred a curse. The "victim" was Janet Moses (see pic), a 22-year-old mother of two.

Why did they think this? Some weeks before, Janet, together with a 14-year-old cousin had stolen a statue of a lion from outside a local pub. The family believed that the statue was a taonga, a treasured object of great importance to Maori culture. The theft had brought a curse on the whole family.

According to police reports, about forty whānau (or extended family members) convened at the little apartment owned by Janet's grandparents. Janet and her cousin were to be "exorcised" by five of the clan. The ceremony of makutu began and it was to last several days.

Janet was subjected to torture, culminating in copious quantities of water being poured into her eyes and down her throat. Family members stood in a circle around the victim, chanting "go with peace and love" while a 52-year-old female cousin sat on her belly and poured water into her mouth and eyes. It was believed that her "demons" could be expelled through the eye sockets and throat. She died of drowning.

Her 14-year-old "accomplice" was forced to look on as Janet died struggling for breath. Then it was her turn. She was held down by four of the "exorcists" while a fifth repeated Janet's torture. The girl passed out several times.

She survived, but barely. At sometime during the ritual somebody had scratched and gouged her eyes. She was eventually taken to hospital with blood oozing from the sockets.

The case came to trial in Wellington last week. The five torturers were convicted of Janet's manslaughter and of causing grievous bodily harm to a minor. Their punishment, however, was unusually lenient: each received a community-based sentence. This prompted Trevor Mallard, the MP for the area where the killing took place, to suggest a racial motive behind the leniency.

"I think there is a lot of sympathy for the individuals involved," he told Radio New Zealand News. "They did get caught up in some sort of hysteria. They were sleep-deprived.

"But there's just not an acceptance either from the vast majority of Maori ... that you can effectively torture someone ... causing death and there not be a jail sentence."

The tragedy is yet another example of what can happen when inexperienced lay people attempt an exorcism. Two children are left motherless and a young girl is perhaps traumatized for life. I cannot say it often enough: leave exorcism to the real exorcists.

How to save your community? Murder your baby daughter.

A man reportedly bashed his 14-month-old daughter to death in order to "save his district's spirituality". The horrific incident occurred in the early hours of Sunday, 9 August, in the Bua Province on Vanua Levu, an island of Fiji, in the South Pacific.

The child, Sadikuini Yalewavukivuki (pictured), was allegedly murdered in front of her mother, Valetina Dimae, a schoolteacher, in their home. Her father Ratu Beni Salagi (32) became convinced that their community was cursed. He'd been to the village pastor earlier, on the instructions of "the Holy Spirit".

He returned to their home in the Lekutu District School compound in early evening, and locked his wife and daughter in the bedroom.

He was heard to quote verses from the Bible, and declaring the house to be infested by an evil spirit. He would "exorcise" that spirit, he said. He told his wife that he was about to do what Abraham did: sacrifice his child to the Lord.

His method of "sacrifice" entailed repeatedly punching the child in the head.

A villager said they "heard the pleas for mercy from the house but thought it was a domestic dispute."

So that would have been okay then, would it? Did nobody think it sounded like a pretty one-sided domestic "dispute"?

When Ratu Beni Salagi was finished he instructed his wife to dress the child while he went to fetch a van. He intended that they all go to his parents' home, just over a mile away.

He later turned himself in to the police. A post-mortem is to carried out today.

While it would be easy to say that this was an isolated incident, it would be less than the truth. Unfortunately such things happen frequently, and not just in the developing world. In a book I published recently, More Bloody Women, I recount the case of a woman in Cork City, Ireland, who stabbed her daughter to death in July 2006. It seems that the Virgin Mary had told her that her daughter was "bad with the Devil" and must be released through death.

The killer, Mary Prendergast, was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One wonders how many such mentally ill people have "exorcised" demons in such a brutal way, and how many will continue to do so.

I can't say it often enough: Beware the Devil, but beware the Pseudo-Devil even more.

The Mother of God, or the Father of Lies?

Satan is behind the “apparitions” at Medjugorje says Pope Benedict.

The pope, in one of his most unambiguous statements to date, has just declared that the Croatian shrine is a fraud, designed by the Devil to lure the faithful away from the real teachings of the Catholic Church. His statement reinforces that of Bishop Andrea Gemma who, in 2008, suggested that Medjugorje is more than just a simple hoax to attract revenue to the village. “In Medjugorje everything revolves about money," he said. "The pilgrimages, the accommodation, the sale of trinkets. This whole sham is the work of the Devil.” As a former Vatican exorcist, Gemma can certainly draw upon some expertise in the field.

The pope's words will have dealt a body-blow to the 30 million pilgrims who’ve flocked to Herzegovina since 1981, and to thousands of prayer groups the world over devoted to the site. That was the year when it was claimed the Virgin Mary—known to the natives as the "Gospa"—had appeared to six children in the small Balkan village.

Central to the affair was and is Father Tomislav Vlašić, a Franciscan priest. He quickly became the “spiritual father” of the children, now adults—and extremely wealthy thanks to the economic boom the visits sparked off. Supposedly the Virgin visits the children, the visionaries, each and every day: there have been over 40,000 visits so far. She is reputed to have vouchsafed “Ten Secrets” to them. Vlašić and the visionaries have always been vague on the nature of these secrets, but I think we can rule out answers to questions such as: Are We Alone In the Universe? What Is the Biological Basis of Consciousness? And the 23 other major unanswered questions of science.

At any rate, champions of Medjugorje aren’t happy with those who see the hand of Satan at work at their beloved shrine. A spokesman for the National Medjugorje Council of Ireland said last week: “We accept that Medjugorje is constantly under attack and we view that as a sign of the authenticity of the visions and of the powerful graces which are flowing. If Satan wasn’t attacking this great work, it would be surprising.” An interesting application of logic to be sure: If the authenticity of an apparition is doubted then it follows that the apparition is genuine. Oh dear.

Father Vlašić himself hasn’t come off unscathed. In 1976, years before the “apparitions”, he fell in love with a local nun and made her pregnant. To conceal the pregnancy he had her sent to Germany, having promised he’d leave the Franciscans and join her there. He reneged, and her landlady found his love-letters, which she sent to the Vatican.

Unfortunately for Vlašić, they were read and filed away by a senior official named Joseph Ratzinger. Twenty-eight years later, Father Vlašić’s chickens were to come home to roost when Ratzinger became Pope Benedict the 16th.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, another Medjugorje priest, Father Iveca Vego, was described by the Virgin during one of her appearances as “a living saint”. But no sooner had the pronouncement been made than it emerged that Vego, like Vlašić before him, had made a nun pregnant. Clearly the Gospa doesn’t always get it right.

The role of the Franciscans in all this was going to lead to red faces at best, violence at worst. The order, along with other Catholic clerics in Yugoslavia, gained infamy during WWII. As Seán Mac Mathúna reminds us:

Catholic priests and Muslim clerics were willing accomplices in the genocide of the nation's Serbian, Jewish and Roma population. From 1941 until 1945, the Nazi-installed regime of Ante Pavelic in Croatia carried out some of the most horrific crimes of the Holocaust (known as the Porajmos by the Roma), killing over 800,000 Yugoslav citizens—750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 26,000 Roma. In these crimes, the Croatian Ustasha and Muslim fundamentalists were openly supported by the Vatican, and the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who openly encouraged Muslims to join Nazi units that would be later implicated in crimes against humanity

The violence carried over into recent times, and almost led to a schism in the Church in Croatia. The Franciscans rebelled against Rome and its bishops. In 1996, Bishop Perić of Mostar and his vicar general were kidnapped and beaten by an angry mob in support of the order.

Vlašić was eventually expelled from Medjugorje. He settled in Italy, where he founded a community devoted to the apparitions. There he "continued to party like a bad dog". According to reports:

He was accompanied by a German woman, Agnes Heupel, who claimed to have been healed at the shrine and also by one of the visionaries, Marija Pavlović [see photo above]. She left after a few months, however, allegedly after catching Vlašic and Heupel having sex.

Last year, Pope Benedict threw the book at the rogue cleric, accusing him of misdemeanours that would have had him burned at the stake a few centuries ago: “heresy, schism, sexual immorality aggravated by mystical motivations, and the diffusion of dubious doctrine, manipulation of consciences, suspect mysticism and disobedience towards legitimately issued orders.”

Vlašić was laicized last year, i.e. unfrocked. He may no longer perform duties as a priest of the Roman Catholic Church.

With churchmen like this, who the hell needs Satan?

French Guiana is a small country of fewer than 100,000 inhabitants situated on the northern coast of South America, nestling between Suriname and Brazil. It seldom makes world news, but when it does it's often for the wrong reasons. Take, for example, this report from Agence France-Presse:

A French Guiana court has jailed four church members for up to 12 years for the exorcism of an epileptic teenager who was found dead attached to a cross.

The members of the Celestial Church of Christ were jailed yesterday [24 June] for terms of three to 12 years for "wilful violence that caused death'' for 15-year-old Roger Bosse in 2005 in the south American territory. The court heard that the mother of the boy, who suffered from mental illness, had brought him to the church for help and was told he was possessed by the devil.

The church members beat the boy repeatedly over a three-day period with reeds and belts and attached him to a cross for the last two days, the position in which he died. A post-mortem examination showed that he had probably died from suffocation.

The Celestial Church of Christ was founded in the west African state of Benin in 1947 and claims millions of adherents worldwide.

It's so tragic that a young life was taken so cruelly and needlessly. Superstition is still rife in our world, even in the 21st century. I'm glad the boy's tormentors were given tough jail sentences. That should deter others, or at least make them think twice before seeing demons where there are none.

Our pic shows another 15-year-old boy being crucified in the Philipines on Good Friday. The difference is that he presumably endured it willingly, unlike the boy in French Guiana.