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.