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.