c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) The most intriguing aspect of the news that Cardinal Francis George of Chicago appointed an exorcist last year is that the designated devil-hitter priest insists on anonymity.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, George named the first exorcist in the 160-year history of the archdiocese “at the encouragement of a French cardinal” and “because he felt it was needed.”

All this surfaces just as perhaps the greatest cinematic travesty of religion, “The Exorcist,” heads into theaters for a revival.

While Congress is looking into the exploitation of children through targeted advertising by makers of violent films and video games, the church _ unwittingly, we presume _ is endowing this 1973 film, with its reduction of evil to special effects, with an aura of undeserved credibility. A movie that should be laughed off may now be taken solemnly, if not seriously, by a new audience.

That action, intended or not, makes the official church an accessory to the exploitation of every believer by externalizing evil at a moment in which the accurate localization of moral potential and failure within us, instead of outside us, is as important as it has ever been in history.

Evil is a genuine problem. It is not unrelated to the advertising/public relations complex that is expert at air-brushing it away so that its origin disappears and there is a blank where blame should be laid.

The technique, of course, is used in the movie based on William Peter Blatty’s equally exploitative novel.

The head of the pubescent girl, Central Casting’s fixed idea of Satan’s fixation, spins furiously as a sign, along with projectile vomiting, of the devil’s presence.

“Spinning” is really a sign that public relations counselors, as they prefer to call themselves, are present. They “spin” away moral responsibility so skillfully that, when the matter is resolved, whether about missing nuclear codes or missing billing records, whether it is defective tires or defective fund-raising, nobody is at fault, nobody stands as the responsible agent for lies, death or dishonor. It is our heads that are left spinning by such manipulation of opinion.

Ask Attorney General Janet Reno. She must believe in the devil because, no matter where she looks, she finds it almost impossible to identify any responsible moral agent beneath almost any public misdeed connected with the present administration.

Even the pope, according to the Sun-Times, recently “carried out an impromptu exorcism on a teen-age girl after she began `screaming insults in a cavernous voice.”’ The pope “exorcised her and prayed with her … but it appeared afterward that the pope’s intervention had only a temporary effect.”

People shouting out in big city churches is not an unusual phenomenon. Nor is the snoring of various pilgrims who stretch out in the pews, as I have often seen them at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. But the friendly local policeman usually handles them expertly as does the pastor, settling them down without shaming them, and certainly without suggesting that Satan is behind any of the bad luck or bad times that bring people to such uncomfortable places in their lives.

The last thing Catholicism, or religions in general, need is to respond to the bland protoplasm of New Age theology with the bizarre gimmicks of Old Time Religion.

Ordinary churchgoing Catholics and others need to be reassured they are not the crazy ones when news that exorcists are on the loose first astounds and then embarrasses them.

The official church should clarify its position about the human source of moral failure not by trying to reinforce the status of clerics by claiming they can cast out the devil, but by addressing the perplexing moral contradictions, painful and diminishing for all parties, beneath the sexual scandals of church personnel.

The bishops are still reluctant to examine how this evil arose within its own ranks. It was not a visitation by the devil but a manifestation of our human power to harm each other.

Besides asking Chicago’s cardinal exactly why he had this feeling an exorcist “was needed,” we might note the anonymous appointee speaks only “through an archdiocese representative.” He says “confidentiality is of utmost importance in my work, so I prefer to be low-key and quiet about it.”

Sounds suspiciously like the devil’s traditional way of operating to me.

DEA END KENNEDY