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MANUEL ACUNA SPRINKLES holy water and waves his crucifix, then lays his hand on the sweating, shrieking woman before him.
This is not a horror movie. It is a real-life mass at Acuna’s evangelical exorcism school – thought to be one of the first in Latin America.
The bespectacled 54-year-old Lutheran pastor trains lay people as ‘exorcism consultants’.
“They study the devil’s character and how he works,” he told AFP, amid the rich smell of incense.
The exorcism consultant will be able to determine where there is a case of a demonic presence, possession, oppression, obsession or a curse.
Acuna has a passionate following. Crowds of hundreds flock to his Good Shepherd church on exorcism nights.
He has also earned the suspicion of fellow clergymen. His 35 students pay just under €45 a month for his three-year, part-time course in ‘parapsychology, angelology and demonology’.
This totals at €1,551 a month income for Acuna and his church.
The money
He insists it isn’t about the money.
“The mystery of the unseen provokes fascination in some people, but also a lot of criticism,” he said.
I have been called all kinds of names. But I didn’t choose to be an exorcist. It is a calling from God.
Photographs on a wall show Acuna meeting celebrities and even Pope Francis, a fellow Argentine.
Last year, 160 Catholic priests from around the world attended a week-long exorcism conference at the Pontifical University of Regina Apostolorum in Rome.
It was endorsed by the Vatican, which is leading something of a boom in exorcism due the Pope’s repeated references to the devil and his encouragement of exorcisms.
Catholic Church law states that every diocese must have a trained exorcist.
There was speculation that Francis conducted an exorcism himself in 2013, after being videoed laying hands on the head of a young man in St Peter’s Square.
The Church at the time said that the Pope “didn’t intend to perform any exorcism”, but was merely praying with the man, who convulsed during the physical contact.
Not a Catholic
But unlike Francis and most other Latin Americans, Acuna himself is not Catholic. He is a protestant bishop from the New York-based Association of Independent Evangelical Lutheran Churches.
Clergy at four other Lutheran churches contacted by AFP distanced themselves from Acuna and his school.
“We have to ask ourselves how much of what is being advertised is true, and how much is business?” said one of them, pastor Esteban Tronovsky, who believes exorcism cannot be taught.
How much of it is about winning fame, prestige, power and money? And how much of all that is actually linked to God’s truth?
Spitting blood
Acuna says he has performed some 1,200 exorcisms. He still recalls the first. In 2001, a teenage girl started writhing and speaking in tongues during a mass.
“On that day, with my first exorcism, I introduced myself to the devil,” he says.
Being an exorcist became my way of life.
Acuna’s monthly public exorcism sessions at his church in a suburb of Buenos Aires are noisy, passionate affairs.
At one such gathering attended by AFP, participants swooned and yelled as demons appeared to possess them.
One woman spat out a red liquid. Acuna told AFP it was because she had “made a pact (with the devil), sealed with animal blood”.
Blessing
Acuna’s students include housewives, lawyers, a writer and an architect. One of them, Gloria Sanchez, 60, said she used to live in a haunted house.
Now she wants to learn “to help other people overcome, understand and resolve such situations,” she says.
This course is giving me explanations to many experiences in my life that no one could explain.
I feel blessed with power, to be doing this course at my age.
At one of Acuna’s training sessions, IT technician student Eduardo Klinec, 53, practiced what he has learned.
He demonstrated how to light a candle for use in an exorcism. ”With knowledge,” he said, “your fear and skepticism disappear.”
With reporting from Darragh Peter Murphy.
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14 Henrietta Street is fantastic for both tourists and locals. The guide takes you upstairs to huge staircase for the music room, drawing room and bedroom and you hear about the great and the good, eg Gardiner, Molesworth and names you know. Right out of a Jane Austin novel
Then a swift shock to the system when you go the corridor neglected by slumlords and to the basement how people in the 1900’s lived
You finish on the 1st floor when a family as recently as the 1970’s lived. Delph with the Chinese patterns, godawful smelling carbolic soap (some love the smell??), lucozade when it was a health product in a glass bottle and other products
The guides are super and love their job, buy a ticket :)
@Michael McLoughlin:
Still use the Carbolic soap , yer only man for the weekly wash. Can also be used as a deodorant and as paint remover. Mrs not too keen on it mind you.
Fantastic job done by all involved in putting this together, and the guides brilliant !! Couldn’t recommend enough .
Mother was a nurse in the old coombe hospital at Meath st. God she tells some horrific stories of calls to tenements in that area
@Eamonn O Connell: wow, I’m a nurse,would love to hear your mams stories.
@Gill Dempsey: Somme very sad stories of hard births and lost babies. The poverty was unbelievable but the people were very good she could walk up Meath Street and into any tenement building at any hour and got only the height of respect from people. no fear of being attacked are interfered with in any way
Once it got dark we had to use a bucket for the loo . The 2 toilets were in a little yard under street level. A back stairs led down to them. Rats were always around. No go area at night.
The tenements are making a comeback!
Does anyone know if Henrietta Street was the actual street used as the fictional Chandlers Court in the classic 1980 RTE rendition of Strumpet City by James Plunkett?
I’m a Bolton St DIT Eng graduate (1990) and remember well the near by cobbled stoned Street that is Henrietta St, leading up to Kings Inns.
I have a US version of the DVD and still enjoy watching it – Real Dublin entertainment! (It does however put my 3 US teen sons to sleep
I have a very intresting story from care at 16 into a tenement what a disaster who needs a mother she was not a fit mother
Does anyone know if Henrietta Street was the actual street used as the fictional Chandlers Court in the classic 1980 RTE rendition of Strumpet City by James Plunkett?
I’m a Bolton St DIT Eng graduate (1990) and remember well the near by cobbled stoned Street that is Henrietta St, leading up to Kings Inns.
I have a US version of the DVD and still enjoy watching it – Real Dublin entertainment! (It does however put my 3 US teen sons to sleep
@Roland Kelly: as they get older they will find it interesting I imagine
Over the last few days you have used a number of photographs to which I own the copyright [the Chinese New Year being another example] … my photographs are made available free of charge to anyone who wishes to use them [many are used by Wikipedia] but in order to use them you must clearly indicate who owns the copyright and you must supply a proper link to the source. Indicating that the source is Wikipedia Commons is the source is not sufficient. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Street,_Dublin. For copyright conditions please refer to https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HENRIETTA_STREET_-_DUBLIN_(402556531).jpg
I visited 14 Henrietta Street last week. It is a brilliant experience and I would highly recommend it!
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