Expansion of Evil

The 20th Century and the “rise” of Demonic Power.

Abstract

This article aims to analyze a set of books written by exorcist priests between 1990 and 2010 in Italy, which have been widely sold around the world in various languages up to the present day. The goal is to examine how this Catholic group interprets the various historical, social, and cultural transformations experienced in the 20th century, and how they organize to disseminate, through discourse, a narrative that denounces this modern or modernized reality as being entirely and absolutely demonic. In the books of these exorcists, it is possible to identify a strong common understanding that in the 20th century, there was a massive increase in demonic activity on a global scale, which is primarily explained by the Church’s distancing, following the technological and scientific advances of the 19th century, which reached unprecedented levels in the 20th century. However, when analyzing the books and critically and historically reading the context in which they were written, as well as the arguments the exorcists present to explain “the devil’s strategies” to expand his domain, we see that this expansion of evil in the 20th century is denounced through transformations that, in some cases, democratized life in society, such as the secularization of the state and the increase in sexual freedom. Finally, the great crisis of the demon’s expansion in the 20th century is expressed in a movement by Catholic groups seeking to mitigate the loss of privileges and powers of the Church that accompanied this century and will continue into the next