Tidings

EXORCISM BY DEATH

When Anneliese Michel died at the age of 23 in Klingenberg, West Germany, in the summer of 1976, she was little more than a skeleton, weighing a mere 68 Ibs. Yet shortly before she died, her parents said, Anneliese performed an astonishing 500 deep knee-bends in one day. The source of her power, her parents believed, was nothing less than the devil himself. Anneliese's release from evil spirits came only with death, after she starved herself during a nightmarish ten-month series of Roman Catholic exorcism rituals. Two weeks ago, a court in Aschaffenburg found two priests and Anneliese's parents, wealthy Mill Owner Josef Michel, 60, and his wife Anna, 57, guilty of negligent homicide in her death. The four, who last week appealed their convictions, drew six-month suspended prison sentences.

Anneliese's parents had agreed to the exorcism with the local bishop's approval after doctors failed to rid her of epileptic-like convulsions. The prosecution took no issue with the rite of exorcism, which Fathers Wilhelm Renz and Ernst Alt conducted according to a Catholic ritual promulgated in 1614. But Prosecutor Karl Stenger argued that calling a doctor to examine the girl "would not have compromised the defendants' religious convictions." Churchmen seemed to agree. Munich's Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger said that the 1614 ritual "must be thoroughly revised," and the German Bishops' Conference ruled last week that no more exorcisms would be permitted unless a doctor was called in.

TOWERS OF POWER

As Evangelist Oral Roberts tells it, he got the instructions straight from the Lord, just as Noah got the measurements for the Ark. Out walking in the California desert one day early in 1977, he heard God's plans for a hospital. It would be, said the Lord, "a new and different medical center," where "the healing streams of prayer and medicine must merge." Dubbed the City of Faith, it would rise in three towers, across from Oral Roberts University, behind a 60-ft. statue of healing hands. Biblical numerology was big in the Lord's plans: 777 beds, to be paid for by donors in multiples of $7. Following God's instructions, Roberts broke ground for the project in the fall of 1977.

The Tulsa Hospital Council fought the project, arguing that the city already had a surplus of 1.000 hospital beds. Grumbled State Representative Mandell Matheson: "We are not talking about man building a monument to God, but man building a monument to man." The Oklahoma Health Planning Agency, a federal advisory board, recommended disapproval of Roberts' application. But after an intensive nationwide letter-writing campaign by the evangelist's supporters and lobbying by political friends, the state's health planning commission last week gave Roberts a go-ahead to begin building. Still, God's plans were somewhat modified: 294 beds at first, with later expansion to 777. qed

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