This was the Evil One, all right.
As Monsignor Stephen Rossetti watched the man in front of him, he saw his blue eyes turn yellow and the pupils shrink down to mere dots. They looked, Rossetti said, precisely like the eyes of a hissing snake.
But the monsignor knew what it really was: The man’s altered appearance convinced him for a fact that the man was possessed by a demon.
Another time, a man’s entire eyes turned jet black, recalled Rossetti. “This doesn’t usually happen but when it does, it is very startling — it is obviously demonic,” he said.
Battling demonic forces is regular duty for Msgr Rossetti, a Catholic priest who worked in two parishes in the Diocese of Syracuse for five years. Now based in the Washington, DC, diocese, he and his team perform up to 20 exorcisms each week, liberating people — and homes — from what he calls “demons and satanic evil.”
And, the 70-year-old told The Post, exorcisms have “grown exponentially” in the past decade or so. The United States, wracked by discord and a moral crisis, is “demonically oppressed.
“I think this is going to get much worse before it gets better,” he said.
A licensed psychologist and research associate professor at the Catholic University of America, Rossetti tells of his 13 years of evil experiences in the new book “Diary of an American Exorcist. Demons, Possession, and the Modern-Day Battle Against Ancient Evil” (Sophia Institute Press).
In it, Rossetti alleges he’s seen demons at work: doors banging, TVs turning on and off spontaneously, dogs howling uncontrollably, victims communicating in ancient languages they never learned — even spewing foreign objects like nuts and bolts.
“There are stunning things that happen that are not humanly possible,” he said.
The monsignor, who is also the president and founder of the St. Michael Center For Spiritual Renewal, a nonprofit Catholic organization that oversees the exorcism sessions around the DC area, said he has not yet witnessed any victims levitate or spin their head like in the movies “The Exorcist” or the new “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.”
But, he firmly believes, he has regularly witnessed diabolical evil.Recalling one exorcism, Rossetti writes of demons manifesting themselves as he began to pray. “They were wagging [the possessed woman’s] finger at me and shaking [her] head,” he recalled. “I had been commanding the demons to leave and the response was pretty clear: ‘No!’ ”
The monsignor moved closer and made direct eye contact with the woman. Holding a crucifix six inches from her face, he cried out: “Ecce crucem Domino: fugite partes adversae” — Latin for “Behold the Cross of the Lord: take flight, you hostile powers.”
As he sprinkled the woman with holy water, her body began to spasm.
“In an exorcism, the demons are engulfed in a holy torture that we believe is worse than the fires of hell,” writes Rossetti. “They were writhing in pain.”
Sometimes, the demons cause him physical anguish. Rossetti recalls in his book a case in which he started the prayers of liberation for a mild demonic possession of a middle-aged man.
“My stomach became instantly nauseated, and the ill feeling quickly spread to my head and the rest of my body,” the monsignor recalled of the demon’s attack on him. “My whole being felt spiritually pummeled throughout the session.”
And then there was the young woman who reached out to him after an upside-down cross appeared “burned” into her shoulder. At the same time, her dad was receiving “snarky” text messages from demons. “The texts were a typical demonic rant: ‘She belongs to us,’ ” Rossetti said.
Rossetti said the messages appeared to come from the phone number of the woman. Upon careful investigation, however, Rossetti insisted there was no evidence of her having sent the messages.
“By the way, several exorcists have had the same experience, getting texts from demons, and why not?” Rossetti said. “In the past they messed with electronics — TVs and lights turning off and on by themselves. Now they mess with cellphones.”
The woman had more to worry about than texts from hell, though.
“As a child, the father dedicated her to Satan,” Rossetti said. “If someone is perverted enough to join a satanic cult to begin with, then it’s not a stretch to imagine them offering their children to their ‘god.’ ”
As the young woman grew up, she found her way to the Catholic faith in search of comfort and solace. “The demons did not like that,” he said. “And they claimed her by burning that cross in her shoulder. So the spiritual battle began.”
Then, he says, followed an epic, six-month battle with Satan. Rossetti and his team — including, on occasions, another priest and several faithful Catholics for support — engaged in holy war to liberate the distraught woman.
At each session, Rossetti would recite: “I claim you for Christ Our Savior by the sign of the Cross.” The woman would respond, “I belong to Jesus.” And each time, it was the same bloodcurdling result. “Satan would burn a cross into her [skin] many times until finally he was cast out,” Rossetti recalled. (The crucifixes would disappear after every instance.)
“Thankfully, this woman has been recently liberated by the power of Christ,” said Rossetti. “It was an ugly fight, and I don’t want to go through it again.”
Rossetti was appointed a diocesan exorcist by his bishop in Washington. By his telling, “the Blessed Virgin picked me” for the job. He trained in Rome and in the US under a senior exorcist, and has been involved in many hundreds of exorcisms since 1999.
At each one, often conducted in a private space at a church, he wears his clerical clothes with a purple stole — an ancient Church symbol of authority — over his shoulders.
“The demons hate the stole and keep telling me to take it off, which I don’t,” Rossetti said. He also brandishes a Benedictine crucifix emblazoned with an “exorcistic formula” in Latin, “Vade Retro Satana,” on the back, Translation: “Get Behind Me, Satan.”
Holy water is essential. “We use a large bottle and spritz with it,” Rossetti said, adding that the possessed often vomit white foam when the water touches them.
As for his brethren’s opinion, New York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan blurbed the book: “Enlightening and timely!”
The monsignor admitted that many who think they are “possessed” or “oppressed” by demons are, in fact, suffering mental illness. But he’s seen enough to believe.
As a young seminarian at college, Rossetti had his own brush with evil as he was about to fall asleep one night. Suddenly he experienced an “unbelievable force. I felt quickly being overwhelmed but no physical manifestation.” Rossetti concluded it was only one thing — a “demonic attack.” He leapt out of bed and lunged for his rosaries. “The moment I touched my rosary beads, this attack stopped.”
And Rossetti has advice for keeping the demons away: “I tell people, put crucifixes in your home, holy water in a font at home, religious statues around the house, and say your rosary.
“That is your protection.”
