by Don Cristian Meriggi
I was born in Florence and come from a good, simple family of hard workers, believers but not practicing. The first thought of a call to the priesthood matured when I was an altar boy. Then, like many young people, I took other paths and abandoned the path of faith and also the scholastic one. I lived through a difficult period, with much suffering and I began to face my first work experiences. But the Lord came to look for me even in the situations of deviation that I was experiencing and, little by little, through interior movements, events, facts and people, he attracted me to himself.
In particular, in my search for happiness, among many mistakes, I had the opportunity to get closer to the faith through the encounter with a Carmelite tertiary. It was very important for me, because, with his friendship, he introduced me to the love of prayer and above all to the love and trust in the Mother of God, to whom, after God, I owe everything. I thus got closer to the parish and my parish priest, with whom I matured the choice to begin a period of verification regarding my desire to become a priest. At almost 19 years old I entered the seminary. I had to recover high school and then do five years of theology. They were ten years of precious and important preparation and discernment. At the age of 28 I was ordained a priest.
Towards the ministry of exorcist
My ministry as an exorcist was prepared by a series of stages and events.
I had begun research into the world of magic and related realities. I tried to understand what Scripture and theology had to say about it, especially St. Thomas and St. Augustine. This study lasted throughout my theology school and even after, flowing into the small book The Other Face of the Occult that I published in 2005. At the same time, after my priestly ordination, I began to study the territory of the large parish of Certaldo where I served as assistant priest, trying to learn about the sects and alternative spiritual movements in the area, identifying the presence of various kinds of magicians and witches. It was the discovery of a vast hidden world!
I had attended occasionally, even before becoming a priest, a small church in the countryside where there was an exorcist priest, the spiritual son of Padre Pio, Don Mario Boretti; and as a priest I went there to hear confessions on certain special occasions and sometimes to celebrate Holy Mass.
While I was in Certaldo I had the opportunity to meet Father Francesco Bamonte – current vice president of the International Association of Exorcists – who held conferences on these themes of faith in a neighboring parish.
After Father Bamonte was called to Rome, where he began to carry out the ministry of exorcist, I always kept in touch with him. I discussed especially some strange phenomena that happened to me in the confessional with some penitents and my research regarding the reality of esotericism in the parish territory. Among his precious suggestions was that of reporting to the Bishop everything anomalous that I had discovered during my investigations and studies. In fact, the Bishop is the shepherd and must be aware of everything that could be a threat to his flock.
In September 2006, the then Archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Antonelli, summoned me to appoint me as an exorcist: I then asked him if he could entrust me to an older exorcist priest, with proven experience. So he entrusted me to Don Mario. He was a great help to me and, if it hadn’t been for him, after a few months of exorcisms, I would have resigned.
As long as Don Mario lived – he died at 90 – he always said that he felt like a schoolboy. The journey I made with him was precious and useful and how many things I was able to see and learn by being close to him!
Then there was the help and the comparison with other exorcists, both from my diocese and others, such as Father Bamonte, with whom I spent a week in Rome at the request of my Bishop. This was a very important experience, also because I had the opportunity to meet Don Gabriele Amorth and listen to his advice. I remember the recommendation that Don Gabriele made to me before we said goodbye: “Remember Don Cristian that we are good for nothing!”
In November 2006, shortly after I was given the appointment of exorcist and the ritual, I signed up to the International Association of Exorcists and began to participate in its conferences. The scope of the Association is universal, authentically Catholic.
Another aspect that helped me was my appointment, almost at the same time as that of exorcist, as spiritual assistant of the Family Counseling Center of the Misericordia of Empoli, where I began to collaborate with some doctors and psychotherapists.
Another important experience for my priesthood and for the ministry of exorcist was the arrival and stay of Cardinal Ernest Simoni in my current parish of San Donato a Livizzano, in the municipality of Montespertoli, in the province of Florence. Father Ernest, as he likes to be called, had been carrying out the ministry of exorcist since before the atheist communist regime of Albania arrested him in 1963, on Christmas night. Today he also exercises his precious ministry in Tuscany.
I remember a particular episode. The day after an exorcism, celebrated by the Cardinal, in which a person was freed from a legion of demons, I saw a cloud of insects gathered under the base of the large statue of the Immaculate Mary (more than three meters high) that we have in the square in front of the parish. These black insects did not touch the statue of the Immaculate, but were covering a base that has a diameter of about two meters. After a prayer of blessing they fell and disappeared. It is a unique experience to see this 96-year-old man, with a history of forced labor and imprisonment and torture, preach, bless and travel the world without a hint of tiredness. Being next to him is a continuous school of humility, of love for the Church and for the people of God, for the Blessed Virgin and for Jesus: a great prodigy of Providence!
Significant episodes
At the beginning of my ministry, an episode that put me in crisis occurred during the exorcism of a person who, thank God, is now free. One evening after dinner I was waiting for a lady afflicted by seven demons. While waiting to receive her – it had been a day of intense activity for me – I needed to confess, but I didn’t have the chance. I made an act of contrition and asked for forgiveness, and began the exorcism. When I asked the devil his name, he replied: “I won’t tell you today because you have a guilty conscience.” The devil doesn’t read thoughts, but he has other ways of intuiting from the outside what worries and torments us. So the next day I went to Don Mario to tell him the story and told him that perhaps we had all been wrong: the Bishop, he and I. It would be better for me to give up the ministry. After a few seconds of silent recollection, he looked at me and said: “Next time, tell him you’re thinking for himself.”
Based on my personal experience I can affirm that the action and power of the devil on society and individuals depends in part on the drift of faith, the multiplication of pagan cults, the spread of esotericism, magic in all its forms and various types of alternative religious movements, Masonic lodges and sects of various kinds together with a life increasingly absorbed by sensuality and the virtual, by the throwaway culture and by the hedonistic-individualistic one.
Among the people I met, afflicted by diabolical possession following magical practices, there was an Asian girl. The young girl had been taken, for health reasons, to a tribal healer as a child and later had made friends with a girl who practiced witchcraft, and who initiated her to magical rites. Her mother, when she was about eleven years old, had come to Italy to work, serving a family of industrialists. They were pragmatic people, of a certain cultural and social level. The young girl had then joined her mother after a few years. Shortly after arriving in Italy, she began to have strange manifestations. She would become gloomy, have moments of absence, say she saw and heard someone’s voices, and was found at night in the garden, as if in a trance, dancing and singing a lullaby in an incomprehensible language and with a metallic voice, which was certainly not hers.
This family had then taken her to the hospital where they diagnosed her with a personality disorder with anorexic and demonopathic traits. The situation soon worsened, because the girl had begun to go into a sort of trance for several hours a day, often showing that she was not fully conscious. Then this family, believers, decided to take her, with the mother’s consent, to a priest to have her blessed: there the presence of a group of demons led by Satan manifested itself. In front of the priest, who was Hungarian, she began to speak and offend him in Latin and Hungarian. She manifested an incredible strength that only calmed down completely after he put the Rosary around her neck. After some time, I began to follow her under the guidance of Don Mario. During the exorcisms, in addition to speaking and writing well in Latin and Greek – the girl did not know these languages but only Italian, English and her mother tongue – she expelled large quantities of blood from her mouth.
When she recovered from the trance crisis she no longer remembered anything. It was difficult to convince her that she needed to undertake a serious journey of faith, because she did not realize it at all. I sent her to the doctors several times to check that the blood had not come from some internal wound. Result: she was as healthy as a fiddle. After receiving Confirmation, she expelled more dark blood and began to eat again: it was a first liberation. So those anorexic symptoms were not caused by a pathology, but by an evil situation. She had another important liberation after forgiving her mother during a Eucharistic adoration celebrated in the cave of Monte Sant’Angelo on Gargano while she was on a pilgrimage.
Our Spiritual Weapons
“Without communion, there is no healing,” said the dear and late Don Mario. An intense sacramental life is crucial, a love for the Eucharistic Christ, for the Eucharist is the royal road to healing and liberation. Adoration and communion! Furthermore, living the sacrament of confession consistently. With it we encounter the mercy of God who not only ratifies the forgiveness of our sins, but with his grace enters deeply into the darkest areas of the soul where our sins have their roots. And also, living, as St. Paul says, as much as it depends on us, in peace with everyone. An intense life of charity where we not only think of our needs, but also of those of others, praying and working for their good. Seeking and giving forgiveness. Living everything, every moment of our life, as a gift, aware that everything works for the good of those who love God, even the most difficult moments.
It is then fundamental to nourish a faithful and loving devotion to the Virgin Mary.
In addition to the sacramental life, the use of sacramentals is very useful. They are like medicines that, together with the sacraments, help us to bring the grace of God into all areas of our life. Let us make the prayer of the Church our own: in addition to the Holy Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours, also the Holy Rosary. And then devotion to the saints and the holy souls in purgatory.
Ultimately, the whole life of the Church is medicine, it is a path of liberation, healing and consolation to rise again in Christ, to live our days in love and peace, so as to distance or expel from our lives the enemy and his influence.
The exorcist Don Mario Boretti: apostle of Mary
Don Mario Boretti was the parish priest of San Donato a Livizzano and S. Maria a Pulica (Archdiocese of Florence) from May 15, 1953 until his death on March 27, 2011. A native of the Florentine suburb of Peretola, Don Mario arrived in the parish of San Donato on May 15, 1953, the feast of the Madonna di Montenero, after having been in Palazzolo sul Senio, on the Tuscan border with Romagna. Sent to Livizzano by the Archbishop Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, he found a difficult situation there but did not lose heart due to his faith and tenacity, being very devoted to Mary. He had a friendly and spiritual relationship with Saint Pio of Pietrelcina. “Once he called me ‘brother’, many other times ‘son'”
This is how Don Mario remembered his relationship with the holy friar of Pietrelcina, to whom he dedicated a prayer group. In 1982, Don Mario founded the Marian prayer movement “Il roseto perpetuo”, in which members commit to meditating on a mystery of the Rosary of their choice every day, reciting 1 Our Father, 10 Hail Marys, 1 Glory Be and the short prayer “Jesus I love you, Jesus and Mary I love you, save souls”, for their entire lives, according to a series of intentions. The movement has more than 50 thousand members throughout the world, including various cardinals and numerous bishops. The Perpetual Rose Garden of Mary has had the honor of being recognized on two different occasions by Pope John Paul II. Don Mario’s long ministry has transformed that parish, one of the poorest in the diocese of Florence, into a center of attraction and spiritual meeting for thousands of people, changing the face of the hill located in the municipality of Montespertoli. The charisma of Don Mario and the fame of San Donato have spread throughout the world, radiating everywhere the love of the Madonna as the main road to reach Jesus.
As an exorcist, Don Mario fought in the good fight against the enemy, helping numerous people. In 2021, his friend and co-diocesan priest Pierfrancesco Amati dedicated a biography to him (news taken from the website of the parish of San Donato, from the newspaper “Il Tirreno” and from the website of the Florentine publishing company) [note AIE].