Russell Crowe’s The Pope’s Exorcist branded ‘unreliable splatter’ by Vatican exorcists group

The International Association of Exorcists has cast aspersions on Crowe’s film

Russell Crowe’s latest film The Pope’s Exorcist has been condemned by The International Association of Exorcists (IAE).

In the trailer released last month, the Sony Pictures movie claims to be “inspired by actual files of father Gabriele Amorth, Chief Exorcist of the Vatican”.

“There is actually a real job called the Chief Exorcist in the Vatican,” Crowe explains in the film’s production notes. “Father Gabriele Amorth was a real man who held that office for 36 years, and was involved in tens of thousands of exorcisms.”

However, in a statement issued last month, the IAE, which Amorth himself founded in 1990, called the film “unreliable … splatter cinema”, per The Guardian.

It claimed that the film’s plot, which involves a Vatican conspiracy, poses “unacceptable doubt” as to who “the real enemy is, the devil or ecclesiastical power”.

Amorth was president of the IAE until 2000 and died in 2016 – he claimed to have performed 160,000 exorcisms in his career.

“The end result is to instil the conviction that exorcism is an abnormal, monstrous, and frightening phenomenon, whose only protagonist is the devil, whose violent reactions can be faced with great difficulty,” the IAE continued.

Russell Crowe in ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ (Jonathan Hession/Sony Pictures)

“This is the exact opposite of what occurs in the context of exorcism celebrated in the Catholic church in obedience to the directives imparted by it.”

The group stipulated that its statement was made in response to the trailer and that it would be commenting further once the full feature was released globally on Good Friday (7 April), however, a second statement has not yet been released.

The Independent has contacted the IAE for comment.

Producer Michael Patrick Kaczmarek optioned the rights to Amorth’s two memoirs – An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories – before the priest’s death.

“I was able to convince [Amorth] that if he took the chance to work with me, that I would try to make sure the Catholicity would be preserved in the film – and that he would be respected as a person along with the Church and his religious order,” Kaczmarek said.

“My producing partners and I always pitched this as the James Bond of exorcists... The sky was the limit in terms of the number of stories we could tell.”

The Pope’s Exorcist is in cinemas now.