'THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!' - Can the prayer of Saints help too?

'I'm not getting out!'

While the Catholic Church struggles to handle the alarming increase in possessions, more and more people fall prey to demonic influence.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The number of existing, approved exorcists aren't enough to combat the onslaught brought upon by the masses who have been foolishly dabbling in "games," such as black magic and using Oija boards.

There are rising waves of atheism and, with television promoting demonic possessions and supernatural arts, many are playing with serious spiritual powers.

The Catholic Church has responded by offering extra classes and encouraging more priests to learn how to exorcise spirits - but some are too afraid to perform them.

Things have gotten so bad, one woman turned to St. Paraskeva, an Antiochian Orthodox Christian saint, in Romania.

Though the Catholic Church does not formally recognize Orthodox saints as canonized in the meaning of the Catholic use of the term, the story is insightful. It shows the reality of the ancient Christian doctrine of the communion of saints, which both the Catholic and Orthodox Church embrace - and is indicative of the necessity for more exorcists.

During an annual ceremony held for St. Paraskeva at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Iasi, Romania, over 300,000 pilgrims attended between October 10-24.

At one point during the ceremony, a woman claiming to be "possessed" began to scream and have a fit.

The entire ordeal was captured on camera.

Two police officers and a paramedic grabbed the woman and began pulling her toward an ambulance when an elderly woman from the crowd told them to instead pull her toward the Saint's relics.

A priest joined the woman and cried, "Don't let her go!"

The woman, who a moment ago was creating a scene, begins to fight authorities and screams, "I'm not getting out!"

She was dragged to the saint's relics and the woman fights every step of the way. At the glass coffin, she struggles until the elderly woman, the priest and authorities push her face to the glass.

She quiets and begins to cry and someone from the crowd says, "The Saint indeed does wonders."

She appears to faint and is taken to paramedics in case she requires first aid but the elderly woman claimed modern medicine was unnecessary.

Romanian journalists asked if it was normal practice for policemen to participate in exorcists and Ionut Catana, a representative of the riot police responded:

"The riot policemen did not act to perform an exorcism, but to offer first aid. From our point of view, any person with such behavior has medical problems.

"They took her to a first aid point. Because that was in the courtyard of the church, they had to pass by the holy relics, but the gendarmes did not act specifically [to] take her there."

Whether the event was legitimate or not remains to be confirmed. The woman's identity has not been made public and the crowd who witnessed the event has developed stronger faith as a result.

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