The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist Read Online Free PDF Page A

Catholic Grammar School, where he served as an altar boy until eighth grade.
    Typically Gary's family would be the last ones to leave church, something Gary's dad often ribbed his mother about. For Gary, something about priests made him feel comfortable; he felt a “positive familiarity” when he was around them. He also had literal familiarity; an uncle on his dad's side was a priest and a cousin on his mom's side was a Jesuit.
    In the fifth and sixth grade, when all those in his class put a picture on the bulletin board of what they wanted to be when they grew up, Gary had chosen a picture of a priest. When he told his parents about this, his dad just brushed it off, thinking his son would eventually grow out of it. While this would never happen, when Gary turned fourteen, a chance encounter knocked him off track for a while.
    His mother took him to a funeral at the Nauman Lincoln Roos mortuary. After the service, Mr. Lincoln approached Gary and asked if he wanted to work part-time in the funeral home. Without much hesitation, Gary said yes. His work at Nauman Lincoln consisted of a variety of tasks: washing and waxing the cars, cutting lawns, answering the phones, arranging flowers for the ceremony, even taking people into the chapel. He found the work immediately rewarding. He appreciated the religious component of funerals (he had attended many over the years as an altar boy). Not unlike the role of a priest, the funeral director's job was to comfort people—especially in the days following the death of a loved one, when survivors need the most help.
    Around the time that he was warming up to a career in the funeral business, Gary began to notice that the priesthood might not be everything he'd originally thought. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Catholic Church went through tremendous upheaval in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which advocated that the Church open its windows to the modern world. As a result, many priests began losing the sense of connection they'd once felt to the traditions that had attracted them to the priesthood. This had a disastrous effect. Priests began leaving the Church in large numbers. The entire order of nuns that taught at Gary's high school, Junipero Serra, disbanded. In the midst of this general confusion, Gary became disillusioned about his chosen vocation.

    I N 1972 H E ENROLLED in the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit-run school in the heart of San Francisco. He and a friend, Robert Eagen, would be among the first generation of kids from South City to go to college. Thinking he might one day run his own mortuary, Gary majored in business management.
    The tuition was $1,600 a year, which Gary paid himself by working as a busboy for $250 a month during the school year as well as at the mortuary during the summer. Because of tight finances, he lived at home, commuting to school in a rust-colored 1971 Chevy Càmaro that he bought from a neighbor for $2,000.
    As Gary matured, his responsibilities at the mortuary changed. When he turned eighteen, he went on his first “removal,” mortuary parlance for picking up a dead body. Surprisingly, despite all the funerals he'd attended and his time at the mortuary, he had yet to actually see a naked corpse. This particular body belonged to a patient who'd died at San Francisco General Hospital. To this day Gary remembers that the sight of the corpse, lying bare on the metallic slab down in the morgue, made him nauseous. Eventually, he got used to that, but the experience of performing removals never became routine—especially not when he had to drive to homes and remove a body while under the watchful eyes of a roomful of grieving family members.
    Meanwhile, in the spring semester of his final year at USF, mutual friends set Gary up on a blind date with Lori Driscoll (now Lori Armstrong), a freshman nursing student at San Francisco State. The two immediately hit it off and began dating, usually attending sporting events with groups