Archbishop Flavio Calle Zapata, of Ibagué, Colombia, has instructed local parishes to offer an exorcism prayer because of the alarming increase in suicides in his archdiocese.
During the year 2014, seventy people have committed suicide in the region, and violence has also been on the rise.
Last Sunday, the archdiocese sponsored a “day of exorcism.” The Archbishop said that in today’s world “there is a culture of permissiveness” and what disturbs us “is that Satanism has also spread among our young people.”
The Archbishop said that “in all the churches of the archdiocese of Ibagué and the diocese of Espinal, the prayer of Pope Leo XIII has been recited, asking St. Michael the Archangel to defend families and young people from demonic temptations and attacks on life.”
Pope Francis has spoken out frequently about the devil, insisting that he is “not a myth” and that “we have to fights him.”
Calle Zapata said that the crisis of values ??and lack of family unity “generate unhealthy behavior of aggression toward others as well as suicide.”
“We are going to work especially in schools to sow values like respect and love for human life,” he said. What we are looking for, he said, “is that young people understand that God is the only Lord of people’s lives.”
The problem, he said, is that “nowadays people don’t speak about God.”