Hitchens harps on Benedict the Accomplice and quotes Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist. I’ve seen Fr. Amorth quoted all over the place recently but no one seems to have done some simple math:

Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican’s chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as “cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon”.

70,000 possessions / (25 years x 365 days) ~ 7 exorcisms per day. But let’s assume he’s done exorcisms since before he was in charge of them — that seems reasonable. In fact, in good Catholic style, let’s be conservative. Let’s assume he became a priest-and-exorcist at age ten and has been doing this for 75 years. That yields the more-reasonable-but-still-questionable figure of two exorcisms per day. Both figures assume no periods of rest as required by scripture.

Given that the Vatican now rightly prefers to use secular mental health treatment over exorcisms that seems like quite a few, to say the least.

But I guess that was an estimate. As, presumably, was this:

He said it sometimes took six or seven of his assistants to to [sic] hold down a possessed person. Those possessed often yelled and screamed and spat out nails or pieces of glass, which he kept in a bag. “Anything can come out of their mouths – finger-length pieces of iron, but also rose petals.”