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Inside story of Catholic bishop who was seduced by Satan
[NYPOST] When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell confessed to the Catholic Church hierarchy in Rome that he was "madly" in love with a divorced woman, officials told him he was possessed by Satan — and ordered him to undergo an immediate exorcism "to calm his troubled soul."

Novell, 52 and a noted exorcist at his parish of Solsana in Spain’s Catalonia region, flatly refused. After all, he had the devil in common with his younger paramour: an erotic novelist and psychologist he’d met at a demonology workshop.

Novell formally left the Catholic Church last month for "strictly personal reasons." Those reasons were not disclosed until his scandalous relationship with Silvia Caballol, 38, was revealed this week by Religion Digital.

The two met in 2015 at a workshop where they were both studying demonology, which probes the existence of "fallen angels" and evil spirits. The BBC this week referred to her work as "Satanic-tinged."

Caballol, who has a degree in psychology and has dabbled in the study of yoga, sexology, Catholicism and Islam, was conducting research for her racy novels — which have been described as "a journey into obsession, madness and lust, pitting God against Satan." Her publisher calls Caballol a "dynamic and transgressive author [who] turns upside down our ideas of morality and ethics."

Her most recent book, "The Hell of Gabriel’s Lust: The First Cardinal Sin Against Being" tells the story of a psychopathic prisoner who falls for the female prison psychologist treating him. The book jacket copy compares the characters’ relationship to "the battle between God and the Devil."

"As if possessed by the demon of lust, I begin to suck and kiss her neck, her lips, her breasts and her shoulders," Caballol writes in the 2017 novel. She goes on to describe various sex scenes in bodice-ripping detail: "Our bodies were incandescent and excited and our sex was inflamed and palpitating."

Now she is living with a man who once said in an interview: "Why are people so obsessed by sex that if they don’t have it every day they can’t breathe?"

Indeed, Caballol’s heavy-breathing erotica is a long way from Novell’s pious life as one of Spain’s most hardline holy men. But then again, his fundamentalism may have been created as a backlash against his own lust.

"I have fallen in love with a woman for the first time in my life, and I want to do things right," Novell told Religion Digital this week.

That statement wasn’t entirely accurate, however. When Novell was appointed bishop of the rural archdiocese in Catalonia, overseeing 51 priests, in 2010, the handsome prelate confessed that he’d been in love before. Rumors quickly circulated that he had seduced some of the young women who had worked for him in the past.


Posted by: Fred 2021-09-13
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=612461