The priest behind the wheel floored it, and the car raced through Rome toward the Vatican. With him were a bishop, and a woman known as Francesca F., who spent the drive “thrashing and cursing loudly.”

The woman was in the throes of a demonic possession, and only one man could drive the devil away.

They parked by the Apostolic Palace, and, assisted by papal advisers, rushed Francesca down the marble hallways, her screams echoing through the holy center.

Minutes after they arrived, they were met by their savior — Pope John Paul II.

The Holy Father approached the writhing woman, “began pronouncing the formulas of exorcism in Latin,” and prayed with “increasing urgency.”

“Finally, he leaned over her and whispered, ‘Tomorrow I will say a Mass for you,’ and with those words she suddenly became calm. The demon appeared to have departed, and Francesca, looking confused and a bit embarrassed, apologized to the pope. Later, John Paul would tell a top aide that his duel with Satan felt like a ‘biblical scene.’”

In “The Vatican Prophecies: Investigating Supernatural Signs, Apparitions, and Miracles in the Modern Age” (Viking), John Thavis, former Rome bureau chief for the Catholic News Service, describes this 1982 secret exorcism.

The new book shares how the Vatican deals with supernatural — or supposedly supernatural — events, from holy relics to instances of possession.

Thavis makes it clear that events of this sort put the Vatican in a difficult spot. On one hand, they cannot reject such supernatural phenomena outright, as to do so would reject many elements of the religion’s history.

At the same time, every claim of a supernatural or otherworldly presence must be handled with extreme skepticism, to prevent the Church from being taken in by charlatans, any one of whom could deal a blow to the Church’s credibility.

Here are some of the objects and events that just might give the pope some sleepless nights.

Relics

Relics are physical possessions that were once touched by saints, or even their clothing or body parts, which for many serve as a talisman of good fortune.

The sale of relics has long been forbidden, but this rule comes with loopholes. Selling a container to hold relics is allowed — and if it happens to contain relics, so much the better — and exceptions are also made when the purchase serves to “rescue it from mistreatment or desecration.”

The death of Pope John Paul II in 2005 was a boon for the relic market, as many clamored to own whatever they could of the beloved pontiff.

Just hours before the pope passed away on April 2, his private secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, requested a vial of the pope’s blood from his doctor as a “remembrance.” Later, the archbishop distributed the blood “drop by drop to churches and dioceses clamoring for a John Paul II relic.”

This and hair from his final haircut were the only “first-class relics” — the phrase for relics taken “from the actual body” — from this pope, as “no bones or organs had been removed from the pope’s corpse,” so “the stock of first-class relics would be quite limited.”

The same could not be said for other saints and prominent Catholic figures throughout the years. The Vatican’s “catalog of officially recognized body parts” includes “the hand of Saint Teresa of Avila, the finger of Saint Thomas, the head of Saint John the Baptist (claimed by several churches), the toe of Saint Francis Xavier, the tooth of Saint Apollonia, the nail clippings of Saint Clare of Assisi,” and “relics the Church now downplayed or dismissed,” including “the foreskin of the circumcised baby Jesus, known as the holy prepuce.”

Relics of the body were once commonplace. In the 1500s, a year after the death of Saint Teresa of Avila, her left hand was cut off and sent to a convent except for the ring finger, which the priest who did the cutting kept and “wore around his neck for the rest of his life.”

Her body was eventually cut up and distributed “piece by piece, including her heart, right arm, a foot, her left eye and a piece of jawbone.”

In 1966, a young nun named Sister Caterina Capitani lay dying in a hospital of esophageal hemorrhaging. She had a vision of Pope John XXIII, who had died three years prior, “plac[ing] his hand on her stomach, [and] telling her she need no longer worry.” The nun recovered, and this was the miracle used to beatify the pope in 2000. Two years later, she was presented with a keepsake — a slice of the pope’s skin that had been peeled off his hand upon his death.

This practice generates mixed feelings at best in the modern age. In 1997, “the bones of the French Carmelite nun Saint Therese of Lisieux” drew huge crowds throughout a tour of France, eventually being presented in 40 countries. The relics have their own Facebook page and one traveled to outer space on the shuttle Discovery.

But Catholic officials say slicing up bodies is done far more judiciously these days, if at all. Relics expert Father Zdzislaw Kijas told Thavis, “If the body is intact, you can take some bone. But there is a hygienic element in all this, as well as respect for the body. You can’t just cut off parts at will. In some cases, there may be no relics removed.”

Unsurprisingly, that doesn’t stop people, including scammers, from trying to sell them.

As recently as 2013, you could purchase “two bone fragments of Saint Martha, a contemporary of Jesus,” on eBay for the “buy it now” price of $1,090, or “a bone chip from the early Christian martyr Saint Theodore” for $890. (eBay bans the sale of body parts, but relics are sold as “reliquary.”)

While both came with letters of authenticity, these are often faked, “bearing the signature of an obscure bishop from the past.”

Fakes can be determined by “basic errors in Latin” or mixed-up chronologies, including authentication by bishops whose lifespan did not coincide with that of the saint in question.

The Church has dealt with fake relics since the Middle Ages, when the “brain of Saint Peter,” which had been “venerated for centuries in the cathedral of Geneva was investigated and found to be a pumice stone,” and the “arm of Saint Anthony,” long “kissed by the faithful on festive occasions, turned out to be part of a stag.”

These days, rather than spend time and money exposing forgeries, the Church sometimes turns a blind eye to relics whose authenticity is in question. In 2011, Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster angered many Catholics when he stated, “If that connection is made through an object which maybe forensically won’t stand up to the test, that’s of secondary importance to the spiritual and emotive power that the object can contain.”

The shroud



The Church could not take such a hands-off approach with the Shroud of Turin, the supposed burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

But that’s not to say it takes a firm position, either.

Pope Benedict referred to the shroud as “an ‘extraordinary icon’ and not as a relic, which would have implied that it had surely wrapped the body of Christ.”

The age-old mystery of the shroud, the public history of which began in the late 1300s, intensified in the 20th century, when advances in science made it possible to analyze the cloth as never before.

The findings, however, have not solved its mysteries.

In 1898, Italian photographer Secondo Pia discovered via a series of photographs that “the negatives revealed an incredibly detailed positive image of the man in the shroud. The face, in particular, was strikingly natural, a likeness that seemed to come out of nowhere.”

The finding, that the Shroud is “a negative image,” confirmed for many its authenticity, as, people argued, “no medieval artist would have had the necessary knowledge to create such an image.”

Since then, “the cloth’s enigmatic imprint [has drawn] the attention of specialists in imaging, chemistry, physics and other fields, including radiocarbon dating.” Carbon-14 tests conducted in 1988 placed the shroud’s origins “between 1260 and 1390,” appearing to “bolster claims that the shroud was a medieval artifact.” But the tests have been criticized, as “according to several experts, the threads [that were tested] came from a repaired or contaminated area of the cloth.”

In the 1970s, a massive effort called STURP — The Shroud of Turin Research Project — united around 30 scientists from numerous fields, including “experts in photography, chemistry, physics and biophysics, mathematics, optics, forensic pathology,” and even “nuclear weapons research.”

An image analyzer that “created a three-dimensional relief of the shroud’s human form” confirmed for some that “the image itself contained precise spatial information, which would appear to rule out a painting or other artistic origin. The image would have to have been created while the cloth was draped over a body, even in places where the cloth had not come into direct contact with the body.”

A slew of additional tests from “every imaginable scientific angle” were conducted, from X-rays to “ultraviolet and infrared experiments” to analysis of cloth samples that had been “covered for centuries.” These tests “added an immense amount of data but also raised new questions. Essentially the team agreed that the image was not the work of an artist and was encoded with unique, three-dimensional information; but how it was produced remained a mystery.”

Exorcisms



The Church’s position on demonic possession, much like its position on miracles of any sort, can best be described as, we’ll believe it when we see it.

While the Church once had “a special ministerial order of exorcists,” Pope Paul VI did away with it in 1972. By a decade later, exorcisms were rare and only performed by “specially delegated priests.”

Prior to his election as Pope Benedict, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which investigated mysterious phenomena.

In 1985, Ratzinger sent a letter to bishops, instructing them to “enforce the limits on exorcism, making sure that unauthorized people did not lead prayer gatherings in which ‘demons are addressed directly.’ ”

But just several months later, Pope John Paul II “declared that demonic influence can take the form of ‘diabolical possession,’ which could require an exorcism.” In 1999, the Vatican “published a revised Rite of Exorcism,” and in the years to come “co-sponsored . . . study courses in Satanism and demonic possession.”

Still, the Church seems wary of the practice, and Thavis notes that “the higher you go in the Catholic hierarchy, the greater the resistance” to talk of demonic possession and exorcism.

In the book, Thavis quotes Father Gabriele Nanni, a former exorcist who was, to his dismay, removed from the position. Nanni believes that by turning its back on exorcism, the Church has left a wide opening for Satan to enter our world and do his dirtiest.

“If you could see the suffering of [the possessed] and what they endure for a Church that is betraying them,” he says. “Their suffering makes me cry. The Church is the only institution that has the weapons to help them.”