ROME — Andrés Cárdenas sat in the back of the auditorium, opened his folder and took careful notes as a Catholic cardinal with decades of experience casting demons out of possessed bodies gave a master class on how to yell at the devil, rid Muslims of black magic and purge Satan on your cellphone.

Father Cárdenas, a Colombian priest, wrote vigorously as the 89-year-old instructor, Ernest Simoni, explained that although exorcisms — what he called “a spiritual scientific instrument” — can be practiced on Muslims, “they stayed Muslims after.”

Cardinal Simoni, who is Albanian, also said that fasting sometimes helped the possessed, but that often you had to play hardball with Beelzebub by saying things like “shut up, Satan.”

After jotting it all down, Father Cárdenas, 36, explained he had come to Rome to learn about exorcisms “because it is a gift” he wanted to share with his parishioners back in El Espinal. He was one of 300 Roman Catholics — mostly clerics but also lay men and women furnished with authorization letters from their bishops — to attend the 13th annual, weeklong “Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation” course that organizers hoped would recruit and train armies of potential exorcists to confront spreading demonic forces.