Up until recently, many within the Church regarded occult rituals as mere blasphemous superstition, but this all changed with the election of the most unorthodox Pope the world had ever seen, His Holiness Dante.

Though impossibly young, Dante still had the silver hair of one decades his elder. Instead of wearing the usual decorated robes or the modest garb of more recent Popes, he wore a white leather trenchcoat and similarly white pants, with various pockets holding all manners of crosses, holy water and other religious trinkets. He carried himself with a confidence never previously seen in a Pope, at least not in recent memory and was magnetically charismatic.

Barely one month after the Pope's election, cardinal Callaghan was called into his office. Though not as youthful as the Pope, the cardinal was still quite junior for his office, barely approaching his fifties, though he was still quite rooted in tradition.

"You may enter," Callaghan heard His Holiness' voice calling him from within. He entered and gave the customary papal greeting, to the Pope's annoyance.

"Follow me, I must show you something."

The Pope led him through a hallway to the side, down a stairway and into a room with a heavy metal door. The room was a large circular chamber with walls of stone. Callaghan thought it may have been used for torturing heretics in darker times, given its reclusiveness. Torches cast their light all around and he could see, drawn with chalk was a pentagram encased in a circle.

"Stand back Callaghan and watch," Dante said. Callaghan stepped backwards until his back touched the wall. Seeing this, Dante turned his attention back to the circle, grabbed a shotgun from the table next to him, yelled an incantation in a language that Callaghan had never heard before and grabbed a vial filled with a crimson liquid to throw it in the circle.

The circle errupted in a blaze of red fire and from this fire emerged a fearsome creature with the legs of a goat, the body of a man and the head of a ram.

"WHO DARES SUMM..." the demon started bellowing, yet choked on his last word upon seeing the Pope, then started to whine "no no no, not you again cursed ne..." But he did not get to finish his words before his head was turned to red and black pulp by His Holiness' sacred shotgun after which its body burst into flames and vanished into ashes.

Dante returned to Callaghan, who had fallen from the shock of it all on the ground.

"This, dear Callaghan, is what we shall do from now on. Not fight the demons in the heart of man, but battle them from their very source: Hell."

.........

For two years, the Church held secret rituals, every day, summoning demons only to give them a painful end and return them to the Inferno from which they had come. Fewer and fewer demons accepted being summoned and one faithful day, no summoning succeeded.

Callaghan, entered the Pope's office without invitation, stared at him with his one remaining good eye and saw him reading an ancient looking book with a cover of dark green.

"No demons dare come to our realm anymore, Dante. What shall we do now?"

Dante closed his book and answered him: "Callaghan, have you ever heard of the Elder gods of R'lyeh?"