On Thursday, March 5, the Shawn Ryan Show — one of the highest-rated podcasts today and hosted by former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan — will release an episode featuring Fr. Chad Ripperger, the traditionalist Catholic priest and exorcist who has built a massive online following through appearances on far-right Catholic YouTube shows, podcasts, and speaking engagements. When Ryan’s podcast featured exorcist Fr. Dan Reehil in October 2024, the episode drew 3.6 million views on YouTube alone. Ripperger is a bigger name. Given the show’s typical audience — and the 3.6 million YouTube views for the Reehil episode alone — the potential reach of this episode is enormous.

This is concerning because Ripperger’s message is not just eccentric speculation about demons and the end times. His teachings have concrete — and potentially tragic — consequences. He has claimed that people diagnosed with bipolar disorder can be taken “completely off their meds” through his spiritual protocols. He teaches that in marriage, consent is only granted once and forever on the wedding day — opening the door for abuse. And he promotes a framework of “generational curses” that many theologians say has no foundation in Catholic tradition. These ideas are about to reach a vastly larger audience.

Preview clips already circulating on social media give a taste of what’s coming. In one, Ripperger claims that alien abductions are real — but they are actually encounters with demons: “If you actually look at what the aliens are supposedly doing, it is identical to the same things that demons do to people who are possessed.” In the clip, he also dismisses evolution as “not only just scientifically problematic, but just even theologically and philosophically problematic.” He also connects the Epstein case to satanic ritual, noting that “the layout of the island gives an indication that it was heavily involved in the occult.” In another clip, he speculates about the end times, claiming that “before the Antichrist comes, one of the things that we know from the fathers of the church is that there will be a worldwide implosion of people’s morality.” He interprets the “mark of the beast” as an inversion of baptismal marks — possibly tied to a worldwide “digital currency” or to the implantable brain chip Neuralink, about which Ripperger says, “you’re not going to be able to get that chip without some type of renunciation of Christ. There’s going to have to be some religious thing you’re going to have to accept that you know is contrary to the will of God and contrary to Christ.”

Ripperger delivers all of this with the unblinking confidence of a man who has never encountered a question he couldn’t answer off the top of his head—whether the topic is biology, psychology, vaccines, yoga, vampires, Harry Potter, or demonology. For many Shawn Ryan Show listeners — most of whom will likely be unfamiliar with Catholic theology — this will sound authoritative, even profound. But the truth is that much of what Ripperger says comes straight from conspiracy theories and pseudoscience — and much of his message is deeply harmful. His confident delivery masks a pattern of fabrication, superstition, and magical thinking that causes real harm to real people.

The fabricated tradition

Central to Ripperger’s worldview is the notion of “generational curses” and “ancestral spirits” —the idea that demons can be passed down through family lines, races, and places, skipping generations and oppressing the innocent. His associate Dan Schneider, who has appeared twice on the Shawn Ryan Show to promote the same framework, explains it in terms of inherited spiritual privation: the sins of a father strip his family of divine protection, allowing demons to attach across generations. Schneider frames the concept as Thomistic and patristic—rooted in St. Thomas Aquinas and the Church Fathers.

It isn’t.

As Mexican exorcist Fr. Rogelio Alcántara explained in an analysis of the movement, the theory of generational spirits “appeared for the first time among Protestants through pagan inspiration. A Protestant missionary, Kenneth McAll, is the one who gave the impulse to the practice of ‘healing’ the family tree. Eventually, it became a movement.” Alcántara described how it entered Catholic circles through the Charismatic movement in the 1960s — not from the Church Fathers, as Ripperger claims. Fr. Peter Joseph, an Australian theologian, wrote that this idea of generational spirits “is a mythical notion imported from sects outside the Church.” Fr. Joseph asserts that “no Father, no Doctor of the Church, no Saint, no Pope, no Council ever taught or even implied any such thing. It is a pure fiction without foundation in Sacred Scripture or Sacred Tradition. There is not a word on the subject in the 688 pages of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

Fr. Joseph also wrote in an email (which he gave permission to share), “To Fr Ripperger, I offer this challenge: If ‘the Fathers’ taught about generational spirits, please name the Fathers and name the specific works and give references within those works, so we can verify it for ourselves, and also see the context of any such statements, in case that is relevant.” Ripperger has not responded to this challenge.

Many theologians and bishops’ conferences, most recently the Spanish bishops’ conference in November 2024, have condemned this notion as antithetical to Catholic tradition and theology. The Spanish bishops wrote that these ideas “stray from the Tradition and Magisterium of the Church and can cause great moral and spiritual harm to the holy people of God.”

Yet Ripperger’s message is saturated with it, and his deliverance prayer book, reviewed by Fr. Joseph, reflects the work of a priest who, in Fr. Joseph’s assessment, has become “obsessed with the devil” and now attributes all sorts of things to evil spirits.

This is Ripperger’s most fundamental deception: he dresses up a modern, extra-Catholic invention as ancient tradition, and his audience — trusting his collar and his confident delivery — has no way to know the difference.

Conspiracy culture, not Catholic theology

In the preview clips, Ripperger claims that the idea of extraterrestrial life “is heavily rooted in the evolutionary hypothesis” and dismisses evolution itself as scientifically, theologically, and philosophically problematic. He has rejected biological evolution outright — not on the basis of serious reasoning, but because, as he has explained, he dismissed the idea as “absurd” when he first heard it as a teenager. Rather than engage with the Church’s long tradition of dialogue between faith and science, Ripperger appeals to junk science, Protestant fundamentalism, and superstition, interpreting the natural world through rigid “first principles” of his own design that lead him to bizarre conclusions about UFOs, aliens, and the preternatural that have more in common with pop culture tropes of the 1970s and 80s than Catholic tradition.

Last year Ripperger spoke at a conference alongside geocentrist and antisemite Robert Sungenis — and affirmed that he too is a geocentrist (someone who believes the sun orbits the earth), saying, “This is why geocentrism plays such an key role in this, because if we are at the center of the universe you know, at least in relationship to mass, the fact is that you know then that then there is something different about us that’s not the same as anywhere else” (beginning at timestamp 49:25).

A pattern of harm

The problems don’t end with fabricated traditions and junk science. Ripperger’s views on women are degrading and dangerous. In a documentary he produced with Timothy Gordon for Candace Owens’s platform, he advances a strict authoritarian vision in which wives are bound to obey their husbands in everything but sin. He claims that women’s resistance to male authority is rooted in “the curse of Eve” and that demons exploit women to undermine men. Any challenge by a woman to male authority is pre-interpreted as a spiritual defect or demonic influence, and he asserted that even “tradwives” are unduly influenced by feminism.

His teaching on marriage builds from this. Ripperger frames sexual relations within a marriage almost entirely in terms of obligation and enforcement, dismissing even a headache as an insufficient reason to refuse the marital act, noting that “consent” was given once and for all on the wedding day. Ripperger explicitly rejects the Church’s covenantal language for marriage in favor of describing it as a contract centered on “a conferral of bodily rights.” In this framework, consent as an ongoing moral reality effectively disappears. This line of thinking gives husbands a sense of entitlement backed by the threat of mortal sin — a system that easily normalizes, excuses, or even sanctifies spousal abuse.

And then there is the question of whether Ripperger even understands what he’s talking about. As the above quote on geocentrism shows, when his spoken words are transcribed, many of his statements amount to little more than unsubstantiated claims padded with jargon and filler words. His supposed expertise in Thomistic philosophy was recently examined by scholastic scholar V.J. Tarantino, who found one of his talks to be “pseudo-Scholastic utter nonsense.” Although the outside package can seem impressive — a nerdy, confident, erudite-seeming priest with a reputation for being an expert in many disciplines rattling off big words and complicated sentences — when scholars put his words under a microscope, what is revealed is sprawling, terminologically overburdened text that is “all gibberish,” as Tarantino put it. Fr. Chad Ripperger is, as a friend with a PhD in philosophy put it plainly, “a stupid person’s idea of a smart person.”

But perhaps the single most concretely dangerous thing Ripperger has said is this: he has claimed that he has been able to get every single person who has come to him diagnosed with bipolar disorder “completely off their meds” within three months by following his protocols. He has claimed on multiple occasions that bipolar disorder is “demonic obsession.” In one video, now removed from YouTube, he said, “Cases of bipolar are in fact cases of demonic obsession. I have always, every time I’ve listened to the explanation or the diagnostic from modern psychologists about a, um, bipolar, I just like, well, send the guy to an exorcist.”

This claim — which undermines years of work to combat the stigma of mental illness by associating it with demonic possession — is not just wrong. It is dangerous to vulnerable people who may stop taking prescribed medication on the word of a priest with no medical training.

Archbishop-designate Golka

Ripperger has operated in the Archdiocese of Denver since 2016, when his Doloran Fathers were instituted as a public association of the faithful under Archbishop Samuel Aquila, who has remained supportive of Ripperger despite his heterodoxy, his dangerous views, and the controversies surrounding him. Recently, Bishop James Golka of Colorado Springs was announced as the sixth Archbishop of Denver, replacing the now-retired Aquila. He will be installed on March 25. That means Golka is about to become Ripperger’s new ordinary, with direct authority over the priest and his society.

When I first heard the announcement, I was concerned because Golka appeared alongside Ripperger at a men’s conference in Colorado Springs last November. He and Ripperger also appeared together at a diocesan rosary rally in 2023. The extent of their collaboration is unclear, but the association is concerning. I have been told, however, that Bishop Golka is a pastoral bishop in the mold of Pope Francis. I hope he will take a serious look at what Ripperger is teaching under his authority.

A word to new readers

If you’re hearing about Fr. Chad Ripperger for the first time through the Shawn Ryan Show, I understand the appeal. He sounds confident, learned, and authoritative. He talks about demons, end times, and spiritual combat in ways that feel urgent and real. But I would encourage you to look more closely before taking his message to heart. His claims about the Church Fathers don’t hold up to scrutiny. His views on women and marriage are harmful. His supposed philosophical and theological expertise does not hold up to scrutiny. And his advice on mental health is genuinely dangerous.

Ripperger isn’t just wrong about obscure points of theology. Real people are being harmed by his teachings, his false claims of authority, and his manipulation of vulnerable believers searching for spiritual meaning. Since I began writing about Ripperger in 2024, dozens of people have reached out to me to tell me about the harm he has caused in their lives. Please, for the sake of your well-being — spiritual, emotional, and physical — approach what he says with extreme caution.

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Image: YouTube screenshot from Shawn Ryan Show preview.