Celebrity exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger has become a prominent and authoritative voice in certain Catholic media circles, captivating large in-person and online audiences with his opinions on topics ranging from demonology to space aliens to Harry Potter. He is something of a religious guru to many of his followers — perhaps a “Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee” of traditional Catholicism — and an expert in spiritual warfare and theology. On the surface, he plays the part well: he presents himself with a tone of erudition and always has a ready response to any question posed to him, never missing a beat. He presents himself as a defender of tradition in an age of moral and cultural confusion, and his reputation as an exorcist lends his claims about sin, demons, curses, and deliverance an aura of credibility, which appeals to Catholics unsettled by world events and the state of contemporary culture.

But confidence is not fidelity, nor is it competence. And a clerical collar does not place a priest’s public teaching beyond scrutiny.

Ripperger is currently promoting a documentary starring himself along with Timothy Gordon, What a Woman Is, hosted on political pundit and Catholic convert Candace Owens’s website. In the film’s trailer and across multiple appearances on social media to discuss the film — including an appearance during production on Gordon’s YouTube channel in January 2025, and another episode last week to celebrate the film’s release —Ripperger offers a view of women and a framework for marriage that goes well beyond a sharp critique of modern feminism or the promotion of Christian married life. Ripperger’s vision is strict authoritarianism, in which wives are bound to obey their husbands in everything but sin. His views are built on a suspicious anthropology of women, a rigid theory of male dominance, and a spiritual-warfare narrative that treats disagreement as a symptom of disorder — sometimes psychological, sometimes diabolical.

Like many of Ripperger’s ideas, it is difficult to place his worldview in the Catholic tradition beyond a few carefully-mined quotes. What’s different about his views on women and marriage is that — unlike his beliefs on young Earth creationism, generational spirits and curses, and Harry Potter — his understanding of patriarchy doesn’t really map onto any fundamentalist Protestant models, either.

Protestant fundamentalist models of patriarchy — such as Quiverfull or the Promise Keepers movement, promoted by figures such as Bill Gothard and Doug Phillips — do emphasize male headship and wifely submission, but they at least attempt to cloak these demands in the language of male responsibility, sacrificial leadership, and slogans like “women and children first.” The worldview advanced by Ripperger and Gordon, however, lacks even this minimal rhetorical softening. Little is said about the husband’s concrete moral duties, while considerable attention is paid to policing female resistance, warning against “domination,” and enforcing obedience as a matter of order rather than charity. What emerges is a stark framework in which hierarchy functions less as a sacrifice for men and more as a disciplinary expectation imposed on women.

In the Gordon/Ripperger model, husbands must hold a standing right to “final decision” authority. Ripperger repeatedly claims that women’s resistance to male authority is rooted in “the curse of Eve,” and says that demons exploit women to undermine men. In their banter, there are no warnings about men taking this authority too far or admonitions that husbands must sacrifice or “lay down their lives” for their wives. Instead, he hands would-be abusers a religious vocabulary for domination. This has the potential to train frightened Catholic women to confuse obedience with safety — and to interpret abusive behavior from husbands as the result of their failure to obey.

In my past articles about Fr. Ripperger’s troubling ideas, I did not respond directly to his views on women because I believed they deserved their own article. In the course of researching for this series, I realized that it will need more than one article. Ripperger does not treat feminism as one problem among many. He treats it as the decisive obstacle to moral and social stability. In the January video he says, “This country will never get its footing and get solidified morally, spiritually, but even societally, until feminism is properly addressed. There’s no other way to do it.”

The definition of feminism used by Gordon and Ripperger is extraordinarily broad. At one point in the January video, Ripperger asserts, “In fact, I find most trad women are just crypto feminists, ultimately.” Gordon immediately concurs: “Me too … we have talked about it. You said like 80%. And I was like, Father, it’s like 95.” Ripperger responds without hesitation, “Yeah, I was being generous. I was being generous.”

What this exchange reveals is not rhetorical excess but ideological scope. In their framework, “feminism” is not confined to explicit political advocacy or doctrinal dissent. It encompasses Catholics who embrace traditional aesthetics, traditional family structures, and even self-identified traditionalists — as long as women retain meaningful agency, judgment, or resistance within marriage. For Ripperger and Gordon, feminism becomes less a coherent ideology than a catch-all term for insufficient submission.

According to Ripperger and Gordon, even the vast majority of today’s “tradwives” aren’t traditional enough. In this worldview, not even the much-lauded bread-baking, gardening, homeschooling, fashion-friendly, Instagram-savvy tradwife has escaped the pervasive stench of feminism. She still isn’t submissive enough.

In a “Sensus Fidelium” podcast interview last week, Ripperger made this logic explicit. He claimed that when a wife works outside the home and “starts providing for herself and also providing for the family,” it produces “a kind of feminizing effect” on men that “takes a chink out of his armor.” A wife having economic agency is not framed as a prudential arrangement, a shared discernment, or a response to concrete family needs, but as a spiritual and psychological threat to male identity and household order.

Ripperger then raises the stakes. Feminism, in his telling, is not a complex modern phenomenon with differing approaches or a diverse movement with varied strengths and shortcomings. It is a replay of Genesis itself, directed by the Evil One. In the same podcast, Ripperger asserts that “Satan goes after Eve to undo Adam,” and that “the way Satan’s going to destroy the family is by subverting the proper order within the context of the family.” He goes on to describe feminism as “rehashed communism,” and collapses ideological opponents into a single spiritualized enemy by claiming that “communism and diabolic psychology” are “the same,” adding bluntly, “it’s the same thing with the left.”

When these elements are combined, the result is a closed system. A single political diagnosis (“feminism”), a spiritual-warfare narrative (“Satan’s strategy”), and a psychology of dissent (“they’re masters at psychologically getting to you”) reinforce one another. Within that system, disagreement cannot simply be disagreement. It becomes evidence of disorder. Ripperger warns that critics are trying to convince believers that “there’s something psychologically wrong with you,” then insists that their own positions “demonstrate a lack of rational stability.”

In his parish talk in Charlotte back in March of this year, Ripperger bluntly laid out the implications of the curse of Eve on women:

“When Adam and Eve fell, the punishment after the fall fit the crime that they committed. So what does this mean in the context of the woman when she ate the apple outside the proper dominion of her husband? It meant therefore that the punishment fit the crime. That meant that she will — that women after that, and Eve and all women after that — will strive to try and dominate their husband. And this is something that they have to work on.”

This kind of rhetoric is meant to condition people. It trains women to distrust their own perceptions, moral instincts, and experiences of harm before the conversation even begins. When a wife’s resistance is pre-interpreted as spiritual defect, psychological instability, or demonic influence, the space for genuine discernment collapses. In such a framework, coercion can easily be called “order,” control masquerades as “headship,” and suffering silently through spousal abuse can be reframed as obedience. That is precisely why this theology is not merely wrong, but dangerous — because it supplies the conceptual architecture that can normalize, excuse, or even sanctify spousal abuse long before anyone ever uses that word.

The implications

The immediate problem is doctrinal: Ripperger’s framework collides directly with the Church’s teaching on marriage as communion, friendship, and mutual self-gift. Catholic tradition does not treat marriage as a hierarchy of power, but as a covenant ordered toward the sanctification and flourishing of both spouses. Authority within marriage is always bounded by justice, charity, and conscience — never insulated from moral scrutiny by appeals to “order” or spiritual warfare.

The deeper problem, however, is pastoral. The system Ripperger advances can be used — easily and predictably — as a religious rationale for coercion and abuse. In the real world, “headship” language becomes dangerous when it is fused to suspicion of women, stripped of reciprocal obligation, and shielded from correction by demonology. That combination can lead a terrified spouse to believe that setting boundaries is rebellion, that seeking help is disobedience, and that enduring control is holiness. When resistance is pre-interpreted as spiritual defect or psychological instability, genuine discernment becomes nearly impossible.

This is precisely why the Church has always insisted that conscience must be formed and followed, that authority exists for service rather than domination, and that the Sacrament of Matrimony is ordered toward the good of the spouses. Gaudium et Spes describes marriage as an “intimate partnership of life and love,” not an arrangement in which one spouse permanently rules the other. And in Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis insists that families are not healed by control, but by patience, mercy, and the slow work of mutual growth — by a love that becomes fruitful, not a hierarchy that becomes brittle.

With Ripperger, the pitch is always the same: following the proper order (as he preaches it) will cure the chaos. But the Church’s actual tradition has a more realistic view of sin and a more humane view of grace. It knows that “order” can become a mask for domination. It also knows that the Gospel does not sanctify coercion. It sanctifies love.

In the next installment, I will examine what the Catholic Church actually teaches about authority, conscience, and marriage — and how sharply those teachings diverge from the model Ripperger promotes. I will also address the contemptuous and demeaning language he uses about women and why that rhetoric matters. Finally, I will turn to the question of ecclesial responsibility: what it means when a priest with a large public platform advances ideas that place the faithful at risk — emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually — and why meaningful pastoral oversight cannot be deferred indefinitely. Fr. Ripperger’s archbishop has passed retirement age. What challenges must his successor address?

To be continued…

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Image: Timothy Gordon and Fr. Chad Ripperger. YouTube Screenshot.