Part 2 of a series examining Fr. Chad Ripperger’s public teachings on women, marriage, and patriarchy — and their consequences.

In Part 1 of this series, I examined Fr. Chad Ripperger’s public claims about women in general: that they are uniquely prone to emotional disorder, inclined toward control, and spiritually impeded by what he calls “the curse of Eve.” Those claims do not remain abstract. They are carried directly into his teaching on marriage, where they become prescriptions governing authority, sexuality, work, money, obedience, and even salvation. This second part focuses on Ripperger’s public teachings and opinions, where his ideas cease to be theoretical and begin to impact people and families.

The Church’s doctrine of marriage is demanding. It calls spouses to lifelong fidelity, self-gift, patience, sacrifice, and conversion. But it does not demand submission through humiliation, collapse consent into obligation, or baptize domination as holiness. When marriage is taught primarily as a hierarchy enforced by fear of sin, demonology, and shame, it stops functioning as a sacrament of communion and begins to operate as a disciplinary system. The stakes here are not abstract. Ordinary Catholics attempt to implement Ripperger’s distorted and theologically unsound views in their lives, and real damage is done to marriages and families.

Clerical misogyny

The problem with Fr. Chad Ripperger’s philosophy of marriage is not simply its emphasis on authority, but the persistent contempt with which wives are described, evaluated, and instructed. This is not a matter of tone or rhetorical excess. Language forms consciences. Repeated patterns of speech teach listeners what is normal, what is expected, and what kinds of suffering should be quietly endured. Across multiple talks — including those addressed explicitly to “wives and mothers” — women are not primarily treated as people with dignity, agency, and conscience who are united in communion with their spouses, but as risks to be managed, liabilities to be constrained, and sources of disorder — unless properly governed.

In a talk titled “Spiritual Warfare in Marriage,” available on YouTube (video), Ripperger frames sexual relations within marriage almost entirely in terms of obligation and enforcement. “If one of the spouses reasonably asks for the conjugal act, it must be rendered,” he says. “Otherwise, it’s mortally sinful to deny that request.” He continues: “After the marriage, it’s no longer a gift, it’s an obligation … Your contract didn’t say, ‘I’ll render the marital debt when I feel like it.’” In this framework, consent as an ongoing moral reality effectively disappears. What remains is entitlement backed by the threat of mortal sin.

That logic becomes more disturbing when Ripperger addresses situations in which a wife refuses sex. In the same talk, he explicitly dismisses a headache as a legitimate reason to refuse the marital act: “On the other hand, a headache doesn’t suffice. Sorry, I got a headache.” While he allows that extreme incapacity might justify refusal, the baseline posture is one of suspicion. A woman’s explanation is treated not as morally meaningful in itself, but as something to be evaluated for compliance. This is not how the Catholic Church understands marital intimacy, which must always remain free, mutual, and expressive of love rather than enforced under threat of sin.

Ripperger reinforces this coercive framing by rejecting covenantal language in favor of a narrowly contractual account of marriage. “Marriage is defined as a solemn contract, not a covenant,” he states, adding that it is a contract precisely because it involves “a conferral of bodily rights.” He contrasts this with what he portrays as a post–Vatican II shift away from what he calls “the obligations of justice.” When marriage is framed primarily as a contract governing access to another person’s body, a transactional approach emerges. Treating sexual availability as something owed rather than freely given creates conditions in which coercion can be rationalized as fidelity.

Beyond condemning a spouse who refuses to “render the marital debt,” Ripperger offers no guidance about how to respond when one spouse does not consent to sex. At around the 20-minute mark of his talk, he simply reiterates his beliefs about the obligatory nature of the marital contract, framing reluctance or refusal by one spouse as the product of demonic suggestion rather than as a morally significant situation requiring discernment, patience, and sacrifice:

“The demons suggest to people various things which make them think they have sufficient reason to deny the marital debt. You know, ‘He’s not being romantic, therefore you can deny the marital debt.’ Or they tend to think that rendering the marital debt after marriage is something that’s voluntary.

Well, in a certain sense it is, because you have to choose to actually fulfill your obligations. But it’s not voluntary in the sense that, after you’re married, that somehow or another it’s at your discretion when you pass out this good, so to speak.

So that’s an important fact. You’ll hear the phrase ‘gift of self.’ Now, that phrase can actually have a legitimate meaning. ‘Gift’ means it’s gratuitous, that you don’t have to give it — which means it’s only true on the day of your marriage. That’s the day when the gift itself occurs. After that, it’s a gift; it’s an obligation. And the demons have subtly pushed this idea that, well, since it’s a gift, I can just say whenever I want to and when I don’t.”

What is striking here is not only what Ripperger says, but what he does not say. He does not state that a husband must respect his wife’s refusal in all circumstances. He does not acknowledge consent as a continuing moral reality within marriage. He does not caution against coercion, manipulation, or the misuse of authority. The absence of such qualifications leaves open the possibility that obligation will be interpreted unilaterally, particularly by listeners already inclined toward control.

In this framework, the risk is not merely theoretical. Emphasizing sexual obligation without explicit limits or safeguards can create conditions in which coercion is rationalized as duty and resistance is interpreted as sin. In the most serious cases, such reasoning can be invoked by abusers to excuse sexual abuse, including marital rape — not because these acts are endorsed, but because the moral language needed to name and resist them is never supplied.

When a priest’s public teaching omits clear prohibitions against coercion while stressing obligation in absolute terms, it raises legitimate concerns about how that teaching may be received and applied in vulnerable situations.

This omission is especially notable when Ripperger’s approach is compared with other faith-based hierarchical or patriarchal models, which at least attempt to articulate boundaries or warnings against abuse. In Ripperger’s account, marriage is presented through abstract categories — “first principles,” “right reason,” “natural law” — applied without sustained attention to power imbalances or the potential for grave harm. Obligation is defined with precision; protection from potentially dangerous and abusive situations is not.

Contemptuous rhetoric about women

The disrespectful way Ripperger speaks about women becomes even more explicit in a separate talk addressed to “Wives and Mothers,” also posted publicly on YouTube (video). There, he advises men considering marriage: “I always tell guys who are thinking about marrying: marry a virtuous woman. I don’t care how ugly she is. I don’t care if you have to put a lamb chop around her face to make her appealing. If she has virtue, you’ll be happy the rest of your life.” He offers this line without explanation, distancing, or pastoral framing.

The remark is striking not only for its cruelty, but for its bizarre and unexplained reliance on pop-culture references. The “lamb chop” image echoes a joke popularized by comedian Rodney Dangerfield (“when I was a kid, I was so ugly my parents would tie a pork chop around my neck so the dog would play with me”), and the closing phrase (“you’ll be happy the rest of your life”) evokes the lyrics of Jimmy Soul’s chart-topping 1963 novelty hit, “The Ugly Wife Song.” Ripperger does not acknowledge these sources, nor does he explain why he is importing mid-century stand-up comedy and novelty music tropes into a clerical setting that carries moral authority. The effect is to normalize ridicule of women’s bodies as harmless humor within spiritual instruction.

In the same talk, Ripperger frames motherhood itself as a kind of aesthetic loss. “Women actually end up usually, in the normal course of things, sacrificing a certain degree of their beauty because they’re having children,” he says. The issue is not acknowledging that pregnancy and childbirth change bodies. It is the evaluative frame: beauty is something women “sacrifice,” something men lose, something to be endured rather than honored. Desire, attraction, and affection for one’s spouse are treated as trivial or suspect, while women are subtly instructed to expect diminishment as part of their vocation.

This rhetoric is part of a broader pattern in which women are held disproportionately responsible for the emotional and spiritual health of the household. In the same “Wives and Mothers” talk, Ripperger claims that “the wife and the mother can either break or make the tenor of a household,” and insists that if the wife is not virtuous, “nobody will be happy.” The moral burden of harmony is placed squarely on the wife, while male withdrawal or disengagement is implicitly normalized as a response to female failure.

Ripperger’s language also normalizes economic dependence and verbal humiliation. He speaks derisively of women who work outside the home: “I’ve never met a woman who works full time when she doesn’t need to who’s happy.” At another point, he goes further, suggesting that if men had properly asserted themselves earlier, they would have told women to “shut your yap, and go home and take care of the children” (at around the 40:50 mark in the video). This is not a theological argument about vocational discernment. It is crude, dismissive language that trains listeners to associate female speech with disorder and male preferences with authority.

Throughout these talks, women’s resistance is consistently pathologized. When women object to control, question authority, or assert boundaries, their response is rarely treated as morally intelligible disagreement. Instead, it is diagnosed as evidence of Eve’s curse, feminist ideology, or spiritual disorder. Once resistance is framed in cosmic terms, disagreement becomes rebellion and assertiveness becomes sin. This is a classic feature of spiritually coercive systems: harm is reinterpreted as holiness, and obedience is sold as safety.

What is striking in all of this is how impersonal the rhetoric remains. Women are discussed almost exclusively as categories — wives, mothers, temptations, sources of control — rather than as concrete persons. These talks do not speak about women as companions or equals. This is not tradition. Catholic tradition does not teach women to accept humiliation as formation or coercion as virtue. It does not instruct wives to distrust their own judgment, bodies, or instincts in the name of holiness. And it does not define sanctity as the shrinking of one person so that another’s authority can expand without resistance. The rhetoric documented here is not an unfortunate excess layered on top of otherwise sound teaching. It is the foundation of Ripperger’s very public message to married people.

He is a priest in good standing in the Archdiocese of Denver who travels the country to train priests and speak to the faithful — and that is why his words demand serious scrutiny. That question of accountability is where Part 3 will take up the discussion directly.

To be continued…

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Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash