It has been a little over a month since we published my article on the problematic and heterodox teachings of the Denver-based exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger, “The bizarre and dangerous views of a celebrity exorcist,” and it appears that it has had at least some concrete impact.
Perhaps the most significant effect (assuming it wasn’t just an incredible coincidence) was the quiet removal of Fr. Ripperger’s interviews with popular Catholic speaker Chris Stefanick from the FORMED platform — a Catholic streaming video service that has sold thousands of subscriptions to parishes, which allows their parishioners to access its content for free. The videos featuring Ripperger were the most watched on FORMED, with millions of views. His interviews also no longer appear on Stefanick’s YouTube channel, with the exception of a pre-Halloween episode from last year, billed as “the spookiest episode to date,” which has been viewed over 700,000 times.
Obviously the removal of this little chunk of online content (assuming it is even permanent) is barely a drop in the ocean of Ripperger online content, but at least ordinary Catholics will no longer be introduced to his content through a parish-provided resource (unless, of course, your pastor is already promoting him).
Most of the personal feedback I’ve received has been positive. I’ve heard from priests, theologians, and even a diocesan exorcist who are grateful for the work I’ve done to expose Fr. Ripperger’s harmful views. For the most part, the negative feedback I’ve received has been, to put it bluntly, unserious.
“Hit piece” refuted
The most extensive commentary the article has received came from Catholic media personality Jesse Romero and Fr. Ripperger’s lay assistant, Kyle Clement, who described my article as a hit piece. They spent 50 minutes on Romero’s radio show Catholic 911 describing me as a “man of the left” (followed by a debate over whether a real man can be described as “left”) and a “woke Catholic modernist.” They suggest that I was motivated to write the article by “plain simple jealousy, maybe even envy of Father Ripperger’s accomplishments,” and that my attempt was akin to “a white belt like the Karate Kid trying to criticize Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee.”
They also questioned my credentials, noting that Fr. Ripperger has written around 3,000 pages on spiritual warfare and asking, “How much has Mike Lewis written on spiritual warfare? Has Mike Lewis ever sat in a solemn session of exorcism? Mike Lewis … in his former life was he an exorcist?”
Here is a 10-minute clip of Romero and Clement’s critical analysis of my piece that was posted on YouTube:
You can watch or listen to all 50 minutes here. Romero and Clement run out of time before they have a chance to comment on most of my criticisms in the piece, but they are rather effective in painting a portrait of me as a woke modernist and spiritual “white belt.” They barely touch on my critique of Ripperger’s statements. The only one they discuss at any length is Ripperger’s claim that, “There has not been a single solitary individual who has come to me that’s been diagnosed as bipolar that’s on meds that I haven’t been able to get completely off their meds and straightened out in three months if they do certain things. Not one.” To be clear, my concern is that Fr. Ripperger claimed, explicitly, that he’s been able to get every single person that has come to him with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder “completely off their meds.”
Rather than address that claim, Romero and Clement downgrade and dodge the concern I pointed to, with Clement asserting, “Demons have access to our emotions and passions, and so of course this is been this is been documented by many people outside outside of Father Ripperger about the fact that that diabolical oppression — bipolar — it can be diabolic, in fact.” The words “can be” carry a different implication than “there has not been a single solitary individual.” I never said it “can’t be” diabolic, I objected to Ripperger’s claim that it always is.
Why do I bring up this ridiculous podcast? Because our Catholic leaders need to understand that many members of the flock are consuming and allowing their faith to be formed by this type of content. These well-meaning Catholics think what they are hearing and seeing from figures like Ripperger, Romero, and Clement is “authentic” Catholicism. Many of the 167 comments on the video reflect this. For example, one viewer wrote:
I have learned more from Father Ripperger than I have from 6 years of Catholic education, without a doubt. Did catholic education teach me spiritual warfare? No. Did catholic education teach me how to combat evil? Not really. Father Ripperger did 100%.
Another wrote:
Agree with you guys 100%Fr. Ripperger is amazing. I have his book, Deliverance Prayers for use by Laity, I use it daily. I say the Commission of the Care of the Soul and Body. Many powerful prayers in this book
And another:
With a sweet pang in my heart, I can say I am indebted to Fr. Ripperger for all the blessings God has bestowed through this faithful servent (Fr R). Nothing is sweeter than to have ones mind enlighted towards God (precisely what the Devil hates). May God bless us, and Our Lady protect us.
And also:
Fr. Chad Ripperger is the only priest I would listen to and trust here on YouTube. Probably the most intelligent and man since St Thomas Aquinas. Plus he is an ordained priest who has the authority to teach such topics, lay people not as much
I don’t blame these people for their blind devotion to a seriously problematic priest. Much of the blame goes to media figures like Stefanick, Romero, and Clement who mislead them. But it also goes to Catholic leaders, especially bishops, who dismiss this as unimportant — nothing more than the irrational lunacy of a reactionary fringe group. There is a refusal to acknowledge that this stuff is becoming mainstream. Many bishops are unaware of just how pervasive this ideology is among their people and their priests — but they need to be.
An unexpected critic
My concerns with Ripperger are not bound by ideology. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across two blog posts about Ripperger written by Maureen Mullarkey in late September. I haven’t heard much from Mullarkey since 2015, when her blog at First Things was cancelled after she penned an article that made “the accusation that the Vatican is conspiring with the Obama administration to destroy the foundations of freedom and hobble the developed world.”
Maureen Mullarkey was one of the first outspoken papal critics, reaching levels of bombast and anti-Francis vitriol in 2014 and 2015 that most reactionary extremist Catholics couldn’t imagine until Viganò was going full QAnon in mid-2020. Which is why her criticism of Ripperger is important. The problem with Ripperger isn’t that he’s “orthodox” or “traditional” or “conservative.” The problem with Ripperger is that he is indoctrinating countless vulnerable Catholics with dangerous, superstitious nonsense.
In her first post, Mullarkey compares Ripperger to a wizard, suggesting that many of the deliverance prayers he promotes read more like spells or incantations. She questions his condemnation of Harry Potter, observing, “It is an odd stance for a man with a bent for soft-core spell casting himself.”
Regarding the deliverance prayer Ripperger wrote for the 2020 election, she writes, “This is hocus pocus—necromancy mimicking Christian prayer with an Aquinasy-sounding riff on phrasing pulled from the Summa.” She adds, “Fr. Ripperger uses St. Thomas to daze rather than inform.”
Unlike Romero’s critique of my article, however, Mullarkey criticizes the substance of Ripperger’s material. She writes, “The Angelic Doctor treats external/exterior goods quite differently. For Aquinas, material resources facilitate good actions by which the habit of virtue is acquired. Together they enliven contemplation of a higher Good.” She compares this principle to passages from Ripperger’s prayer, including: “external goods are necessary, not as belonging to the essence of happiness, but by serving as instruments to happiness, which consists in an operation of virtue.”
Mullarkey then comments, “The great saint’s rigor of mind is lost on a self-styled Thomist who does not think through the absurd implications of his own recipe for warding off evil. Ripperger’s consecration is not a petition. It is a spoken spell to insure pragmatic goals.”
In her post, Mullarkey puts into words what I have been trying to say about the Fr. Ripperger phenomenon:
“It is hard to shake the impression that, behind the simulacrum of rationality, Ripperger is less cogent than his online persona suggests.”
In her second post on Fr. Ripperger, Mullarkey analyzes one of the exorcist’s now-removed interviews with Chris Stefanick. She comments, as I did in my article, on Ripperger’s outward presentation of unwavering confidence:
“Ripperger’s smug confidence in his own judgment derives from his having been selected for this line of work by a demon itself. More precisely, God chose him but a demon confirmed the choice. Our exorcist confided this tidbit online in his Q&A with a star-struck Stefanick.”
Since the video has been taken down, I can’t verify that claim, but it is consistent with Ripperger’s tendency to quote what demons tell him in conversation. Mullarkey gets even more incisive in her commentary:
“Ripperger’s self-created image as a technician of esoteric power and protocol is laced with vanity. To proclaim oneself chosen by God, by the Virgin Mary, and by some elitist hell-fiend with preferences—that’s a helluva curriculum vitae. It follows the pattern of hagiographic lore widespread in the Early and High Middle Ages. A demon’s preference was considered supernatural evidence of the sanctity of the exorcist.”
Mullarkey also critiques Ripperger’s approach to psychology and his rejection of modern science at length, writing:
The genius of St. Thomas, exceptional as it was, was also that of a thirteenth century man. He inherited from Aristotle and the physician Galen the humeral theory which held that four bodily fluids—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—determined a person’s temperament and behavior. Any imbalance in the humors led to certain sicknesses of body and mind.
The idea that these humors were connected to celestial bodies, seasons, body parts, and stages of life, were staples of the scientific thinking of Aquinas’s day. Thomas inherited the ancient belief that stars and planets played a role in the behavior of the physical world and in ourselves. He also accepted the conviction that full human life did not begin until ensoulment took place some 40-80 or so days after conception. Earlier for males; later for females. [All the same, he condemned abortion.]
Aquinas died before William Harvey’s 1628 discovery of systemic blood circulation, an anatomical revelation that presaged the waning of humeral theory. Aquinas had been dead six hundred years before an Augustinian abbot, Gregor Mendel, introduced the world to genetics and the hereditary effect of genes (which contribute to personality traits.) Neurology, still in its infancy in the seventeeth century, continued to expand in the twentieth. Knowledge of the nervous system and its intricate role in cognition, behavior, emotion, and memory, has bearing on the subject of possession that was inaccessible to Aquinas.
My point in sharing all this is simply to point out that Fr. Chad Ripperger has been given a very wide platform to share problematic (and often heterodox, superstitious, and dangerous) ideas to rank-and-file Catholics, and very few in Church leadership (least of all his own archbishop) seem terribly concerned about this. This is not a left-or-right issue, this is a call to Catholic leaders on the left, right, and anywhere in between to realize that Fr. Chad Ripperger is promoting anti-Catholic lies and superstitions to many gullible people.
Mike Lewis is the founding managing editor of Where Peter Is. He and Jeannie Gaffigan co-host Field Hospital, a U.S. Catholic podcast.
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