Upon Cardinal Robert McElroy’s promotion to the post of archbishop of Washington, I authored an article titled “The Devil in D.C.” That should provide some indication of my thoughts on McElroy. The cardinal has distinguished himself as a proponent of left-wing ideology infiltrating the Catholic Church, from promoting same-sex relationships and mass immigration to excusing abortion advocacy and protecting clerical sexual abusers. Now, McElroy can add a new feather to his progressive cap: firing an exorcist. Yes, the priest tasked with driving out demons for the archdiocese was recently fired from his position by McElroy.
“The Archdiocese of Washington announced … that Robert Cardinal McElroy has removed Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, a priest of the Diocese of Syracuse, N.Y., as an exorcist of the Archdiocese of Washington, and ended all affiliation between the archdiocese and the Saint Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal located in Washington, D.C.,” the Archdiocese of Washington said in a press release last week.
Rossetti, a licensed psychologist, has served as an exorcist for the archdiocese for years. He founded the St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal as a ministry dedicated to deliverance and exorcism. The archdiocese continued, “Cardinal McElroy said that statements made by Monsignor Rossetti linking UFOs to demonic presence and the Center’s recent use of social media gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons[,] and exorcism.”
In a recent YouTube video that was subsequently deleted, Rossetti stated his “personal belief,” based on his experience combatting demons and working with those influenced or afflicted by demons, that “probably many, if not most” unidentified flying object (UFO) encounters or experiences are demonic activity. “There’s a danger here, and I want to raise that as an exorcist, I want to raise that danger, and that is that demons like to hide. They don’t want us to know they’re around. They don’t want us to know what they’re doing because they’re more effective when we don’t realize it,” Rossetti said. “They can kind of get into your head, you know, and manipulate things in the world to influence us to do evil,” he added. “The fight we have in this world, this spiritual battle is with the evil one.”
Contra McElroy, Rossetti’s statement in no way undermines the longstanding teachings of the Catholic Church on demonic activity, and certainly not “gravely” so. In fact, many theologians and exorcists have made similar suggestions to Rossetti’s. In a recent interview on The Shawn Ryan Show, renowned exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger noted similarities between instances of demonic oppression or obsession and reports of extraterrestrial encounters. “If you strip the veneer of the alien aspect of it off … what you’re dealing with is just … they’re just demons,” Ripperger stated. He noted at least 10 parallels between demonic behavior in cases of oppression or obsession and reported encounters with aliens or UFOs. The veteran exorcist also pointed out that, in cases of demonic possession, demons sometimes manifest in the form of what are generally considered “aliens,” with grey skin, large eyes, bulbous heads, small mouths, etc. and claim to be something other than demons.
[A] better question would be asking why a Catholic cardinal … fired the man responsible for combatting and exposing demons in that archdiocese.
Both Rossetti and Ripperger are careful not to assert that there is no such thing as extraterrestrial life or extraterrestrial intelligence. Instead, the two note, based on their decades of intense experiences with the demonic, that there are startling similarities between the behavior of demons and the typical presentation of supposed extraterrestrial encounters. Whether or not life on other planets exists is, to Rossetti’s and Ripperger’s points, immaterial. The emphasis here is on the demonic. The Catechism of the Catholic Church stipulates that demons lie and deceive, and frequently attempt to hide or disguise their presence. Sacred Scripture informs us that Satan is “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). It therefore makes sense that demons would attempt to disguise their presence.
The Catholic Church is full of stories of Saints who physically fought against the demons. St. John Vianney was physically tormented by Satan himself, who would appear in the parish priest’s bedroom as a snarling wolf or light his bed on fire. St. Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio) would physically wrestle with Satan. Demons would appear to St. Teresa of Avila and mock her for praying at all times. However, these appearances occurred in the lives of Saints, holy men and women who led lives of extreme virtue and who the Catholic Church officially declares to be in Heaven. What good would hiding be at that point, for the demons? They had hidden for years, tempting these Saints, trying to corrupt their wills and ensnare their souls, all to no avail. Ripperger explains that such Saints physically wrestled with the demons because their souls had already been perfected through sacrifice and self-mortification while still living on earth, and that fighting demons “in the flesh,” so to speak, was simply next level of spiritual warfare to which they had graduated.
The assertion that demons may appear as extraterrestrial beings in no way undermines or contradicts the Church’s teachings on demons, nor does it contradict the Church’s teaching on any other subject. The Catholic Church has no official dogma on whether or not there is intelligent life on other planets, although prominent Catholic thinkers and theologians over the years have argued both for an against the possibility. The late Dr. Paul Thigpen, whose own experiences with the demonic led him to convert to the Catholic faith, discussed the subject in his book Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Faith: Are We Alone in the Universe with God and the Angels? At its heart, the question of intelligent life on other planets is a scientific one, not a theological one.
In his celebrated science fiction trilogy, C.S. Lewis explores the possibility of intelligent life on other planets in the context of Christian morality and theology. Although not himself a Catholic, Lewis did conclude that the existence of intelligent life on other planets would in no way contradict the Christian faith. In Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of the trio, the protagonist Elwin Ransom is kidnapped and taken to Mars, where he discovers three species of intelligent alien life forms. None of them are human, and the angels (called eldila in Lewis’s books) successfully prevented Satan from leading the Martians into sin; thus, there was no need for God to take on their form and redeem them. In the second book, Perelandra, Ransom travels to Venus on a divine mission to prevent a second fall of man. There, he is shocked to find not some strange, alien life form, but essentially another human being. When he questions the Venusian’s appearance, she explains that since God became man on Earth, all other intelligent, spiritual life created afterward must take the form of its Maker. So far, so good.
It is in the conclusion to his trilogy, That Hideous Strength, that Lewis deals more pointedly with the connection between extraterrestrial intelligence and the demonic. The protagonists of the trilogy’s final installment are a young married couple, Mark and Jane Studdock, although Ransom is featured as a crucial supporting character. Mark is a college professor who becomes entangled in a political conspiracy, naively joining a cabal of scientists and bureaucrats bent on world domination. Jane becomes allied with Ransom and a small band of Christian academics, housewives, and gardeners who are tasked with stopping Mark’s co-conspirators.
Mark discovers that the leadership of the political conspiracy are under orders from “macrobes,” extraterrestrial intelligences from the moon, who are able to animate corpses and demand human sacrifice. It quickly becomes clear that these “macrobes” are “dark eldila,” fallen angels, demons, who have been restricted to Earth’s orbit by God, with the moon as their furthest outpost, in an effort to keep them from corrupting other worlds. So while the novel’s antagonists believe that they are acting under orders from superior intelligences from another planet, they are, in fact, simply doing the bidding of demons.
Is there life on other planets? What would it mean if extraterrestrial intelligences were real? The point that Rossetti and Ripperger and many other Catholic exorcists, theologians, and thinkers are trying to make is not that such possibilities, if realized, could only be explained by the demonic, but rather that it really doesn’t matter. The existence of little green creatures on Mars would in no way alter the nature of God, would in no way diminish or change our human nature, and ought not therefore in any negative way impact our relationship with God. God would still be God, man would still be man, and God would have still taken on the form of man in order to save man from sin.
Instead of asking so many questions about aliens and UFOs, a better question would be asking why a Catholic cardinal and the leader of a prominent American archdiocese fired the man responsible for combatting and exposing demons in that archdiocese. Rossetti did not contradict Church teaching, he simply noted that demons like to hide. What is McElroy trying to hide?
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