October 24, 2026
Why Are We Letting Demons Teach Us?
Hidden knowledge, holy-sounding gossip, and a temptation the Church has faced since the beginning.
Earlier this month, at the request of Denver’s Archbishop James Golka, Fr. Chad Ripperger agreed to a one-year “fast” from public speaking and interviews, with no sanction announced. In June, Cardinal Robert McElroy removed Msgr. Stephen Rossetti as an exorcist of the Archdiocese of Washington, and he later explained that the decision came from his “major objection” to high-profile exorcists, in a role that is traditionally “a very private” and “sacred one.” Both men remain priests in good standing.
A lot of Catholics found this news shocking. The two cases are different, and Denver hasn’t said what prompted its request, so I won’t guess at it. I respect the bishops for acting. What interests me is a deeper problem in our Catholic culture: our fascination with hidden evil and secret knowledge, and the spiritual authority we hand to whoever claims to have it.
As a psychologist who has written about deliverance, I take the Church’s ministry of liberation seriously. That’s exactly why my first question is such a simple one. Why are we listening to demons at all?
What the demons said
In a March 2026 interview on The Shawn Ryan Show, Fr. Ripperger attributes much of his understanding of alleged occult involvement among Church leaders to what demons have disclosed during exorcisms. “The demons have revealed pretty much the full complexion of what’s going on in the Church,” he says. He adds that “it’s not stuff that I’ve ever asked,” and that the demons “are compelled sometimes by our Lord” to speak. He also urges people to pray for the Church and to become holy themselves, and I take him at his word that he didn’t go looking for any of this.
But an unsolicited accusation still has to be discerned. A demon speaking up during the rite doesn’t make what it says true, and it certainly doesn’t give us the right to receive it as privileged knowledge.
The traditional rite of exorcism tells the exorcist not to ask questions “prompted by curiosity, particularly if they pertain to future and hidden matters,” and to “bid the unclean spirit keep silence and answer only when asked” (Roman Ritual, Weller trans., XIII.1). The same chapter, which Fr. Ripperger cites, acknowledges that demons sometimes reveal a crime and who committed it, but it places that among the evil spirit’s tricks to deceive and gives no warrant for believing it, let alone teaching it.
Jesus, the model for every exorcist, silenced demons even when what they said was true. In the synagogue at Capernaum the unclean spirit cries out, “I know who you are, the Holy One of God,” and Jesus answers, “Quiet!” (Mark 1:24-25). That same evening he drove out many demons, “not permitting them to speak because they knew him” (Mark 1:34). St. Athanasius’s Life of Antony says the Lord silenced them “lest haply they should sow their evil along with the truth,” so that we would learn “never to give heed to them even though they appear to speak what is true” (Life of Antony 26).
That’s the instinct of the saints, and it’s mine. Shut the demons down and don’t listen to them, even when they’re telling the truth, because a true sentence in the mouth of a liar is still a move in his game. I’m against any ministry or teaching founded on what has been learned from demons, about anything, whether it’s their own world or ours.
Occult means hidden
Consider what’s actually being alleged here, that some of the Church’s leaders are secretly involved in the occult. Leaders of the Church in the occult? That’s a huge rumor. What evidence establishes it, and how would the people accused ever answer it?
Occult means hidden. And a good deal of what goes viral from exorcists is built on hidden knowledge: what the demon said in session, what Beelzebub has, in Fr. Ripperger’s words, “admitted to me in session,” who in the Church is secretly compromised. That’s much of the appeal of the clips, access to spiritual secrets that ordinary Catholics supposedly don’t have.
The Catechism puts its finger on what sits underneath divination and its cousins, “a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers,” and it rejects any recourse to demons (Catechism 2116). I’m not accusing Fr. Ripperger or anyone else of occult practice, which would take evidence of what was actually done. I’m describing a tendency in an approach. When what a demon said becomes a source of authority, and a kind of power over how we see other people, the approach starts to take on the shape of the thing it condemns. Even more than occult, though, the better word for it is gnostic.
Gnosticism has troubled the Church from the beginning. It’s a word we rarely hear and barely understand, and yet it’s one of the most significant temptations in the life of the Church. In the second century it took the form of an elitist Christianity of secret knowledge for an enlightened few, and St. Irenaeus answered that the Church’s tradition is “public, not private or secret” (Benedict XVI, General Audience, March 28, 2007). Pope Francis warned that the same temptation “can be present within the Church,” among laypeople and teachers alike, and that our perfection is measured “not by the information or knowledge they possess, but by the depth of their charity” (Gaudete et Exsultate 37-39).
I mean only a resemblance to those ancient movements, but the psychology of it is familiar. The minister becomes the one with unusual access, the audience becomes a circle of insiders, and we start to feel informed and vigilant and a little more perceptive than everyone else. After a while, questioning the claims feels like betraying the man who let us in on the secret, because the secret is what holds the group together.
The delight in knowing
There’s a simpler problem underneath all of this, and it starts before anything gets published. There’s a delight in knowing something hidden. It’s the same delight that makes a busybody, the person who always seems to know whose marriage is in trouble, and it doesn’t get any holier when the secret is about a bishop. When we pocket information about other people’s sins, we can become complicit in a kind of gossip. Aquinas says that whoever listens to backbiting without resisting it “seems to consent to the backbiter, so that he becomes a participator in his sin” (Summa Theologiae II-II, q.73, a.4).
And a sin doesn’t have to be named for a reputation to suffer. Suggest that an identifiable person has grave hidden faults and you’ve damaged his good name whether or not you ever say what the faults are. The Catechism calls the disclosure of someone’s real faults without an objectively valid reason detraction, calls false allegations calumny, and calls it rash judgment when we assume, “even tacitly,” that a neighbor is guilty without sufficient grounds (Catechism 2477-2479). Leaving the names out doesn’t make it harmless either. Tell a large audience that unnamed leaders are involved in specific rituals and crimes and you’ve spread suspicion over a whole class of people that audience has no evidence against, and you’ve invited everyone to start guessing who’s meant. Credible reports of crime belong with people who can investigate them and protect the vulnerable, and an alleged demonic source was never a substitute for evidence. Everything I’ve quoted from Fr. Ripperger he said publicly, on camera, and answering a public teaching is a different act from hinting at a man’s private faults.
The devil’s moral theology
Thomas Merton has a short chapter in Seeds of Contemplation called “The Moral Theology of the Devil,” and I’ve never quite gotten free of this sentence from it:
“The devil is not afraid to preach the will of God provided he can preach it in his own way.”
Merton describes a spirituality that becomes “a kind of hypnosis of evil,” in which people take “a deep, subconscious comfort from the thought that many other people will fall into the hell which they themselves are going to escape.” The devil “makes many disciples by preaching against sin,” he writes, and then “lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men” (Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 62-64).
Merton wasn’t writing about anyone in this story. I’m applying his warning to this material, and I’m not judging anyone’s heart. He’s describing what can happen to any of us when we preach about judgment and sin, God and demons, in a way that divides us. A message can sound thoroughly Catholic while it forms us in suspicion and a quiet sense of superiority. We learn to sort people into the compromised, the deceived, and the demonically infested, and we feel safer because we’re sure we’re not among them, which is the Pharisee’s prayer all over again, thanking God that we’re not like the rest of humanity (Luke 18:11). Even the suffering person being prayed over can become a spectacle we measure our own security against, and whatever someone’s spiritual condition, their affliction never licenses our contempt.
Then there’s the fascination itself, the pull toward evil as a subject: demons, other people’s hidden sins, rumors of corruption inside the Church. These stories give us the thrill of danger and the satisfaction of being in the know. A disturbing account becomes a clip, the clip gets shared, the algorithm notices we watched to the end, and the next disclosure is waiting before we’ve finished thinking about the last one. It’s an unhealthy curiosity, and we feed it virally, one view and one share at a time, until suspicion becomes a habit of our religious life.
Fill the house
Christians aren’t called to become experts on demons. When the seventy-two came back thrilled that even the demons were subject to them, Jesus redirected their joy: “Do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). We’re called to know Jesus Christ, to abide in him, and to become like him. “Remain in me, as I remain in you,” he says, “because without me you can do nothing” (John 15:4-5). And Paul describes our salvation as God delivering us “from the power of darkness” and transferring us “to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13).
This is the heart of what I’ve tried to teach in Big God, Little Devil. Deliverance is meant to lead into communion with God. When something dark is driven out, the house can’t be left swept and empty (Matthew 12:44). It has to be filled with his presence through prayer, Scripture, the sacraments, worship, forgiveness, and the ordinary work of loving the people in front of us.
Whatever the demons claim to know, none of it can set anyone free. What sets us free is what Jesus offers instead, to be loved the way the Father loves him and to stay there: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love” (John 15:9).
If you want to go deeper, I’ve laid all of this out in Big God, Little Devil, which received the Imprimatur, the Church’s declaration that a book is free of doctrinal or moral error. It’s a radical shift from the culture that’s grown up around high-profile exorcists, and it keeps God big and the devil small.
If this gave words to something you’ve been carrying, share it with someone who needs it.
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