Archbishop Fires Exorcist Who Said UFOs Are Demons, Because Church Still Has Exorcists On Staff To Fire
Yes, JD Vance believes 'aliens are demons' too.
It’s been quite a week for firings! CBS News fired Scott Pelley for not quietly standing by as Bari Weiss wrecked 60 Minutes, and now the Archbishop of Washington DC has relieved an exorcist of his duties just because of a little heresy about UFOs and demons. Dangerous days to speak up for what you believe in, be it journalistic integrity or demons from Hell masquerading as flying saucers!
As the Washington Post reports (gift link), Monsignor Stephen Rossetti is a longtime “priest and psychologist who has held prominent positions in the Archdiocese of Washington for decades. From 1993 to 2009, he treated clergy with mental health issues — including priests accused of sexually abusing adults and children — as head of the St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland.”
More recently, Rossetti has headed the St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal, an outfit aimed at feeding the Catholic-flavored adherents of the “charismatic” movement, which is all hopped up on the Holy Spirit and the idea that humans are helping out on God’s side in a spiritual war between good and evil. That’s also very popular with Protestants, with the whole “prayer warrior” thing in which prayers are useful in stopping actual demonic attacks.
Rossetti’s most recent advice on battling demons got him in hot holy water, and that’s why he had to turn in his exorcist badge and exorcism gun Wednesday. In a May 29 video posted to his Facebook page, Rosetti shared his professional opinion as an exorcist and expert on demonic doings, and opined that UFO sightings are actually people seeing demons crossing into our realm, to do evil stuff! Those tricksy demons, he said, are posing as space aliens to mess with us.
Rosetti later removed the Facebook video, but it has been preserved and appended as an introduction to this oddball YouTube video from something calling itself the “Faith, Hope and Love Ministry.” Enjoy, if that’s the word; Rossetti’s 6-minute vid begins at the 2:55 mark. The hour or so that follows appears to be wholly unrelated, and we have no idea whether Rossetti agreed to his video being reposted here. (The WaPo story inaccurately suggests he appeared as a guest on the show, but nah, the video producers clearly just plucked it off Facebook and added it in; Rossetti doesn’t interact with the video’s host. Sloppy reporting, WaPo!)
There’s no need to watch the full 90-minute video (or even the Rosetti bit, since we summarize the good parts below), but we’ll note that the host says it includes a prayer that’s certain to release a thousand souls from Purgatory each time someone recites it, so those souls can “go up to heaven and join the Holy Army to fight Satan.”
So after you die without a final absolution, you spend eons in Purgatory being cleansed of your earthly sins, and you think once you’re released, you’ll be rewarded with an eternity in Paradise. But the moment you get there, you’re drafted as a grunt into God’s Army, handed a flaming sword, and sent off to fight Satan instead? Talk about a bait and switch!
At least in John Scalzi’s science fiction classic Old Man’s War (Wonkette-gets-a-cut link) you got a choice, and a new young body and some orgies first.
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Rossetti started out on firm enough ground, noting that Catholic doctrine doesn’t preclude the idea that there’s life on other planets, although he personally doesn’t think there is. Then he gets into the demony stuff:
There’s a danger here, and I want to raise that, as an exorcist I wanted 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. And they can kind of get into your head, you know, and manipulate things in the world, and influence us to do evil.
Demons are everywhere, and we’re at spiritual battle with the Evil One, Rossetti explained, citing Scripture. “Demons indeed can break into the physical world at times, and they can be seen. We actually have some photos of such things,” he explained, saying that there’s documentation of people seeing “shadow men,” and cases of people possessed by demons seeing “dark shadows, possessed houses, globes of light, all sorts of things — and more direct manifestations of evil hands, we’ve seen that — and actually images of beastlike creatures.”
Well of course there are pictures and eyewitness hallucinations testimonies to prove all that. Rossetti also offered an example of a woman who had “a particular gift” (which was “documented” somehow), who was shown a picture of a “UFO,” and said “It’s a demon.” We can only wonder what she’d have said about photos of punk rock bands, undersea creatures, or My Little Pony collectibles.
Anyway, Rossetti concluded, carefully noting that it was only his best logical conclusion, not Church doctrine, “There’s no question in my mind personally […] it’s my personal belief that probably many, if not most of these ‘UFO’ sightings are in fact demons.” He noted that a demonic origin would explain how “UFOs” can do all sorts of things that are beyond human technology, like sudden acceleration to incredible speeds and instant changes in direction. All of it is in the service of deceiving humans into sinning and evildoing.
Rossetti then rambled off into discussing other demonic deceptions, like how mediums and “automatic writing” allow demons to warp our minds, and how if you see a “friendly ghost” in your house you should instead pray for that soul, not accept it as a benevolent visitor from beyond.
In a statement, the Archbishop of Washington Cardinal Robert McElroy said Wednesday that Rosetti was no longer an exorcist, and that the archdiocese had cut its ties with his St. Michael Center. McElroy said that Rossetti’s remarks “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.”
This makes a ton of sense to us. It’s obvious that the Devil is real (his picture is even on canned meat products), and that demons are all over the place, even in some of our favorite anime series. It therefore is perfectly logical that demons must from time to time be expelled from people, usually by a young priest and an older priest working together while dodging bucketloads of pea soup. But come on, that stuff about UFOs is pretty far out, man.
It’s not clear whether Rossetti’s removal as an exorcist will do anything at all to tamp down the popularity of the Demon-UFO hypothesis as a fringe obsession among some members of the Excitable Christian Right. They see demons under every bed and in nearly everything on TV, after all, and even great thinkers like JD Vance — in case you’ve forgotten, he’s a heartbeat away from the presidency — have opined that whatever those blobs on radar screens may be, they aren’t from other planets, but from Hell, as Vance explained on conspiracy nut Benny Johnson’s podcast back in March:
“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion,” he said. […]
“Well, look, I think that celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people. I think that the desire to describe everything celestial, everything is otherworldly, to describe it as aliens,” Vance said.
It’s just more natural to Vance that it’s Satan, because as a Christian, he knows that anything weird is evil, and “one of the devil’s great tricks is to convince people he never existed.”
As of blogtime, there’s been no word yet on whether Monsignor Rossetti will be appointed to a position in the Trump administration, possibly in the Defense Department’s Spiritual Warfare Division.
[WaPo (gift link) / Syracuse Online / Guardian / NYT / Sign of the Cross Media / Guardian]
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“…the idea that humans are helping out on God’s side in a spiritual war between good and evil.”
So…. is your god omnipotent or not? What does he need MY help for?
I'm pretty sure I don't need or want an exorcist treating my mental health issues.