The Priest, Exorcist, and Celebrity: Has Curiosity Brought Out the Best in Spiritual Healing or Gotten the Best of Us?

Priests who perform exorcisms have become, in the past several years, genuinely large public figures. Prominent exorcists such as Father Chad Ripperger, Father Carlos Martins, and Father Dan Reehil have drawn millions of views through media appearances and podcasts. A ministry once conducted behind closed doors, governed by episcopal permission and strict discretion, now streams to viewers who have no sacramental preparation, no pastoral relationship with the priest, and no framework for evaluating what they are watching.

Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington made the tension concrete this summer. In June, he removed Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, whose St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal had drawn more than 146,000 YouTube followers, from his role as an exorcist for the Archdiocese of Washington, after Rossetti posted online that "probably many, if not most, UFO sightings are in fact demons." The archdiocese's own statement said the remarks "gravely undermine the Church's very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism." Weeks later, in a June 29 interview, McElroy reframed the decision: "It wasn't touching on the question of UFOs," he said. "My major objection is that I think the traditional role of an exorcist is a very private one. It's a sacred one."[^1]

The debate tends to run along predictable lines: transparency versus sacred discretion, evangelization versus sensationalism, demystification versus exploitation. Those tensions are real. The more structurally precise question, however, is epistemological. What does an audience actually come away knowing after watching an exorcism video? And is what they receive the same thing as what the Church's tradition means by ordered knowledge of spiritual combat?

The Appetite for Novelty and the Weight of the Invisible

Curiosity about the demonic is a natural cognitive response to the invisible. The soul tends toward what it cannot yet account for, and the demonic, a personal force operating at the edge of ordinary experience, exercises a pull that is entirely predictable given the structure of human attention. The Catholic philosophical tradition draws a sharp line between curiosity as appetite for novelty and the ordered knowledge that actually prepares a soul to encounter evil without being drawn into fascination with it.[^2] These are structurally different orientations of the intellect: one seeks stimulation, the other seeks truth about the nature and limits of a thing.

The online exorcism video is calibrated, almost by necessity, for the former. An algorithm that surfaces a video to three million viewers selects for affective intensity, for the moment when something visible and strange happens. The viewer gripped by such content has been gripped by spectacle, and spectacle and formation produce different educational events.

Discernment and the Problem of the Thrilling

Ignatius of Loyola's rules for the discernment of spirits establish something counterintuitive: what feels most compelling spiritually is not thereby trustworthy. Fascination with supernatural phenomena can function as a portal for spiritual deception rather than a path toward truth.[^3] His second series of rules (SpEx 328-336) makes the point with unusual precision: the task of discernment requires attending to the entire course of thought that a consolation generates, because the direction taken by the bad spirit is chosen to bring the soul closer to his goals. Ignatius recognized this in himself; the serpentine vision at Manresa gave him what felt like growing consolation until he finally identified it as a diabolical mirage.

A viewer who watches a confrontation with the demonic and comes away with heightened interest, who returns to the channel with attention now organized around the drama of possession and expulsion, has undergone an intensification of appetite, not a formation of judgment. The Ignatian tradition calls for attending to where a movement of attention leads, over time, in its full course. Fascination with the extraordinary, even when the extraordinary is real, is a recognized obstacle to spiritual clarity.

Visible Signs as Obstacles

John of the Cross makes the same point with greater severity. In the Ascent of Mount Carmel, attachment to visible spiritual phenomena, visions, locutions, extraordinary signs, functions as an obstacle to genuine union with God rather than evidence of spiritual progress.[^4] Such phenomena aren't always false; the danger lies in the soul's attachment to them, including the cognitive appetite to observe and possess them as experiences, which pulls the understanding away from faith and toward a self-referential satisfaction in the sign itself. John's concern is with a soul that seeks out extraordinary spiritual phenomena as a mode of seeking God, typically in the earlier stages of formation, mistaking emotional intensity for proximity to God.

This maps onto the psychology of the online audience with uncomfortable accuracy. The viewer who accumulates exorcism content isn't being drawn into the dark night of faith that John describes as the genuine path; the content offers the opposite: noise, visibility, spectacle, an intensification of sensation that functions more like attachment than detachment.

The Formation Gap

Even a well-intentioned exorcist who speaks publicly to correct superstition faces a structural problem with the medium. The audience that arrives seeks the experience the thumbnail promised, and whatever the priest says by way of theological clarification, the affective payload of the video is the confrontation itself. The formation that would convert curiosity into wisdom, sacramental life, examination of conscience, structured direction, the long practice of prayer, cannot be transmitted in a video. The gap between what online audiences receive and what the tradition actually offers is a gap between spectacle and accompaniment, not a matter of production quality or messaging strategy.

There is a legitimate pastoral good in demystifying the Church's ministry of deliverance. Many people carry disproportionate fear of the demonic, confuse psychiatric illness with spiritual attack, or dismiss the Church's engagement with evil as medieval superstition. A priest who speaks clearly and accurately about what exorcism is, and what the Church actually teaches, corrects those misapprehensions, and that project has real pastoral value.

Satisfying curiosity is a different project. The question every exorcist who steps into the spotlight must answer is which of those two ends their visibility actually serves, and whether the medium they are using is capable of serving the first without inevitably amplifying the second. The distinction between curiosity as appetite and knowledge as ordered engagement with truth is not an abstraction; it governs whether a given act of communication leaves a person more equipped to resist evil or more fascinated by it.

The Church's debate about exorcists in the spotlight is, at its core, a formation debate. The answer it requires is about what kind of knowing is actually available in a given communicative act, and whether that knowing disposes a soul toward God or toward the spectacle that the demonic, by the logic of the tradition, has always preferred.

References

[^1]: Peterson, Josephine. "US Cardinal: Exorcist Role Should Be 'Private' After Priest's Removal Tied to UFO Controversy." OSV News (Catholic News Service), July 8, 2026. https://www.osvnews.com/us-cardinal-exorcist-role-should-be-private-after-priests-removal-tied-to-ufo-controversy/

[^2]: Ulrich, Ferdinand. Homo Abyssus: The Drama of the Question of Being. Translated by D. C. Schindler. Washington, DC: Humanum Academic Press, 2018. Discussion of ordered knowledge versus curiosity as appetite for novelty, drawing on Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II.

[^3]: Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. The Christian and Anxiety. Translated by Dennis D. Martin and Michael J. Miller. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000. Discussion of Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, Rules for Discernment of Spirits, SpEx 328-336, and the warning that fascination with supernatural phenomena can function as spiritual deception.

[^4]: John of the Cross. The Ascent of Mount Carmel. Translated by K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991. Books II-III; treatment of visions, locutions, and extraordinary signs as impediments to union with God.