We who have spent decades inside the apparatus of institutional religion know exactly what it looks like when a tradition’s internal machinery begins to prioritize the sensational over the substantial. When the feverish curiosity surrounding government UFO disclosures is allowed to hijack the solemnity of spiritual ministry, the result is never “renewal.” It is a thin, dangerous distortion of what the hierarchy actually claims to be.
Cardinal Robert McElroy’s decision to remove Monsignor Stephen Rossetti as an exorcist of the Washington Archdiocese, following Rossetti’s attempts to link unexplained aerial phenomena to demonic activity, is a necessary act of structural accountability. When Rossetti, a high-profile exorcist, began framing Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena as veils for demonic manifestation, he did not merely engage in speculative theology. He breached the rigid jurisdictional parameters established by the Church to prevent the exact type of alarmist encroachment that turns ecclesial authority into a vehicle for cultural anxieties.
The timeline matters. A February executive order initiated the release of classified UFO files. April and May saw the acceleration of this political theater, the Pentagon preparing further disclosures, the public suspense building. And into that gap stepped a cleric with a platform, suggesting that demons “hide” behind the unexplained, that the exorcist’s office could serve as a guardian of national secrets. This is the classic move of the religious entrepreneur: re-clothe archaic superstition in the garb of modern science fiction, shield the ministry from critique by placing it outside the reach of the very doctrines it claims to serve.
McElroy correctly identified that this is not merely a fringe opinion. It is a fundamental breach of the cleric’s oath. The Vatican’s 2019 updates on exorcism and prayer for liberation clarify that the ministry of deliverance is a profoundly serious, deeply circumscribed practice. The instruction famously cautioned against the tendency to treat demons as the cause of every unexplained evil, demanding instead a clinical skepticism that the St. Michael Center’s recent social media output abandoned. When a priest starts treating every unexplained shadow as a demonic mask, he has abandoned his commitment to the “very precise teaching on the devil” that his office is sworn to uphold.
Some defenders of such speculation point to traditional Catholic hagiography, to the writings of saints like Padre Pio, to argue that the veil between the demonic and the physical is porous. But those are private devotions, not public diagnostic tools. The exorcist’s rite is a process defined by psychological and medical rigor, conducted in the interior silence of the soul. It is not conducted via press releases and UFO-hunting videos.
The true prophets of the tradition were not wandering the countryside looking for extraterrestrial signs. They were looking at the corruption in the sanctuary and the empty performance of the liturgy. They knew that the real danger is not some shadowy creature in a spacecraft, but the way a clerical official hides behind the sensational to avoid the work of repentance and the labor of accountability. Rossetti’s “demons as hidden actors” diagnosis effectively positioned the exorcist as a guardian of national secrets — a role the archdiocese, rightly protective of its spiritual, non-political mandate, could not permit.
There is a lesson here for all of us, no matter our station. When the religious leader becomes more interested in the spectacle than the substance, the hierarchy is leaking. The church leaders who have stoked UFO suspense as a means of political urgency should take note: at some point, the institution must be allowed to protect its own sanctity from those who would use the pulpit as a cudgel for their own curiosities. McElroy chose to draw that line. The rest of the body would do well to examine whether their own altars are being built by such work, or whether they are simply running out of room for the sacraments they claim to administer.