The Exorcist, the Intelligence Officer, and the Modern Fear of the Supernatural
Some controversies illuminate more than the decisions that produce them. They expose the hidden assumptions of an age, the instincts of institutions, and the limits of what a civilisation is prepared to believe. The removal of Monsignor Stephen Rossetti as an exorcist of the Archdiocese of Washington is one such case. What appears, at first glance, to concern an unusual dispute about UFOs and demons in fact discloses something far more serious: not merely a cultural unease with the supernatural, but an emerging incapacity—both societal and ecclesial—to recognise it when it is named in its proper terms.
The official account is deceptively simple. Cardinal Robert McElroy removed Rossetti from his role and severed the Archdiocese’s association with the St Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal after Rossetti publicly suggested that some unidentified aerial phenomena might have a preternatural, rather than extraterrestrial, explanation. According to the Archdiocese, such remarks “gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism.”¹ Yet the explanation immediately collapses under scrutiny, not because it is false, but because it is incomplete. What teaching, precisely, was undermined? What doctrinal proposition was denied? What element of Catholic belief was contradicted? The absence of any clear answer is not a minor omission. It is the central fact of the case.
That absence matters because Rossetti’s remarks, however debatable at the level of prudence, remain firmly situated within the Catholic intellectual tradition. The Church has never confined the explanation of extraordinary phenomena to a binary between the natural and the divine. It has always recognised a third order: the preternatural. The Fathers, the scholastics, and the masters of the spiritual life repeatedly insisted that deception is intrinsic to demonic activity, and that not every manifestation that appears extraordinary originates from God.² To suggest that some phenomena may belong to this category is not to innovate but to retrieve. It is not to challenge doctrine but to apply it. One may reject Rossetti’s judgement; one cannot plausibly deny its theological legitimacy without simultaneously narrowing the tradition itself.
The context in which this judgement was made renders the response all the more revealing. Rossetti is not an obscure or marginal figure whose claims can be dismissed as eccentric speculation. Before entering the priesthood, he served as an intelligence officer in the United States Air Force. He later became a clinical psychologist, academic, seminary professor, safeguarding specialist, and one of the most experienced exorcists in the English-speaking Catholic world. For nearly two decades he exercised that ministry in Washington, D.C., a city that has become the focal point of contemporary discussion surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena, intelligence disclosures, and governmental inquiry into unexplained encounters.³ His formation embodies precisely the synthesis modern institutions prize: disciplined analysis, psychological insight, institutional experience, and practical engagement with claims of extraordinary phenomena. Such a man cannot easily be caricatured. That fact alone renders the reaction to his remarks disproportionately revealing.
The deeper issue exposed by the Rossetti affair is not, in truth, the nature of unidentified aerial phenomena at all. It is the peculiar intellectual condition of modern man. We inhabit a civilisation that congratulates itself on its openness to possibility, its willingness to question assumptions, and its readiness to entertain explanations that previous generations might have regarded as implausible. Governments hold hearings on unidentified craft. Scientists speculate about non-human intelligence. Cultural institutions explore multidimensional realities, simulation theory, and forms of consciousness beyond human comprehension. Entire intellectual industries have been constructed around such possibilities. Yet the moment one proposes an explanation rooted in the spiritual categories of Christianity, the atmosphere shifts. What was previously inquiry becomes embarrassment. What was previously curiosity becomes suspicion. The suggestion is not refuted; it is excluded.
This exclusion reveals not merely a preference but a pathology. Modern man has not ceased to believe in unseen realities; he has lost the ability to name them truthfully. The supernatural has not disappeared; it has been translated into categories that render it acceptable. Having rejected angels, we now speak of interdimensional intelligences. Having dismissed demons, we now speak of entities, energies, and presences. Having abandoned spiritual warfare, we now speak of psychological disturbance or cosmic imbalance.⁴ The language has been altered in order to preserve the experience while evacuating its theological meaning. What is rejected is not the phenomenon, but its interpretation within a Christian framework.
Rossetti’s intervention disrupts that arrangement. He does not introduce novelty; he reintroduces clarity. By invoking the category of the preternatural, he challenges the tacit assumption that the only admissible explanations for extraordinary phenomena are those that remain compatible with a secular or quasi-scientific worldview. He reminds the listener, however cautiously, that the Church has long possessed a vocabulary capable of accounting for deception, manifestation, and disturbance without recourse to speculative extraterrestrial hypotheses. In doing so, he does not expand the field of discussion. He reorders it.
The response to this reordering has been instructive. Rather than theological engagement, there has been disciplinary action. Rather than argument, removal. Rather than clarification, silence. This would be less significant if such responses were characteristic of the Church’s approach to doctrinal ambiguity more generally. Yet the opposite appears to be the case. In recent decades, open challenges to established teaching on matters of moral theology, ecclesiology, and sacramental discipline have frequently been met with patience, dialogue, and institutional tolerance.⁵ Theological experimentation in these areas has often proceeded with minimal consequence. Against that background, the swift removal of an exorcist for articulating a prudential judgement rooted in traditional spiritual theology presents not merely an inconsistency, but a hierarchy of tolerances.
This hierarchy is revealing. It suggests that the problem is not error as such, but category. Certain forms of speculation are permissible because they remain within the conceptual boundaries modernity finds acceptable. Others are impermissible because they reintroduce categories that modernity has rejected. To speak ambiguously about doctrine may be tolerated; to speak concretely about demons is not. The issue is not theological precision. It is metaphysical embarrassment.
This points to a deeper ecclesial crisis. The difficulty is not simply that modern society struggles to accept the supernatural. It is that parts of the Church appear uncertain about how unapologetically they can proclaim it. The language of angels, demons, temptation, and spiritual warfare remains present in official teaching, but its operative force has been attenuated. It is affirmed at the level of doctrine while often avoided at the level of discourse. When it reappears with practical immediacy, it produces unease—not because it contradicts what the Church teaches, but because it contradicts what modern culture finds plausible.
The Rossetti affair therefore reveals a tension between two fidelities: fidelity to the Church’s inherited vision of reality, and fidelity to the intellectual sensibilities of the contemporary world. When these fidelities diverge, the temptation is to soften the former in order to accommodate the latter. Yet the result of such accommodation is not harmony, but incoherence. A Church that affirms the existence of demons in principle while discouraging discussion of their activity in practice risks rendering its own teaching unintelligible.
The deepest irony of the present situation is that Rossetti’s remarks did not provoke controversy because they were implausible. Had they been implausible, they would have been dismissed without consequence. Nor did they provoke controversy because they contradicted a clearly identifiable doctrine, for no such contradiction has been demonstrated. They provoked controversy because they were recognisably Christian. They reasserted a vision of reality in which spiritual forces are not metaphors but agents, and in which deception is not merely psychological but ontological.
The modern world will tolerate almost any mystery except the mysteries Christianity insists are real. It will discuss extraterrestrials more readily than angels, interdimensional intelligences more readily than demons, and cosmic consciousness more readily than sin. What it resists is not the existence of the unseen, but the possibility that the unseen has already been named, described, and understood within a tradition it has chosen to transcend.
The question raised by the Rossetti affair is therefore not whether UFOs are demonic. Faithful Catholics may reasonably differ on that point. The more serious question is whether the Church still possesses the confidence to speak about demons at all. For if an exorcist can be removed for suggesting that certain phenomena may involve preternatural deception, then the issue is no longer the interpretation of unexplained events. It is the intelligibility of the Church’s own supernatural claims.
The modern world has not ceased to believe in spirits. It has merely changed their names. What it cannot endure is the suggestion that those names were already given—and given truly—by the Church it now seeks to outgrow.
¹ Archdiocese of Washington, “Statement of Cardinal McElroy on Monsignor Stephen Rossetti,” 3 June 2026.
² Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§391–395; De Exorcismis et Supplicationibus Quibusdam (1999); cf. St Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Book X; St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 114.
³ Stephen J. Rossetti, biographical materials; St Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal; Archdiocese of Washington clergy records.
⁴ Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), on disenchantment and the “buffered self.”
⁵ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Veritatis (1990); comparative episcopal responses to doctrinal dissent in Western Europe and North America, 2000–2025.
⁶ Pope Paul VI, General Audience, 15 November 1972 (“the smoke of Satan has entered the Church”); Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§409, 2851–2854.
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