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Archbishop James Golka of Denver has asked Fr. Chad Ripperger, the exorcist who became a podcast star on the American right this year, to stop speaking in public for twelve months.
The Archdiocese of Denver confirmed the arrangement on Monday, October 19, saying Golka asked the priest “to consider a one-year fast from public speaking and interviews.”
Ripperger said yes. By that afternoon, the archdiocese’s online clergy directory listed him as “retired.”
Pope Leo XIV sent Golka to Denver on February 7, promoting him from the Diocese of Colorado Springs, where Pope Francis had made him a bishop in 2021. He was installed on March 25.
Seven months into the job, the Nebraska-born archbishop has quieted a priest whose talks on demons and elections reached millions of listeners through Tucker Carlson and Shawn Ryan.
A “fast,” in name
The archdiocese’s statement, released through communications director Kelly Clark, offers no reason for the request. It says the year will let Ripperger devote himself to the Society of the Most Sorrowful Mother (the community of exorcist priests, known as the Doloran Fathers, that he founded in 2012) and to the people it serves.
Golka is grateful, the statement adds, for the priest's “generous spirit” in receiving the request. The two men will review the arrangement at year’s end.
Ripperger was blunter with LifeSiteNews, which had booked him for its 30th-anniversary gala next April. “The Archbishop has asked me to take a break on public speaking,” he wrote to the outlet.
He has canceled at least two other engagements, and LifeSite reports that the restriction appears to cover his online homilies and his writing as well.
Ecclesiastical language often softens moments like this. A priest who has promised obedience to his bishop does not turn him down, and the word “retired,” attached to a 61-year-old with a booked calendar, says a lot more about the situation than the sterile statement does.
Tucker’s exorcist
Ripperger was ordained in 1997 for the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. Denver is his second diocese as head of the Dolorans; according to a 2016 Church Militant report, the society was asked to leave the Diocese of Tulsa that year, shortly after Bishop David Konderla arrived.
Archbishop Samuel Aquila took the community in and granted an imprimatur to Ripperger’s book, Deliverance Prayers for Use by the Laity.
His audience exploded in 2026.
Ripperger sat for four hours with Shawn Ryan, the former Navy SEAL turned podcaster, in March, and he went back in July. On April 3, he spent nearly two hours with Carlson, whose show promoted the episode by explaining that Ripperger sees demons running parts of American politics. LifeSite counts more than three million YouTube views for that conversation alone.
The July episode produced the image that may define Ripperger’s year.
Ryan taped it in the chapel of the Doloran Fathers in Colorado, and halfway through he handed the priest a SIG MCX Spear rifle fitted with a suppressor and an optic as a gift from a friend at SIG he described as a “huge fan.”
Ripperger called it “awesome.”
He said an earlier handgun from Ryan had been “well received,” promised to test the rifle that afternoon, and then, at Ryan’s request, opened the show in prayer, with the altar and tabernacle behind him.
Asked about the setting by LifeSiteNews, Ripperger said the chapel “has not been dedicated yet.”
Fr. Robert Carr, a hospital chaplain in Brockton, Massachusetts, was unpersuaded; firearms, he wrote, do not belong near a tabernacle, and he answered the priest’s reaction with four words of his own:
“Only God is awesome.”
Mike Lewis of Where Peter Is has spent two years building the public record on Ripperger, and much of what follows rests on his reporting.
In September 2024, Lewis transcribed hours of the priest’s talks (saving the original audio in case it disappeared from the web) and asked why Ripperger was still “allowed to remain a priest in good standing.”
On the eve of the first Ryan episode this March, he warned that Ripperger’s “dangerous message” was about to reach millions. Monday’s decision in Denver vindicates that work.
The politics were never subtle.
After the 2020 election, Marissa Nichols reported that families in her Catholic homeschool network were circulating a “Prayer of Command” Ripperger wrote, asking Christ to break curses as part of the effort to “Stop the Steal.”
In one recorded talk, he said legal abortion and same-sex marriage had left the country “politically in the hold of the top five demons in hell other than Satan.” Catholics, he concluded, had “an obligation” to vote accordingly.
His teaching on women runs darker. Lewis has documented Ripperger’s claim that a wife’s resistance to her husband flows from “the curse of Eve,” along with his description of marriage as a contract for “a conferral of bodily rights.”
In a talk addressed to wives and mothers, he mused that men should have told women long ago to “shut your yap, and go home and take care of the children.”
What the Church actually teaches
The Catholic Church believes in the devil. It takes exorcism seriously enough to regulate it, which is exactly why Ripperger’s showmanship matters.
The Catechism draws the line in paragraph 1673: psychological illness “is a very different matter” from possession, and its treatment “is the concern of medical science.” Ripperger has claimed on tape that every bipolar patient who followed his instructions came “completely off their meds” within three months. A listener who believes him could stop taking the medicine that keeps her alive.
Saint Paul tells Christians to “be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21). John Paul II built his teaching on marriage around that mutual subjection in Mulieris Dignitatem, describing a covenant in which two people give themselves away to each other. Ripperger’s version hands one spouse the deed to the other.
Golka is not the first American archbishop to act. In June, Cardinal Robert McElroy ousted Washington’s celebrity exorcist, Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, and my sources told me the concerns inside the archdiocese ran well past his UFO commentary.
McElroy moved first, and Golka has now followed. Two archbishops, one of them Leo’s own pick, have looked at the exorcist-as-influencer and decided the Church cannot afford him.
Leo’s bishops
Nothing public ties Monday’s decision to Rome. LifeSite asked the archdiocese about Vatican involvement, and Denver declined to comment. Pope Leo XIV has no need to manage the Doloran Fathers from Rome, though. He chose the archbishop who now governs them.
Something real happened this year in the audiences Ripperger reached. Shawn Ryan told Carlson he came back to the Catholic faith after their interview. The Church should welcome him home, along with every listener who followed the same path.
Those listeners deserve a priest who will hand them the whole faith, including the passage that commands husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the Church. Any good confessor can tell a demon from a diagnosis, too.
A man who treats his wife as a spiritual suspect and calls American politics a battlefield of named devils cannot be that priest for them.
Golka has given Ripperger a year of silence. The rest of the American Church should spend it asking why it took this long.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Archbishop Golka, and with every Catholic woman who has been told by a man in a Roman collar that her suffering is her own fault.
Our solidarity extends to every family that needs an exorcist on rare occasions and a doctor far more often, and to every priest who refuses to turn the devil into a business model.
The Church has fought evil for two thousand years without monetizing it. In an age when podcasts turn priests into content, we hold to a faith that sees the image of God in the wife and the patient, and just as surely in the voter across the aisle.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a Church that tells the truth about evil without inventing it.
They want shepherds who protect the vulnerable — and right now, with a celebrity exorcist’s marriage advice reaching millions of young men, that hunger is urgent.
If you believe the Gospel should shield the vulnerable from those who would wield it as a weapon, I am asking you to join us.
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This is good news. If the Church was able to sideline Ripperger, then let’s hope that Bishop Robert Barron is next.
The notion of a "celebrity exorcist" used to be, and ought to be, oxymoronic. The fact that Fr. Ripperger used his celebrity to promote MAGA ideology exacerbates the scandal of celebrity in this context. Good on Father Carr!