How Chad Ripperger Showed Me the Potential Benefits of Demonic Possession

Lately I’ve been listening to YouTube sermons by Father Chad Ripperger about his experiences as an exorcist. They’re quite remarkable. Here’s a typical excerpt where he discusses video games, Harry Potter, and people being prevented from entering the priesthood by Loki:

This witchcraft is finding itself not just among girls in Catholic high schools, it’s finding itself in video games. If you pay close attention to it, the guys making the video games today are doing their research. They are digging up these ancient gods, which are just another name for demons as we can read in the Old Testament and New Testament and from my personal experience too, all the gods of gentiles are demons, and I can testify that. I’ve seen Baal, which is mentioned in scripture, Asmodeus, Isis, Osiris, the guy named Loki who’s out there today, by the way, who interestingly, Loki – if this gives you any indication of the stronghold he gets – he’s the demon who goes around seeking people who have religious and priestly vocations to neglect entering those.

It’s even in the video games, and even in some of the other games, they’re actually happening where you have to actually cast real spells, these guys are digging up real spells and casting them in the process of this, this even goes – and I’ll just answer now, because someone’s going to ask the question ‘what about Harry Potter?’ Okay, It was expunged from the Internet, as soon as I saw  it I ran to the Internet and grabbed it, and I made a copy of it somewhere in my files. Basically J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, she did the entire Harry Potter series by auto-writing, and auto-writing is a form of diabolic channeling.  I’m not accusing her of thinking this is done, that she’s using diabolic channeling. She went to witch school. Real witches will testify that the actual spells in Harry Potter are real spells, unlike Tolkien, who uses it as a literary device.

I gather he’s well-regarded in certain quarters, but I have to say, I find it hard to trust Ripperger. I mean, this is a man who’s point-blank admitted to telling rape victims that they’re demonically possessed, something that I can’t imagine being recommended by any qualified trauma counsellor:

Mortal sin, that’s the principal way that most people become possessed. Another category is people who have undergone some kind of extreme evil of some sort. So about half the women who show up on my doorstep have either been raped or molested sexually or psychologically abused. And people say ‘wait a minute, this isn’t fair’. Well, it’s not a matter of fairness, it’s a matter of the fact that when a person acts upon the other person, they’re using that person in a gravely dismoral way, and as a result of that the person is placed under the domain of Satan on a physical level, and that’s how he gets his foot in the door.

There are two sides to every argument, of course, and having listened to Ripperger go on at great length about demons, I found myself wondering what the demons’ perspective might be.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that there’s some truth to the phenomena which  Ripperger claims to have witnessed: that he really has encountered non-human intelligences in the form of discarnate spirits. This would put him in a similar position to a person who has landed on another planet and made contact with sapient alien lifeforms. Now, if our first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life was to try and ram them into an orthodox religious framework of angels and devils, the results could be disastrous. Why, then, should we conclude that the discarnate intelligences allegedly encountered by Chad Ripperger are best understood through millennia-old religious texts?

It is reasonable to assume that any intelligent life on other planets would find us as perplexing as we find it; that any attempts at communication would face hurdles on both ends. Could it be that Ripperger’s spirits are facing this problem  — that they are trying to communicate with us, but we are failing to understand them?

If a spirit purports to be Satan or Lilith or another Judaeo-Christian entity, then it may be making a fumbled attempt to communicate with us on our own terms. This theory is backed up by Ripperger’s claim that certain demons have identified themselves by the names of Harry Potter characters:

J. K. Rowlings [sic] has denied she’s a witch, okay, you walk like one, you quack like one, you write books like one, so okay. One exorcist told me, he’s kind of done the footwork, whether it’s true or not I don’t know, he said 60% of the names in Harry Potter are actual names of demons that exorcists have booted out of people.

Ripperger takes this as evidence that J. K. Rowling is in league with Satan, as he is wont to do. But another possibility, one that seems at least as viable, is that the entities in question are choosing names that mean something to the people whose minds they are sharing. Some might go with Biblical names like Satan or Lucifer, while others go with pop-cultural names like Dumbledore or Weasley, but in either case, it is hypothetically possible that these beings are merely finding a way to communicate with us on our level.

If there’s any truth to the phenomena described by Ripperger, then it would indicate that demons offer a wealth of largely untapped benefits for humanity. According to Ripperger, demons have such transformative power over the human body that they can cause an individual to completely alter biological sex:

Beelzebub always manifests the same way, and when he manifests, it’s almost instantaneous, and that is the jaw extends out about two inches on each side, the head narrows, the eyes come together, they turn bloodshot, and the complexion turns almost blue instantly. And so, this is something that you’re not going to see happening unless the person is actually possessed, this isn’t something that a human being can cause. Another case of morphing which is pretty pronounced is an exorcist who’s a friend of mine had a case where Isis, the demon Isis, was the possessor and when he would put the stool on the back of the possessed person’s head instantaneously his face would elongate about three inches and turn into the face of a wolf. […] Sometimes they can even change shape – the whole body changes into something else. So in one possession case I actually saw a woman change completely into a man in the process of the manifestation.

If a demon can turn a woman into a man through a process quicker and apparently more thorough than even the most sophisticated gender-reassignment surgery, then is it too much to speculate that they might be able to, for example, transform a cancerous growth into a benign tumour? Perhaps instead of trying to drive these entities away through exorcism, Ripperger and others in his profession should be working out a means of encouraging a symbiotic relationship between spirits and humans.

There are other potential benefits to demonic possession. Demons, according to Ripperger, can also teach new languages, grant superhuman strength, and offer the ability to read minds:

Possession sometimes can include the knowledge of languages known to the victim, I heard of a case where a woman was speaking fluent Latin, but she was possessed. That’s a sign, that’s a pretty good sign. Superhuman strength, ability to know occult or someone else’s thoughts.

Apparently, demons can even affect the world’s weather and are responsible for climate change, which raises the possibility that a more understanding relationship between humans and demons could end drought and famine:

The demons of the air, too, it can also be a collective thing, they can gain a certain amount of control over a certain amount of mass of air. So, for example, there is an exorcism for storm, and there was a deacon in a fraternity who said this because he got caught in this really bad hailstorm, and so he started saying that exorcism he reached the last line and the hail just shut off. You know people say ‘oh, there’s this global warming, there’s this global climate change’, well first of all, they’ve predicted it, I think it was [inaudible] who said the weather patterns are going to change. But some of it can also be us conceding more and more control to the demonic over the Earth by the fact that we’re using it by our sin, and as a result they’re just gaining more and more control over it and things are getting more and more dysfunctional as a result of it.

Communicating with demons might make good business sense, too. According to Ripperger, certain industries have already begun using demons to increase profits. The pornography industry, for one:

Another area that we’re seeing is pornography. It’s off the charts. One of the things a lot of people don’t know is that the Satanists taught the people in the pornography industry, because they can curse the master copy, sometimes called the locked copy of the pornography. All the copies made from that bear the curse, so the people who view it become subject to the curse. And the principal aim of them becoming subject to the curse is to boost the addictive effect of the pornography. I know an exorcist who has dealt with a guy who become possessed through pornography.

The music and film industries, as well, along with drug cartels:

One of the things that the drug cartel in Mexico has started doing is doing the same thing that Satanists taught to people in the pornography industry – which by the way, that mechanism has worked its way into Hollywood now, it’s also worked its way into the music industry by cursing the master copies, but what they would do is curse the drugs coming into this country to boost the addictive effects of them.

Ripperger lists John Lennon as one of the musicians who benefited from demonic assistance — admittedly, it appears to have backfired for him in the end, but perhaps that’s the sort of mishap that can be avoided when demons are better understood:

John Lennon, before they were famous, made a pact with the Devil. And the Devil signed an agreement that it would be twenty years, that was it. And he took it. Almost twenty years to the day – it was within the week – he was shot. So the point is that they actually do, sometimes they can produce what they say. This is becoming a bigger problem especially in Hollywood, in the music industry, where people are openly talking about their pacts with the Devil now. You can just go on YouTube and watch it, you don’t have to take my word for it.

And if you play your cards right, the demons might even provide you with a free supply of Mountain Dew:

I know an exorcist who, during one of the exorcisms, the demon said ‘if you just leave me alone, I’ll give you a truckload of Mountain Dew to be delivered to your house’ because he had a big fondness for Mountain Dew. And they’ll do that. The next thing, out of the blue, somebody shows up and says ‘yeah, somebody paid for this, you’ve got a truckload of Mountain Dew’. They try to appeal to your weaknesses.

If anyone wants to try and call upon some demons of their own (and, after reading the above, who can blame them?) they’ll be pleased to know that – according to Ripperger – doing so is pretty straightforward. For example, you can apparently invite demons simply by being proud, having sex out of wedlock, or looking at porn:

I’ve seen people become possessed through mortal sins of pride, fornication, pornography.

Naturally, reading Harry Potter is another quick-and-easy method:

I know an exorcist who’s had to exorcise three children who became possessed just from reading Harry Potter. I know a woman who allowed Harry Potter into her house and became possessed by five demons as a result of it. So I say to people, stay away from it. If you have it in your house, get it out of there.

If you try out reiki, then you’re also inviting demons into your life — and not just any demons, but Osiris himself:

I actually had a case where Osiris was the possessor. He’s a brutal demon, he’s one of the most vicious and the most cruel demons of all. Part of the reason he’s cruel is that part of his sin was he fell because he refused to accept mercy that Christ wanted to give to them. The point is that these hand-motions in reiki is something that is a form of invocation to Osiris to possess.

Another easy method of attracting demons is by swearing, apparently. But be warned – if you swear too much, you might start a storm:

Any time you make ill use of a physical thing, you basically are using the thing in such a way that you place it under the order of the demonic. Now, not every time that happens do they take possession of the thing or have control of it, but in the case of air, if people say blasphemous words by means of – because they have to use the air to do that – the demons can actually take possession of the air. And there’s actually, I’ve mentioned this before, there’s a blessing for driving them out in storms, which I’ve seen effectively used, because they can take possession of the air – it becomes accumulative.

Also on the list is watching The Exorcist:

Remember when I said that the first opening that Eve opened to Satan was through curiosity? People watching, like, Exorcist movies ad nauseum and they’re watching these paranormal things because they want to see the ghosts and stuff like that, that’s a big door opener.You can get that. I know a guy that in my estimation, he’s a paranormal investigator, the first time I met him I said ‘that guy’s possessed.’ So I tell people, stay away from that, you don’t need to know that stuff, the church tells you what you need to know about those things.

As is that old chestnut, Dungeons & Dragons:

Role-playing games have become a bit of a problem, both video and otherwise, they can become a bit of a problem you’ve noticed on a psychological level and then once the person does this stuff it’s disordered on a psychological level and they’ve opened up the door to diabolic influence. I have in mind specifically things like Dungeons & Dragons. Exorcists have come across people who have become diabolically influenced from playing Dungeons & Dragons because in the role playing game what happens is a person immerses himself so much into the role that they basically disassociate from reality. And that disassociation is the open door, it’s a big open door, I’m still trying to sort it out myself. It’s a big open door for demons getting their foot in, you know.

And if you’re Hispanic and “not living in a good situation”, well, then Ripperger seems to think that leaves you open to demonic influence as well:

I have had the misfortune of having to deal with a case where I didn’t do anything in the end because the people were living in a situation that was not right with the laws of God, so I said ‘well, there’s nothing I can do because you people are still opening the door to this’, but the people in the house, the demons would pull on their hair, move objects around, the whole bit. So these are the things they can actually do, so they can cause actual physical pain on people, and this stuff is actually becoming more and more common, particularly in this neighbourhood. But the point is that in this particular neighbourhood it’s a big problem because of the fact that there’s so much superstitious practice that’s going on here, and a lot of the Hispanics are not living in good situations, or they’re not married and living together and that sort of thing.

Phew. So, if you want to look into the benefits of demonic possession — which, as we have seen, may be substantial indeed — then it would appear that your investigations can begin with the simple process of swearing, watching porn, and reading Harry Potter. If you make any progress, do let me know in the comments section.