Mike Lewis, founder of the website Where Peter Is, has taken a swipe at exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger. But “taking a swipe” is actually too soft a term when one considers that Mike Lewis didn’t merely challenge certain things Fr. Ripperger has said or written. Throughout his 4,000-word screed, Lewis accuses Fr. Ripperger of making “bizarre” statements that “dissent from the teachings of the Catholic Church.” He even accuses Fr. Ripperger of making statements that are “contrary to Catholic Tradition, doctrine, and theology.” What he offers up as evidence are cherry-picked quotations from various speeches—often leaving off pertinent context—never once supplying any direct evidence to substantiate his very serious charges.
Lewis peppers his article with derogatory accusations, calling Fr. Ripperger things like “a fringe traditionalist figure.” But while such ad hominems are not libelous in themselves, statements like “Fr. Ripperger has a long history of controversial statements and claims, including but not limited to dissent from the teachings of the Catholic Church” could be. It’s one thing to challenge the things someone says, and it is quite another to directly accuse them of what is tantamount to heresy.
Under the heading “A History of Bizarre Statements,” Lewis claims something that is completely untrue, stating it as if it were the truth. He made no attempt to contact Fr. Ripperger to obtain a clarification or to ascertain the truthfulness of his claims—he simply asserted his interpretation of the facts as fact. Lewis wrote:
Following the 2020 election, Marissa Nichols wrote about how members of her Catholic homeschool community were circulating a “Prayer of Command” composed by Fr. Ripperger, who urged that Catholics recite it, asking “Jesus Christ to break any curses, hexes, or spells and send them back to where they came from” in order to “Stop the Steal.” (emphasis added)
I reached out to Fr. Ripperger to ask if he urged Catholics to recite the “Prayer of Command” he composed and if he encouraged the use of the prayer to “stop the steal.” This is what Fr. Ripperger wrote in return:
I wrote a prayer by that title as it is in my Deliverance prayers but they modified it and I never said to say it to stop the steal. I never sent out that “memo.” It was a case of telephone: one person said to pray this prayer from Fr. Ripperger and then it morphed into me saying to say the prayer/Other people were saying that. I wrote a separate prayer (attached) which just tells people to say a prayer for the integrity of the election.
In essence, Mike Lewis took an email written by someone else and attributed its contents and its intentions to Fr. Ripperger. Had he reached out to Fr. Ripperger to confirm the situation prior to publishing, he likely would have received the same response. But instead, Lewis rushed to publish without verifying his claims; and immediately after stating this blatant falsehood, Lewis all but accused Fr. Ripperger of heresy: “Fr. Ripperger has made other statements that are not only contrary to Catholic tradition, doctrine, and theology, but which threaten spiritual and physical harm to the vulnerable people who look to him as a religious authority” (emphasis added).
The Church defines heresy as: “the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith.” Such matters which must be believed include Church doctrines, so for Lewis to claim that Fr. Ripperger is making statements contrary to doctrine, he is accusing him of spreading heretical ideas. Subsequent to this, Lewis never points out any specific doctrine, tradition, or theological teaching which he believes Fr. Ripperger to have contradicted—he merely relies upon inference and suggestion to substantiate this claim.
In the next section, “‘Making Stuff Up’ About Demons?” Lewis refers to a video clip of Fr. Ripperger talking about the hierarchical structure of Hell. Here, Lewis quoted a criticism from Fr. Matthew Schneider, who asserted that Fr. Ripperger is “making stuff up from nowhere” about the hierarchy of Hell:
According to one of these priest-theologians, Fr. Matthew Schneider, LC, Fr. Ripperger’s teachings on demon hierarchy appear to deviate from traditional views, which often either depict demons as chaotic without a clear hierarchy or align them with the seven deadly sins. He wrote of Fr. Ripperger’s claims in this video, “As far as I can tell, he’s making stuff up from nowhere.”
From here, Lewis quoted extensively from Fr. Ripperger’s talk, wherein he explained the authority of demons over others. If anyone is deviating from the traditional views of the hierarchy, it is Fr. Schneider (as well as Lewis, hiding behind Fr. Schneider’s comments). St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in the first part of the Summa Theologica an answer to question 109, “The Ordering of the Bad Angels:”
On 1 Corinthians 15:24 the gloss says: “While the world lasts, angels will preside over angels, men over men, and demons over demons.”
I answer that, Since action follows the nature of a thing, where natures are subordinate, actions also must be subordinate to each other. Thus it is in corporeal things, for as the inferior bodies by natural order are below the heavenly bodies, their actions and movements are subject to the actions and movements of the heavenly bodies. Now it is plain from what we have said (Article 1), that the demons are by natural order subject to others; and hence their actions are subject to the action of those above them, and this is what we mean by precedence—that the action of the subject should be under the action of the prelate. So the very natural disposition of the demons requires that there should be authority among them. This agrees too with Divine wisdom, which leaves nothing inordinate, which “reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly” (Wisdom 8:1).
Had Lewis simply turned to Aquinas on the matter, he would have understood that what Fr. Ripperger said is indeed a part of the Church’s theological tradition and teaching. Rather, this is supposed to stand as one of Lewis’ examples of Fr. Ripperger contradicting “Catholic tradition, doctrine, and theology.” This is now the second time Lewis failed to do even a baseline level of research.
