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A Catholic priest just fumbled the job of a lifetime.
On Wednesday, Monsignor Stephen Rossetti was stripped of his role as an exorcist for the Washington archdiocese after publicly asserting that UFOs are actually demons. Now, the only demons he’ll be fighting are inner ones.
The order was made by Cardinal Robert McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, who said that Rossetti’s comments clashed with official church doctrine.
“Statements made by Monsignor Rossetti linking UFOs to demonic presence and the Center’s recent use of social media gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism,” the archbishop said in a statement, per The New York Times.
Rossetti is an ordained priest and psychologist who has authored several books on his time as an exorcist. But his outspokenness, evidently, finally went too far.
In a live interview on YouTube and Facebook this week, he pontificated about the “danger” posed by UFO sightings, before speculating on their demonic implications.
“As an exorcist I wanted to raise that danger. And that is that demons like to hide,” he said, as quoted by The Associated Press. “They don’t want us to know what they’re doing because they’re more effective when we don’t realize it.”
“It’s my personal belief,” he added, “that probably many if not most of these UFO sightings are in fact demons.”
Rossetti’s demonic alien convictions are becoming an increasingly less fringe belief among Christians.
Technically, the Church has no formal teaching on the possibility of alien life, according to Christopher Baglow, head of the Science and Religion Initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life. But Rossetti may have overstepped by “putting forward his own doctrine as something Catholics should accept,” he told the NYT.
After being exorcised from his job, a “saddened” Rossetti took a Catholic course of action: feeling very guilty and begging for forgiveness.
“I ask forgiveness for any ways that I have not been faithful to the teachings of the Church’s Magisterium,” Rossetti said in a statement.
More on aliens: Paper Claims the “Asteroid” Japan’s Probe Is Approaching Is Actually a Derelict Spacecraft
