Guestsplaining: Rod Dreher on the Occult, UFO’s and the Hidden World | Fr. Gregory Pine
February 3, 2025
Fr. Gregory: This is Father Gregory Pine, and welcome to Godsplaining. Thanks to all those who support us. If you enjoy the show, please consider making a monthly donation on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to God’s planning wherever you listen to your podcasts. We are delighted to welcome for this episode of Guestsplaining, one Rod Dreher. Thanks so much for joining us.
Rod: It’s great to be here. I’m always happiest when I’m with a metaphysical realist. Just so you know.
Fr. Gregory: There you go. Well, in our moderate commitment to the real order, we salute you. Now, many folks will know you probably best from The Benedict Option, which I guess is published 2017, some seven years ago, which is wild to think. Or through various other online and print media to which you make generous contributions. But for those who don’t know you.
Could you just say a word of introduction?
Rod: Sure. Well, my name is Rod Dreher. I am an American, but I happen to live in Budapest, Hungary. That’s where I’m coming to you from today. And I’m a writer and a journalist. I used to write for the American Conservative, and now I’m at the European conservative. I did write The Benedict Option, which is probably my best known book, but by far my best selling book was called Live Not by Lies. It came out in 2020, right in the middle of COVID and it’s a book that talks about the people who came to the United States and to the West in general, from the Soviet bloc escaping communism and how they in recent times, they’ve come to see some of the elements of what they left behind, totalitarianism rising in a different form in our society. I thought that was alarmist at first, but the more I talked to them, the more I realized they were really on to something. So in the book, I write about what they’re seeing and the second half of the book is based on trips I made throughout the former Soviet bloc countries to talk to Christians, Catholics and others who had stayed behind and resisted communist totalitarianism.
Because I was looking for the advice they would have to give to Christians in the West for how to prepare for what’s coming. In fact, they even dedicated the book to the memory of Father Thomislav Kolaković, who was a Jesuit who escaped the Nazis in Zagreb because he was doing underground work for them, moved to Bratislava and told his and lived under a false name, taught in the Catholic University and organized networks of small groups of Catholics, mostly students, young people who and told them that when the Germans lose this war, the Soviets are going to be ruling their country. They were going to come after the Church. The first thing that they were going to do is persecute Christians. So because Father Kontorovich saw this coming prepared his people, the underground church in Slovakia was one of the strongest in the Eastern bloc. So I think that Father Kolaković, by his example and his work has a lot to teach us today. So I dedicated the book to him. The most recent book came out just the other day. It’s called Living and Wonder, and it’s a more hopeful book. It’s about how we, we as Christians can get back in touch with the visceral presence of God. God is everywhere, present and filling all things, how we lost it, how we can get it back, and some of the false false forms of enchantment, such as the occult and technology that we are particularly prey to today.
Fr. Gregory: Well, I know we’re going to get into that newest publication, but I am struck by things close to my experience, your description thereof. I was in Switzerland for a few years up until recently, and I had a lot of contact with folks in Slovakia, especially those associated with the Ladislav Hanus Fellowship and then the Collegium Institute.
Rod: They’re my friends. Yeah, sure. I’ve spoken to them.
Fr. Gregory: There you go. So these are your people? I’ve never found such a concentration of new natural lawyers outside of the immediate company of, you know, Finis Boyle, [unk]. But it was like it was. It was impressive. Just the intellectual, the kind of social and political, but also, like the liturgical culture, which was not not just excellent, but like, flourishing in that setting.
And you got, you know, Czechia next door, which is, by all accounts, the most secular country in all of Europe. And then Slovakia was like, I mean, they’re like, okay, so we want to eat. And we were hoping that you serve us red meat, just red meat. We just want red. It was it was wild. So, okay, cool. That’s great. I’m encouraged. Maybe we can then just kind of talk a little bit about this most recent book. And you’ve made the observation that, like the problems confronting millennials or even Gen X prior are not the problems confronting Gen Z and perhaps Gen Alpha in days to come. Can you kind of lay out for us the different kinds of ways in which we are brought into confrontation with secular modernity, but also those parts of our weird time that could potentially undermine the faith?
Rod: Sure. Well, one of the crucial moments when I was researching this book came in Oxford a couple of summers ago, Oxford University. I was approached during a conference by a young man, 27 years old, an Anglican seminarian who comes from the evangelical side of Anglicanism. And he said, “Look, I feel like I have to tell you, because you’re writing this book on Christian re-entrapment, that the New Atheism is dead for my generation. That’s something for your generation and the boomers.” I said, “okay, so what’s going on?” “He said, It’s all about the occult with my generation.” And he said, “Before I accepted this calling to the priesthood, I worked in advertising in London. I was the only Christian in the office, which is not really surprising. This is London, this is advertising,” he said. But there were no atheists there either. Every other person in the office was an occult us to some degree or the other. The two of them were even open Satanists and they described Satanism as learning how to be your most fully human self. He went on to say, “Rob, I know that in my entire priesthood I’m going to be dealing with this because my generation has been saturated by the occult, by paganism, from later forms of it, all the way to Satanism and now it’s coming at them hard through psychedelic drugs which are becoming so popular. “But your generation,” he said to me, “You don’t know anything about it. The Church is not ready for this.” And I took him seriously. And then I started investigating and reading some social science research. And the man is right. My generation is completely blind to this and it’s galloping its way through Gen Z and the younger generations.
Rod: Okay. So thinking then about the occult and thinking specifically about this kind of new contest with powers and principalities of a fell sort, I’m reminded of the early centuries of Christianity in which through the exorcistic power of baptism and the celebration of the sacred liturgy, there’s this understanding, like the demons were chased from the city and into the desert. And then you have the early monastic movement in the third and fourth century, especially kind of taking what the witness of the martyrs had made manifest and seeking to interiorize that as a way of life, also involving kind of contending with demons. And there’s obviously this like those are those are beautiful stories and there’s a beautiful witness there to confidence in the power at work and one’s baptism in Christ who is present to us through sacramental signs and sacramental character. But I think that when people encounter the demonic or when people encounter the occult, you know, in living technicolor, they’re typically just terrified and perhaps justly so. So I’m wondering, like, what types of things do you propose in your treatment of the occult in this book as resources with which to kind of reclaim our baptismal dignity and exorcize this exorcist power?
Rod: Well, I, I talk about the importance of prayer, confession, fasting, the usual things. But let me tell you a story that I tell in the book that is just it really changed the way I thought about these things. I used to live in New York City. I was a journalist there 20 years ago or more, and I had this really good Catholic friends, I call them Nathan and Emma, and they were faithful Catholics. Emma was involved in the pro-life movement, Upper East Side people, fancy people. I got a call from Nathan the husband, back in 2017, 2018. I hadn’t spoken to him in many years and he said, Listen, I was praying last night. I felt the Holy Spirit told me to get in touch with you and let you know what’s going on. Emma is possessed. I thought, Wait, what? Really? He said, Yeah, I’m not making it up. To make a very long story short, she had tried to kill herself after having her fourth child nearly succeeded when she got out of the hospital. Psychiatric hospital, A nun that they knew invited her to go to a healing service with a priest who had a gift of healing. And it was there that the demons manifested themselves through her. Well, she applied for an exorcism. She had a priest who was helping her with deliverance stuff. But the Archdiocese of New York had her see the psychiatrist they had on retainer to see if there was any way to explain this. Naturally, there was not. She was approved for a ritual exorcism. But while they waited for the cardinal to approve, this priest was doing routine prayers with her to try to loosen the grip of the demons on her and it turned out that her grandfather back in Italy had been a high level Freemason, an occultist and had made a pact with the devil that ended up cursing the her entire family line. I mean, it was a horrible thing. And these again, these are Catholics, faithful Catholics, small Orthodox Catholics, but this had hit them. I went up to visit New York. I was there on business, and Nathan invited me to come over to the apartment to meet with him. And Emma knew I was coming. He told me, Watch what happens when I go,
I excuse myself to go get lemonade, I’ll put a relic of the true cross that our priest gave to me to protect me when she has these episodes. Watch what she does. Sure enough, I was sitting there on the balcony overlooking the Upper East Side, talking to her, and when he comes back and puts the lemonade down her husband, she cut herself off mid-sentence. Her head dropped down her chin, touched her chest, which she lifted it up, Father, her face was not her own. She looked at her husband with this look of pure hatred, and she cursed him and said, Get that blankety blank thing out of here. I told you, don’t bring it around me. Now, the relic was hidden in his pocket. She dropped her head again, looked at me with her normal face, with eyes just filled with pain and pity. And she said, I’m so sorry. That’s not me. I said, I know, I know. When he was walking me back to my hotel that night, her husband, I said, They’ve been going through this for two years. I said, How has this changed you? He said, Whenever I walk down the street in Manhattan now, I realize that there is this tremendous spiritual battle going on everywhere and we just can’t see it. Well, the good news is she was delivered eventually and how it happened goes back to what you said in your question. Her priest said that he had this intuition that because she was baptized in Italy around 1970, right after the council, that she might not have been baptized, according to the Trinitarian formula. He said there were some funny things going on in Italy back then. So they did a conditional re-Baptism. When they did that, 90% of the demonic activity stopped instantly and the other 10% was fairly easy for him to handle. So this was and she’s free now. In fact, I just saw her this past summer. The story here is that the sacraments matter. They matter immensely. And people who have this mistaken idea that there is nothing between our mind and our souls and the material world are wrong. Matter is not just dead stuff. The spiritual and the material inter-penetrate in mysterious ways. The church knows that’s the Catholic Church. The Orthodox Church knows this, but we often forget it. But I tell you, exorcism is really, really coming back in a strong way in the Catholic Church because people are being flooded by the demonic a lot of the times because they open themselves up to it through things like Ouija boards, horoscopes, things that they think are just going to be something they’re playing around with and lately psychedelic drugs. And they soon find that they are in much deeper than they realize and that the only person who can get them out of it is Jesus Christ, through the Ministry of his priests.
Fr. Gregory: So talking with folks who have experienced some modicum of mischief or oppression in their lives, it sounds often enough like, you know, there’s been some act on the part of the person that him or herself or, you know, those who have gone before, which has kind of made more porous the division between this world, the existence and preternatural existence.
And as a result of which, there’s a kind of easier interchange. Now, in the book, you know, living by – you’re describing, how we ought to be sensitized not merely the preternatural, but to the genuinely supernatural. So we want to distinguish a kind of posture of idle curiosity whereby one consults a Ouija board or tarot cards or whatever else which can make porous and then eventually lead to transgressions. And that kind of division between the this worldly and the other worldly of a fellow sort. But we want to be sensitized to the supernatural, that is to say, the working of God, not just as creator, but as Redeemer, as conducting us into a life beyond. So I don’t know what are what are the some of the things that you describe in the book or even your thoughts beyond the book, apropos of the difference between a kind of vain curiosity as concerns the preternatural and the kind of genuine wonder and openness to the supernatural?
Rod: Well, the book is mostly a hopeful book. This is one chapter in the book, but it’s a chapter that most people are talking about because it’s pretty alarming stuff. But the book is also a book about miracles. People who have been brought to Christ by extraordinary interventions, by God, miraculous interventions. Most people won’t experience that kind of miracle. But that doesn’t mean that we’re cut off from the experience of the supernatural. That is to say, through God, the saints and the angels, what we can do, the most important thing we can do. Aside, of course, from living a faithful and disciplined life in the Church is to change our ways of paying attention. That I found, and this really surprised me that the thing that anthropologists and others say is most important about the ability to pray and to have a sense that there is more to the world than just what we can see, hear, feel, taste and smell is your attention, your ability to focus. And this is something that we’re all struggling with in the world of the Internet. You know, we’ve all heard about that famous book that came out about 15 years ago, The Shallows, in which Nick Carr, the author, talked about what the Internet and the smartphones are doing to our capacity to sustain attention and the Internet as a disenchantment machine in one sense, and that it makes it extremely difficult for us to sustain attention and prayer or focus Bible reading or anything else.
So I would say one of the most important things and this was a surprising finding to me, is for people to limit their use of the Internet and smartphones and to spend more time in meditated prayer. And it’s not something you do once or twice and it’s over, but it’s a process. I should say too, Father, that re enchantment, and what I mean by re-enchantment is simply not sprinkling dust fairy dust on things and making the world suddenly appear all shiny and Disney-like now what it is, is becoming much more aware at a deep spiritual level of God’s presence and that everything has ultimate meaning in God’s sight. It’s not about conveying information. This is not formulaic. It’s not like, here’s the five point plan, boom, it’s done. Rather, it’s about learning how to be staring at the right corner of the sky when a comet goes past. What I mean by that is when there is a [unk] a manifestation of God’s goodness. And in my own case, this is how I came to Christ. The first time it happened to me, I was 17 years old, an agnostic. I walked into the Cathedral at Chartres in France. Nothing in my life growing up in late 20th century America and small town Louisiana had prepared me for the glory of God made manifest there and the stained glass and the stones. I didn’t reconvert there, but I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God existed and that he wanted me. I left that cathedral on a journey towards Christ and went through a lot of crazy turns. But it ended with me sitting there as a young journalist in Louisiana. I was maybe 23 years old, interviewing an elderly Catholic monsignor who was in his late nineties. He had been born in the 1890s and he had been an art professor and an artist himself.
Before his conversion, he was from Guatemala. He had come to America to be educated at Dartmouth, and Yale, lost his faith and didn’t dare tell his family, he didn’t want to hurt their feelings. He went back to Guatemala City. This must have been in the early 1940s to a Mass. His father had been away from the Church for many years, but was dying and wanted to be reconciled, Carlos Sanchez. I was his name and Senor Sanchez kneel down to receive communion. But he didn’t believe in it. The priest held the host out. A dazzling light came out of it, and he heard an audible voice say, “I have always loved you.” He instantly reconverted came back to America, led the life of great repentance, began to think he was called to the priesthood.
But this was the early 1950s. They didn’t need priests like they do now. He thought it was silly. Went back to Guatemala for another event. Same thing happened. But this time the voice said, “Why don’t you do as I ask?” And that’s a great story and a great story for a journalist. I was thrilled to get it. But the thing I noticed is that as this sweet, tender old man who just radiated peace as he was telling these stories, recalling events that changed his life 50 years ago or more, he was crying and the tears of this old man convinced me who was who believed in Christ but was still holding back from full commitment that convinced me I was in the presence of a witness, of a true witness to holiness. And I can’t stay away anymore. I bring that story up because even though most of us will not experience anything quite like that, you can read and the lives of the saints Padre Pio, contemporary saints, Padre Pio, for example, about these things happening, we need to learn to take them seriously. And if God doesn’t speak to us directly in that way, he can speak to us through the holiness of others who have experienced them.
Fr. Gregory: And so I’m very struck by this commendation of attention or this encouragement to care or express solicitude or concern for one’s experience in a way that reflects its integrity. I think of, like the words of Monsignor Luigi Guissani, who describes reason or rationality as a kind of attention to reality and the totality of its factors. But obviously, many of us prefer to not pay attention or we prefer to appear to pay partial attention insofar as paying attention. I mean, it’s exigent. It requires or it places demands on us. But then also it can be a source of great difficulty, you know, like of sadness, of anger, of the recognition that things in my life need to change or in the lives of others. And I myself are responsible for bringing that about. So, you know, what would you say to those who might not feel they have it in them to pay attention for fear of what that might entail?
Rod: Yeah, I’ve known people like that and they are terrified to be still because they’re afraid of what they’ll see if their mind gets stilled. So, I had a good friend back in Louisiana who would constantly fill in her mind with music, with noise. She wasn’t listening to music, to listen to music. She was listening to it to escape the thoughts that scared her. And all I can say is back in gosh, in 2012, I fell into a deep depression because of family matters and I developed chronic mononucleosis. I had mono for three years straight. My priest at the time, I’m an Eastern Orthodox Christian, my priest advised me to pray the Jesus prayer for an hour a day. And the way the Orthodox pray the Jesus prayer you get very still. You clear your mind and try your very best to still your mind and you breathe and slowly. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Pray quietly breathing. If He had asked me even this week as I was with my sickness, if he had asked me to walk ten miles a day, that would have been easier than being still for an hour to sit in the presence of God and pray, pray carefully. But I did it out of obedience. And do you know, after a year or so I noticed changes. I noticed prayer itself became easier and I began to heal. I mean, there were other things going on, too, in my life. But later, when I was physically restored and spiritually restored, I said to my priest, How did you know that that prayer was the medicine? He said, It was easy. I had to get you out of your head because you were stuck in your head and your own anxieties and your own fears, your own sorrow and your own helplessness that the Holy Spirit couldn’t find a beachhead inside your heart to begin to heal you. Once you are able to learn how to focus your attention for just an hour a day, to be in God’s presence, that gave the Holy Spirit a way in to do the work of healing.
I lived it. I know it’s true. And I know that whenever I myself find myself overcome with anxiety, it’s always because I have ceased to pray the Jesus prayer regularly.
Fr. Gregory: Um, okay. Turning for a minute back to the book, you know, like my experiences that driven people are rarely very satisfied with their work. You know, they’re kind of used to a baseline of maybe B-plus. And then they will occasionally surprise themselves with an A-minus or even an A, as it were. But every once in a while you stand back from something that you’ve done and you say, you know, while it’s incomplete or while it’s imperfect and X, Y, or Z ways, nevertheless, this dimension or this aspect of it is as beautiful. It’s wonderful, and I’m proud of that in an appropriate manner. Are there things in the book or like an insight or two that you stand back from and say like, Yeah, the Lord has made Himself known and this or the Lord has made Himself manifest. So there are a couple of things about which you were especially proud?
Rod: Mm hmm. You know, I am a storyteller. I come from the Deep South. I love telling stories. It’s in my blood. It was in my culture. And the way I’ve generally written my books is there’s serious intellectual content there, but it’s interspersed with stories because people tend to respond better to stories. And there’s actually neuroscience behind this. When I wrote a book a few years ago called How Dante Can Save Your Life. And one of the things that I found in that book is when I was researching the book is that neuroscientists discovered by measuring people’s brainwaves that when research subjects take in information and a nonfiction way, they compare that to how they take in the same information presented in the form of a story that it gets so much deeper into our brain. And it’s it’s easier to remember when you tell stories. That’s an insight that really helped me as a writer. It helped me understand why reading the Divine Comedy at a very attentive and even prayerful level helped heal me from my sickness, my spiritual physical sickness. But it’s continued to help me as a writer with that, as background, I’m very proud of the research I did, the anthropological, the philosophical research that is in this book. But I’m most proud of the stories. There’s a great tale of a young man who was 19 in Rome, raised in a communist family in Rome, was a great blasphemer, according to him, who was brought into the Catholic faith by the witness of friends he met at college. But then by getting out of his car a couple of weeks before Christmas in Rome, a homeless man walked up to him out of the blue and said, “Stefano, I’ve been waiting for this moment. The Lord Jesus Christ sent me to tell you that you don’t have to fear anything anymore. From this day on you will serve him.” And then the homeless man began to tell Stefano all of his sins and that they were forgiven, that sort of thing. Stefano told me, I was sobbing when the man was talking. If my cousin hadn’t been standing next to me listening to all this, I would have thought I hallucinated it, he said. I said to the man, Are you an angel? And the man just smiled. He said, Well, what can I call you? He said, You can call me Philippe Natale. Merry Christmas. And then the homeless man fell on the ground, raised his hands and began to says the Our Father. After each line, he praised the Holy Trinity in elaborate language, stood up, walked away and disappeared. Well, Stefano converted and he ended up converting his entire communist family, even his hardcore atheist father, on his deathbed. Now, that’s the kind of story that’s in the book that people are going to remember, even though they’ve got the theology behind that sort of thing. But that’s what they’ll remember. And I’m glad I was able to tell. People opened up to me what their true life stories of miracles and conversion. There’s also a part that’s going to be pretty controversial where I talk about UFOs and artificial intelligence as forms of false enchantment. Till about a year ago, Father, I did not take UFOs seriously. My mindset on UFOs was stuck in in the first season of The X-Files in the early nineties. But then a Catholic journalist in Rome who was a faithful Catholic, said, Listen, I think you better start paying attention here because there’s something big going on spiritually. So I started doing reading and ended up talking to Catholic Social, Catholic Professor of religious Studies, Diana Asoka in the U.S. She studies UFO culture as an emerging religion. And it absolutely blew my mind. Again, this is one of these things that as someone who’s in his fifties, I had no idea this was going on, but it turns out that it’s taken extremely seriously at senior levels of the U.S. government and Silicon Valley. The thing is, nobody there, almost nobody believes these are beings from outer space. These are creatures from other planets. They believe these are some forms of disembodied intelligences that seek to communicate with us. The more I learned about it, the more I realized, my Lord, we’re talking about demons. The first story in my book, In Living in Wonder, is the testimony of a Catholic lawyer who had been demonized by these things. He reached out to me because he was terrified these so-called aliens were visiting him. He’s a sophisticated lawyer working at a major American city and a faithful orthodox Catholic, was terrified, was even afraid to tell his priest because he was he was embarrassed. And I told him that had been speaking to exorcists who have experience with this sort of thing. And I urged him to go to his archdiocese and exorcist. He did. The exorcist prayed over him. These visitations stopped. Now, again, I’m sitting here telling you this on this podcast, and your mind might be kind of blown, too, but this is the hidden world that we never hear about. Ah, we don’t often hear about that because our media don’t talk about it. I spoke to a prominent journalist a month ago who was working on a story for a major secular magazine. He himself is not a believer, but he knew I had been writing about this and living in wonder, and he just wanted to talk to me to find out what I had heard. And he said, you know, I’ve been talking to very senior people in the military and in the national security field. They all say the same thing, that these are intelligences that we don’t comprehend, but they’re trying to reach us. And the journalists that I asked, I asked these guys, did you ever tell the journalists this is what you think they said, Yeah, but they never print it. So if this book of mine gets people at least talking about this and how this sort of stuff falls in to artificial intelligence, it turns out that a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are working on AI, I’m talking about scientists, believe that it is a sort of high tech Ouija board through which we can make contact with these higher intelligences. They actually believe that these intelligences are going to lead us to enlightenment, to greater control over the natural world and all the good things that Americans want. In fact, I believe and the exorcist, I’m talking about Catholic priest. I talked to this study this say, no, no, no, it is a deception. So people are going to laugh at this. But those who know, they know and they know that this is a very dark thing we’re moving into because and I’ll stop here. There’s a man named Jacques Vallée in Silicon Valley. He’s like the grand old man of UFO studies. He’s a computer scientist. That’s how he made his money. But not a believer at all. But he wrote a great book called Passport to Magonia that I read. That’s a legend of these circles. He surmises that these things are preternatural beings that are appearing to us as space aliens, because that’s the sort of thing that people raised in a scientific technological culture would take seriously if they appeared as, I don’t know, fairies, trolls, that sort of thing. Nobody would take it seriously, but they would as aliens. And this says Jacques Vallée, again, not a Christian. He believes that there’s a grand spiritual deception going on. So if I planted that seed in the minds of readers to say, just watch this, don’t take it all for granted, don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing, then I’ll be proud of that.
Fr. Gregory: Wonderful. We’ve come, we’ve come to the end of our time. But I’m hoping that you can just direct our listeners to places where they can find your work, whether articles or the books that you’ve mentioned or other things besides.
Rod: Oh, thank you for the invitation. While I write a daily Substack newsletter, roddreher.substack.com where I cover these things that cover religion, culture, politics, and it comes out every single day and sometimes on the weekend they can subscribe there. I also my new book, Living in Wonder, it’s available everywhere also in the UK, issues coming, editions coming out in France, Hungary and Italy next year. I’ve also written Live Not by Lies. That’s my by far my biggest seller. They’re making a documentary film about it now, by the way, to bring the stories of these Christian heroes who resisted communism to a new audience while they’re still alive. They’re dying off now. I live in Eastern Europe. They’re dying off. These testimonies have been preserved on film, and they’re going to be shown to everybody next year. And of course, The Benedict Option and How Dante Can Save Your Life. They’re available, too.
Fr. Gregory: Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for taking the time. Thanks so much for your contribution. I am grateful.
Rod: It was a blessing. Thank you, Father.
Fr. Gregory: All right. Turning to you, the listener. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Godsplaining. You can follow up on all the ordinary outlets, but especially at Godsplaining.org where you’ll find our links for upcoming events and for merchandise and for options to support the podcast for which we are very grateful. So know of our prayers for you. Please pray for us and we’ll look forward to chatting with you next time on Godsplaining.