Fr. Richard Rohr and UFO's
Aliens are at the centre of his teachings

This is Part 6 in this series.

• Part 1: Richard Rohr's strategies to gain credibility and silence objections
• Part 2: Richard Rohr vs the Bible
• Part 3: Richard Rohr and social and moral issues
• Part 4: Richard Rohr vs Catholic doctrine
• Part 5: Richard Rohr and the Great Reset.
• Part 6: Richard Rohr and UFOs (this article)

This is an exceprt of Daniel O'Connor's book "Only Man Bears his Image" (released Oct. 2023). This book is a watershed work in the fight for the heart of the Church. It exposes Richard Rohr's UFO theology.

Richard Rohr's statements

In a recording of which currently has over a third-million views on just one of his social media pages [1] —wherein he teaches:

We can’t presume that God just got interested in God’s creation 2,000 years ago and left the first 13.7 billion years empty of revelation .. .in our overemphasizing Jesus without understanding Christ we created a storyline ... that all depends upon a supposed sin that was committed between the Tigris and Euphrates River, and that just isn’t a big enough storyline... when I was in college, its six galaxies! ... you have to say, ‘who is God?!’ Well, he certainly isn’t upset because someone bit into an apple...our theory of salvation is so tiny, so planet-bound... when we discover life on another planet, which might be tomorrow, our little story line is shot to hell...[13]

... a Universal religion... [one that] doesn’t depend on the Bible... in terms of geological time the Bible has existed in the last nanosecond... I’m not trying to lay the Christian religion on anybody; in fact, quite the contrary. In fact you’ll find, once you recognize the Universal nature of the Christ Mystery, it isn’t in competition with Judaism anymore... you don’t need to call it Christ to have the recognition...Karl Rahner... was one of my five great teachers... he said, ‘I would recommend that, for 50 years, we stop using the word ‘God.

...Paul [the Apostle] usually quotes Jesus incorrectly ... the three synoptic Gospels... are about Jesus, [but the Gospel of] John is about Christ. And the reason we have so misused and misinterpreted John’s Gospel is this is the eternal and archetypal Christ talking; he can say ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life,’ but he is not talking about Jesus, he is talking about this mystery, this amalgam of matter and spirit which IS the way for everybody... that was true for the native religions... it’s certainly apparent in Hinduism...it’s shocking for us prudish Christians; well, we’ve got a lot of un-learning to do...Christ is not an individual, Christ is a collective... already by the 70s, Jesus has been dead only 40 years[**] ... they came to this massive cosmological understanding of their religion.

Rohr’s inability to refer to Jesus as alive (in fact, Jesus was only dead for 3 days) is linked to his inability to understand that it really was and is Jesus Himself—not merely an ephemeral “Universal Christ”—Who declared that He was and is “the way, the truth, and the life”... for everyone who exists.

... [Jesus] told us to follow him, not to worship him... this Universal Christ... is an archetypal image, it’s a universal image, it’s a cosmic image, it’s connected to creation, not to a storyline in Israel...

The teachings above provide just a small overview of some of Rohr’s efforts to undermine the essence of Christianity by replacing it with a “universalized” Christ, inspired by the “need to defend Christianity of being shot to hell when aliens are discovered.” I sympathize with one who is shocked that a Catholic priest could say these things without being excommunicated, much less with remaining in such an extremely popular public ministry and be granted personal audiences with the Pope. But I can only exhort such a person to wake up, pull his head out of the sand, and see the signs of the times.

This is only one of innumerable instances of free rein being given to the Great Apostasy (of which we are now in the midst) while a simple, pious, traditional, and orthodox Faith is ridiculed and even persecuted. Therefore, Catholics in particular must stop holding their breath, waiting for official Ecclesial pronouncements, before rejecting what is not in keeping with the Deposit of Faith. They must continue to hold fast to the true Magisterium, but they must stop supposing that every opinion for every theologian in the Vatican is trustworthy on that count alone. That Fr. Rohr appears as a priest good standing, whose teachings are under no formal Church censure, is no reason at all to regard them as licit. Similar protestations now being offered in defense of the various other clergymen who have promoted alien belief are equally irrelevant.

Due to claims from Rohr like those described above, many of today’s popular Christian apologetics resources, speakers, websites, etc., are careful to point out that his teaching is problematic. But until they root out the source and motivation of Rohr’s errors, their cautions will only ring hollow and prove ineffective.

Whoever believes the galaxies are filled with extraterrestrial civilizations will, sooner or later, come to find the allure of Rohr’s “Universal Christ” irresistible. Alien belief and “UFOlogy” are interests known to dominate the minds of their adherents (a theme we will discuss in Part Four), and a Christian who follows this path will soon find himself in desperate need of a theology to bolster, or at least allow for, this fantasy. It is no coincidence that Rohr’s popularity has grown in proportion to ever metastasizing belief in aliens among modern day Christians.