Kevin Annett says his Vatican exorcism was followed by Rome's first tornado in 48 years

Kevin Annett said on the Danny Jones Podcast that his October 11, 2009 exorcism in St. Peter’s Square was followed the next morning by Rome’s first tornado in 48 years. He also said the same week European press reports began focusing on Pope Benedict XVI’s role in concealment.

That is the claim. Not a vibe. Not a metaphor. A former minister says he went to the Vatican, called out a spiritual power, and the weather answered like the third act of a Dan Brown novel written during a fever.

Annett frames the trip as accidental escalation. He says he arrived in Rome planning a memorial service for children who died, then decided St. Peter’s Square was not merely symbolic territory but enemy territory. His phrase is the kind of thing that makes a podcast producer quietly check whether the cameras are still rolling: the heart of the beast.

I’m calling out the entity of Rome. It was an exorcism to expose this this entity.

Not him. Rome.

The funny part, if funny is allowed in a story about demons, dead children, and Vatican power, is that Danny Jones briefly thinks Annett is saying he had an entity inside him. Annett corrects him. The target was not Kevin Annett’s soul. It was Rome itself.

No, in it. I wasn’t talking about entity in me.

That distinction matters because it turns the anecdote from spooky autobiography into cosmic geopolitics. Annett isn’t describing a private haunting. He is describing exorcism as a strike on an institutional spirit, a way of naming the power behind the power. He compares the move to aiming at the head rather than the appendages, which is a very podcast sentence, half Saint Paul, half Sun Tzu, with a little airport conspiracy paperback sprinkled on top.

The story gets its voltage from the details. He says Rome police and Vatican police usually stop unauthorized ceremonies in St. Peter’s Square, but that officers walked past him as if they could not see him. He says a Native relative later told him he had become invisible. This is not evidence in the courtroom sense. It is evidence in the campfire sense. The kind that improves when the lights are off.

So the next morning a tornado hits Rome for the first time in 48 years.

A huge claim, carried by a very small bridge

Annett’s biography gives the story its charged setting. He is a former minister whose public work has centered on allegations involving churches, Indigenous communities, residential schools, and institutional cover-ups. On the episode, he links spiritual language to political accusation, saying that naming the truth offers protection and exposure. That is a powerful frame. It is also a convenient one, because any coincidence can become confirmation once the universe is allowed to testify.

The problem is simple: the episode gives us sequence, not causation. Ceremony, then tornado. Exorcism, then headlines. Annett admits he has not tried very hard to interpret it, then interprets it anyway. That is the charm and the danger of this kind of paranormal testimony. It arrives with dates, places, and proper nouns, then asks you to cross the last mile on faith.

Jones, to his credit, keeps asking the practical questions. What was the name of the thing? Why did you do it? Did you think it would work? Annett answers with a cosmology in which institutions can have overminds, addiction can make people spiritually vulnerable, and modern life is not just alienating but edible. By the time he gets to online porn and energy feeding, the Vatican story has become part of a much bigger theory of human predation.

That theory is not modest. Annett says there is no clean border between the spiritual and material worlds, and that people can be fed on by forces they barely understand. The phrase he reaches for is blunt and pulp-horror perfect.

It’s a parasitic It’s spiritual vampirism. It’s a form of parasitism.