More On Michael Voris And Church Militant

I ran into this intriguing video by someone named Christine Harrington, whom I hadn't previously encountered. She says she was briefly an employee of Churdh Militant, and it isn't hard to see that the experience left her disgruntled, but just comparing her account to my own experience in various workplaces, I'd have to say her version has the ring of truth. Some excerpts, at 4:05:

There wasn't much Catholic going on inside of Church Militant, other than the chapel. Now, there were a few people that were very courteous, very accommodating, very nice to work with, but for the most part, everyone was vying to be a little Michael and to eventually take Michael's place, so they all emulated Michael and Michael's behavior.

At 7:05

There are some things that I'm not going to be able to talk about, but I will talk about what Christine Niles put in her statement after Voris released his, and in that statement, she said that Voris often did not attend chapel. Now, I can substantiate that that is true. I can also substantiate that we were all required and mandated to attend chapel. But Voris wasn't the only one that wasn't attending chapel. There were managers and board members that didn't attend chapel as well. Now, I don't know why they were given a special privilege not to attend, because my understanding and what I was told was that everyone was mandatory to chapel.

But let me give you my story about chapel. So my first week there at Church Militant -- you know, chapel is from 8:00 AM until 8:45, we do the noon Angelus, and then 5:00 evening vespers until 5:30 or 5:45, it depends -- so, 8:00 rolls around, everybody, you know, shuffling in the chapel, and I'm new, so I sit in the back. And they let it go the first day, but then the second day, they told me I had to sit either up front or in the middle, and I'm thinking, "Well, why is that? Why do I have to do that?" I went ahead and sat up front, and then I was told the third day, when I went and sat in the back again, that I had to sit in the middle or up front.

And I said, "Why, what difference does it make?" and they said, "Because you're not on camera when you're sitting in the back." Oh -- so we're in chapel for the audience? We're in chapel to show that we're praying? I thought we were in chapel to show reverence for Jesus and to God and to increase our spiritual life, and to pray for the day that we may honor God in our work. . . . But no, I had to sit where I could be seen.

Confer Matthew 6:5:

When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.

At 9:46:

On day one working there, I was told that I was not to speak to Michael; I was only to speak to Michael if Michael spoke to me; I was to not try to catch his eye; . . . I'm to be seen and not heard, and not to ask him any questions, because he was a very important man.

At 13:05:

Back to Christine Niles's statement about the chapel. Christine had different hours than everybody else in the studio. She usually came in about late morning or early afternoon. Sometimes she was there for the Angelus, sometimes she wasn't, but she was always in chapel for evening prayers.

. . . As far as working in the studio, there was constant crisis going on all the time, constant drama all the time, and since I was writing scripts for Evening News, during that five months, the set for Evening News changed five or six different times during that five month period I was there.

Her overall point is that the Church Militant morality clause is so vague and broad that there's no clear way to identify what Michael may have done to violate it and force his resignation. On the other hand, she points out the the Church Militant board is made up of Michael's friends, as well as Church Militant employees who had a vested interest in letting Michael do as he pleased, so whatever forced his resignation must have been such a major issue that the board had no choice but to force him out.

She notes that Church Militant has been in financial crisis at least since mid-2022, so what the future holds with or without Voris is uncertain. Ever since I'd learned of Church Militant, I've seen occasional accunts from disgruntled former employees who left in frustration or were fired, so this version from Ms Harrington is nothing new. The lesson to be taken here, I think, is that it never hurts to be skeptical of people who insist that the Roman Catholic Church has gotten things all wrong, and the true pathway to heaven lies with the likes of Michael Voris. This is and always has been a con.

I'm a little amused to see so many YouTube commentators so disillusioned at Voris's sudden downfall, but then they conclude it's somehow un-Catholic to criticize him too much, best just to pray for his healing and not ask too many other questions. It's true that focusing inordinate attention on Michael Voris's possible failings could be sinful curiosity or detraction, but learning his methods of deception can help us avoid being led into such errors as he led us into in the future. I made a similar point about Taylor Marshall back in 2019.

So far, it looks like there was quite a bit of deception behind Church Militant, and we shouldn't simply ignore what was done there.

Thoughts On Michael Voris

Over the past two days, the level of YouTube commentary from conservative Catholics on Michael Voris's resignation from Church Militant has far exceeded the commentary on either the recent Synod on Synodality or Bp Strickland's removal by Pope Francis. Based only on that, an observer from Mars might conclude that this was a much more significant event in the life of the Church than either of the others, which has me puzzled.

I started this blog in 2012 as I was in the process of converting to Catholicism, at that time trying to do it under the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus, which didn't work out. After a year or so, my wife and I were able to come in via RCIA. At the time, influenced in part by the second sex abuse crisis in the US Church driven by the McCarrick-Wuerl scandal, I tended to follow more conservative influencers like Voris and Church Militant and Fr John Zuhlsdorf.

In part, I was also driven by the conservative orientation of the former Anglicans hoping to form Roman Catholic ordinariate parishes under the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus. However, over the period of covering the formation and early administration of the US ordinariate, I became gradually disillusioned, in some measure due to the level of scandal associated with the former Anglican (and other Protestant) priests the ordinariate ordained. A remarkable number were laicized or otherwise removed from clerical roles during the ordinariate's first decade, which I covered here; others probably should have been but weren't.

What changed my viewpoint even more was finding a vibrant diocesan parish that exposed us to a fully functioning novus ordo model. Among other things, I saw actual committed diocesan priests regularly rotating through the parish as pastors and associates who formed a remarkable contrast to the caricature of the diocesan priesthood offered by people like Michael Voris and, maybe more importantly, the sometimes pretty sketchy examples in the ordinariate.

I occasionally posted about Michael Voris here. In this post from 2016, I generally referenced remarks he'd made at the time about his former days as an active same-sex-atrracted person, but I tended to agree with his position that Pope Benedict was overrated. As I recall his various quasi-confessions around that time, he said he made them because, in the light of his criticisms of the Church over the McCarrick-Wuerl scandals, sources close to the US bishops might leak his background to discredit his own accusations, so he felt the need to air the information first -- but this was all in the past.

Well, apparently not. I've been listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast -- I don't know what conservative inflencers think of it, but of course the John Paul II CCC is a thorough product of the Second Council -- but I note that CCC 1131 says the sacraments are efficacious. They aren't mere formalities. If you go to confession sincerely wanting not to do certain sins, you can make definite progress via God's grace. Somehow, this didn't happen with Michael Voris. People who've known him say he went to the gym a lot, which seems to be reflected in the photo above.

Not always, of course, but the gym to some people can be a near occasion of sin. Maybe he needed to stay out of the gym and work out at home, just for starters. And if he was going to the gym all this time, I quetion whether he'd ever actually left his prior life behind. But for whatever reason, I gradually stopped following Michael Voris and Fr Zuhlsdorf, but I kept going to mass and confession. I've probably grown as a Catholic as a result.

These days I follow Bp Barron and Fr Mike Schmitz. I find Michael Voris less of a disappointment than maybe an indication for me of how I've moved forward as a Catholic. I'm really sorry for people who depended on him. On the other hand, I'm wondering if the Church is moving toward a crisis bigger than the first two sex-abuse crises of the past decades, and we're going to need characters much more solid than Michael Voris or Fr Zuhlsdorf to bring us through it. In the meantime, the sacraments continue to be efficacious.