All of the versions above, however, have been remarkably coy about identifying the effective cause of Voris's departure, speaking in more general terms about the inability of Church Militant's board to control Voris, since the members all had conflicts of interest, especially those who were also Church Militant employees. Ms Harrington in fact deferred to another former employee, David Gordon, expecting him to provide the lurid details; his account has now been posted here. At 4:37, he says,
As you can imagine, it's that Michael Voris was living, up til, up to recently, I don't know if it's ceased yet, I don't know if his behaviors have ceased yet, but living a life that involved active homosexuality. . . . The board itself, when this came to light, were scrambling to do damage control, [were] floating lying to everybody, lying to donors, lying to people and saying you know, Michael Voris, he stepped down for health reasons.
Gordon claims that the board mentioned the morality clause in its statement due to his insistence that some mention of the issue be included. However, in searching for more background on l'affaire Voris, I dscovered a 2016 book by E Michael Jones, The Man Behind the Curtain: Michael Voris and the Homosexual Vortex, which puts the current crisis for Church Militant in the context of an ongoing series of barely averted disasters since the group's founding. The PDF is available at the link. David Gordon says he was concerned that the board would find a way to put Voris on some type of temporary leave that would allow him to return after a decent interval, and in light of Jones's book, this isn't far from what's happened at least twice in the past.I would say that none of the former employees who've made various statements on Voris's departure is on any sort of media A-team, nor indeed on anything much more than junior varsity, and this applies to E Michael Jones's book as well. Nevertheless, it provides necessary additional information on the organization in light of two earlier crises:
On January 23, 2016, Michael Voris, the Internet TV personality who was the face of Church Militant TV, placed an emergency call to his spiritual advisor, who was in Mexico at the time, asking for prayers. A homosexual had gone on Facebook claiming that he knew the man who had given Michael Voris AIDS. He was now claiming that Michael Voris was “as gay as they come” and that he was going to reveal what he knew about Voris’s homosexual past. The announcement precipitated a crisis at the Church Militant studio in Ferndale, Michigan.
. . . The January 2016 posting on Facebook was not the first time that someone from the homosexual scene had come forward and accused Michael Voris of being gay. In each instance he denied the allegations.
. . . In spite of the denials emanating from Church Militant, the blogosphere kept insisting that Michael was gay. Before long the staff realized that “the clock was ticking.” This was not going to be another tempest in a teapot like the SSPX affair. By the time the new allegations began to arise during early 2016, Voris’s spiritual advisor had seen pictures of Michael in his gay lifestyle period. Now he was hearing from good priests who were telling him that Voris was harming the Church by accusing priests and bashing bishops.
Buit this waan't the first such crisis:
In February 2012, Voris’s spiritual director discovered that Voris had had a past that included sexual activity with both men and women and that he was HIV positive. The fact that Voris had been a homosexual and was now engaged in public denunciation of clergy and bishops for the very sins he himself had committed turned Real Catholic TV into a bombshell that could go off at any moment. Voris remained oblivious to the danger, saying in typically narcissistic fashion that God would never let this come about. He continued in the same vein by claiming that he, as the prodigal son, had a right to talk about sodomy. If anyone had that right, it was Voris. Pressure was building both inside and outside RCTV. By the end of 2012 Voris was in a precarious situation because a gay priest he had targeted was demanding financial statements.
. . . [Later that year,] Marc Brammer got a call from Mark DeYoung, a seminarian at Dunwoodie, the same seminary which Voris had attended for two years during the ’80s. The current crop of seminarians at Dunwoodie were avid Voris fans, but they were being told that Voris had been dismissed for good reason and didn’t know who to believe. DeYoung had told Brammer during one of his trips to New York that the seminary officials were willing to release Voris’s dossier to the public if Voris felt the rumors were false. Voris had always maintained that he had not been dismissed because of homosexual activity but because of his spiritual immaturity, failing to understand that spiritual immaturity had become a code word for homosexuality. Unaware of that point, Voris has made some effort to prove that he was not kicked out because of a gay lifestyle.
On April 10,. . . Brammer met with Voris’s spiritual director, who then told him what he knew about Voris’s homosexual past. At this point, “the dam broke.” Both men now felt that Church Militant TV could not go forward with Voris as its director, and the two decided to join with a number of stakeholders at CMTV and come up with a plan that would allow Voris to go quietly to avoid scandal.
In each of these previous crises, Voris was able to hang on, in 20l6 because he was able to convince his audience that this was all in the past, while in 2012 he appears to have been able to use the intricacies of Church Militant's legal position to avoid termination.The bottom line here is that Church Militant and some of the key figures behind the scene have known about both Voris's history and his ongoing conduct throughout the life of the organization, and up to now, Voris had been able to remain in his position there, due in some measaure to nonfeasance by the board and knowledgeble backers. Let's hope that the current publicity can drive a final stake through the heart of his career.
