Atonement Academy Redux

Although San Antonio's Atonement Academy, a longtime focus of this blog, closed on May 31, 2025, the controversies that surrounded it -- and indeed, the headaches it caused for the Archdiocese of San Antonio -- continue. According to the San Antonio Express-News,

The closing of Atonement Catholic Academy has re-ignited a rift between the archdiocese of San Antonio and an independent Catholic school, which is reaching out to families and teachers affected by the school closure.

In a June 2 archdiocese statement, Superintendent of Catholic Schools Marti West encouraged families to begin the enrollment process at one of the archdiocese's 35 other schools.

“In our schools, you will find Christ at the heart of all we do — through prayer, service, and the relationships we build together,” West said in the announcement.

The archdiocese also steered families away from Lumen Christi Academy, an unaccredited K-12 school that bills itself as "an independent school in the Catholic tradition."

Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller said Lumen employs "unauthorized priests, personnel, and volunteers" that "are not safe environment certified." He also referred to a spat early last year over the use of Sanctus Ranch in Pipe Creek, about 48 miles northwest of San Antonio.

Sanctus Ranch describes itself as a private retreat and conference center that also houses the sole Lumen school. Dan Sevigny founded the ranch and is president of the school.

In January 2024, García-Siller prohibited Catholic organizations from contracting with Sanctus Ranch for any official Catholic events.

He said the Lumen school was not an approved Catholic school.

“It is unfortunate that the situation with Sanctus Ranch has devolved to this point, but Sanctus Ranch, the Spiritual Retreat Foundation, and Lumen Christi Academy cannot be allowed to misrepresent their Catholic status to the public, while soliciting and accepting donations from the people of God in the Archdiocese of San Antonio,” García-Siller wrote.

Sanctus Ranch officials defended they operations, saying in a statement that they never claimed to operate as part of the Catholic church. They called García-Siller's prohibition an abuse of ecclesiastical power.

Lumen Christi Academy, founded in 2024, has marketed itself from the start as an authentic successor to Atonement Academy. In a Letter to the Parents and Teachers of Atonement Catholic Academy on the Lumen Christi website, Dan Sevigny, the school's president, says,

Yesterday, my heart was heavy when I received a phone call from one of your teachers telling me that your school had made the awful decision to close entirely. As a fellow parent who once walked these same halls with my own children at Atonement, I have always prayed for that institution's success, despite the many challenges it faced. I know that for you as teachers and parents, this is an extraordinarily difficult time filled with uncertainty about the future of your children's souls and education.

My letter today comes from my heart as a father who understands your struggle. I want to share with you why my family and I felt so compelled by the eternal destiny of young souls that we stepped out in faith and began Lumen Christi Academy two years ago.

The problem, of course, is that the Atonement Academy had a sketchy history. Its head from 1997 to 2016 was Deacon James Orr, about whom the Archdiocese of San Antonio published credible allegations of sexual abuse in 2019, only a short time after his death. I covered these in detail in this post from 2019 here. And while many were disappointed to hear of the Atonement Academy's closing, many others, students, parents, and teachers, remembered their experiences at the school under Orr and the longtime parish pastor, Fr Christopher Phillips, as nightmarish.

Nevertheless, Fr Phillips, the parish, and the school enjoyed remarkably good press, even as Abp Garcia-Siller moved to restrict Fr Phillips's priestly faculties in 2017. Another popular conservative priest, Fr Dwight Longenecker, wrote of this at the time,

Parishioners at Our Lady of the Atonement are justifiably mystified by their archbishop’s letter. Why, they wonder, would the Archbishop remove a good, hard working and experienced priest if he has done nothing wrong?

Is he really simply asking Phillips to “dedicate some time to reflect on some issues” or is there something darker lurking below those innocuous words? The parish has issued a statement that the archbishop has, in fact, begun the canonical procedure to remove Phillips as pastor.

The timeline of l'affaire Orr that the archdiocese eventually published in 2019 strongly suggests that Orr's retirement in 2016 was forced, and in fact, Phillips had been enabling Orr's abuse:

In 1992 or 1993, a child claimed that Orr had sexually abused him at a neighborhood pool, when Orr was a volunteer for the parish. It was only 23 years later that Father Christopher Phillips, the former pastor of Our Lady of the Atonement, acknowledged that he had received the complaint, but found it unfounded. He failed to inform the archbishop of the allegation, both at the time and later, when he recommended Orr for ordination to the permanent diaconate. In 2007, a second survivor came forward against Orr, alleging sexual abuse in 1995. Eight years later, in 2015, the Archdiocese was contacted by a psychologist who said that one of her clients had disclosed sexual abuse committed by Orr that occurred in the 1990s. Soon after, Orr requested retirement and resigned from active ministry.

It's likely that Abp Garcia-Siller's restriction of Phillips's priestly faculties in 2017 was in this context, and it's very hard not to assume the archdiocese was acting in the interests of Atonement Academy students and parents. Phillips was able to evade Garcia-Siller's restrictions by having the Atonement parish transferred to the Ordinariate under Bp Steven Lopes, and Bp Lopes allowed him to continue as "Pastor emeritus" until 2019, when revelations of yet more reports of Orr's abuse that Phillips covered up emerged, and even Lopes was forced to withdraw Phillips's faculties and ban him from the parish property.

But let's fast-forward to 2025 and the Lumen Christi Academy. The archdiocese posted a letter dated January 30, 2024, in which Abp Garcia-Siller made a particular objection:

The presence of priests on the Sanctus Ranch who do not possess faculties from their dioceses nor a status of good standing from their respective bishops. They are also not in possession of the required faculties nor required permission to exercise ministry of any kind in the Archdiocese of San Antonio. These priests have been disciplined by their respective bishops, yet they are exercising unauthorized ministry at a privately owned business, without supervision and without canonical authority.

So who are the "unauthorized priests" at Lumen Christi? The only priest I can find on the Lumen Christi website is Fr David Wagner. His official biography there says

Fr. Wagner’s journey to Lumen Christi is a long and winding road. Born and raised in northeastern Ohio, Fr. Wagner was baptized and raised in the Episcopal Church. At 19, he enlisted in the Air Force and after his discharge he earned his BA in Philosophy with a minor in English at the University of New Mexico.

Several years later he met and married Carol Anne Castillo. In 2002 he discerned a vocation to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. He attended Nashotah House seminary in Wisconsin, and took his first parish, St. John’s, in Kewanee, Illinois in 2005.

A friend he met at Yale Divinity School who also was an Episcopal priest converted to the Roman Catholic Church and had been encouraging Fr. Wagner to do the same. Eventually, he did, when in 2008 the Wagner family, now including son Joseph and daughter Natalie, moved to the San Antonio area.

Fr. Wagner began the Pastoral Provision process in 2009, but transferred to the Ordinariate when it was launched in 2012. In 2014, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. His Ordinariate assignment was a mission called St. Gilbert’s, and masses were done at St. Peter the Apostle in Boerne.

In 2016, Fr. Wagner left the Ordinariate to become Pastor at Notre Dame Catholic Church in Kerrville, where he served until June 2022, when he retired from active ministry. Since then, he has been serving as a supply priest at several parishes in the Fredericksburg Deanery, as well as other venues, one of which is Sanctus Ranch.

This account leaves out several intermediate steps. According to this 2016 announcement,

Born on March 28, 1958, in Ravenna, Ohio, and baptized that April, he lived in Ohio before enlisting in the United States Air Force in 1978, assigned in Albuquerque, N.M., and Germany. In 1988 he graduated from the University of New Mexico with a BA in Philosophy, then studied Library Science. From 1994-1996 Father David studied at Yale Divinity School, graduating with the degree of Master of Arts in Religion.

. . . In 2002 Father David responded to the interior call to ministry, entering the Episcopal Seminary in Nashotah, Wisconsin, and finishing his studies with a Master of Divinity degree. He was ordained an Episcopal priest on June 12, 2005.

. . . Out of a deep conviction of faith, Father David renounced his Episcopal Holy Orders and left the Episcopal Church in 2008, moving to San Antonio, Texas, and converting to Roman Catholicism. In November 2009.

Exactly where and how this conversion took place is unclear, although it seems that if he'd moved to San Antonio, Fr Phillips and Our Lady of the Atonement must have been involved. The same source continues,

Father David applied for ordination to then-Ordinary Monsignor [Steenson]. While waiting, Father David taught Philosophy, English, and Theology at Northwest Vista College, the Mexican American Catholic College, and St. Mary’s University, all in San Antonio, Texas.

Atonement Academy isn't mentioned here, but other sources suggest he taught there as well. Of his ordination, this post says,

His Excellency Gustavo Garcia-Siller, M.Sp.S., Archbishop of San Antonio, ordained Fr. Wagner to the priesthood in the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter at 3 p.m. on Sunday, August 24, [2014] at St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church in Boerne, Texas.

Fr. Wagner, a former priest in the Episcopal Church, served as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Kewanee, IL, from 2005 to 2008. He and his wife Carol and their two children – Joseph, 13, and Natalie, 8 – converted to the Catholic Church in June of 2008 and moved to Boerne, Texas.

Note the discrepancy with the source above on the conversion date -- but it's also worth noting that converts to the Catholic Church are normally received at Easter, and neither date would correspond with that. Nevertheless, this puts him in Boerne for six years workng in some vague way toward the Pastoral Provision before he was ordained to the Ordinariate. We have no further details on how this redirection took place. A comment from 2017 at Fr Hunwicke's blog gives somewhat more detail about Wagner's time in the Ordinariate:

The archbishop [Abp Garcia-Siller] ordained Fr. Mark Cannady over 4 years ago for St. Gilbert Ordinariate community, which held services at St. Peter in Boerne (less than 20 miles from Our Lady of the Atonement) where he was also worked as an associate pastor. Over two years ago the archbishop also ordained Fr. David Wagner for St. Gibert's and gave him work at various parishes. With Fr. Cannady retired, the archbishop allowed Fr. Wagner to relocate St. Gilbert's to Notre Dame parish in Kerrville (some 45 miles away), as he had family there. While the St. Gilbert community (whatever that might be besides Fr. Wagner and family) meets at St. Peter Upon the Water retreat center, Fr. Wagner has taken over as the pastor of Notre Dame with the previous pastor becoming an auxiliary bishop. It wouldn't surprise me if there aren't folks that would drive past St. Gilbert's to attend the Latin Mass at Our Lady of the Atonement.

The 2016 announcement linked above regarding Wagner's assignment to Notre Dame Bourne concludes,

[B]ecause there are more priests than people in the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, Archbishop Gustavo and Bishop Lopes have made an agreement to bring Father David Wagner and his family to Notre Dame Catholic Church and School.

This raises another question. Wagner proceeded to fill a six-year term as pastor at Notre Dame Kerrville, at first under some type of agreement between the archdiocese and the ordinariate. He was reincardinated from the ordinariate into the Archdiocese of San Antonio as of June 3, 2017, per an announcement from the ordinariate. Thus he came under Abp Garcia-Siller's exclusive authority.Then in 2022, at the expiration of that six-year term, he said in a 2024 interview with Lifesite News that he was "forcibly retired":

He served as the pastor of Notre Dame Catholic Church in Kerrville for six years and then was “forcibly retired.”

“Others have told me it was political. It was because of my orthodox and conservative views, my being a traditionalist. It was for those reasons,” he told LifeSiteNews.

For a year after his “retirement,” Wagner worked as a supply priest, but he says this employment dried up.

. . . Wagner says that after he was “retired” as a priest, he received no salary or redundancy payment from the archdiocese.

It appears that based on the general practice in Catholic dioceses, Wagner had been placed for a six-year term at Notre Dame Kerrville on July 1, 2016. As of mid-2022, with his six-year term as pastor expiring, Abp Garcia-Siller had several options:

• Renew the term
• Transfer the priest to another parish or other administrative job
• Accept his retirement, if he is 70 or 75, depending on the diocese.
• Place him on leave, although this would not necessarily be related to the end of his term, and is up to the bishop.

In this case, since Wagner was born in 1958, he would have been 64 in 2022, not of retirement age. We simply don't know what discussion took place between Fr Wagner and the archbishop or his surrogate, and it would have been highly confidential in any case. All we have is Wagner's version. By his account, he was able to work as a supply priest afterward, but that eventually dried up. In the Archdiocese of San Antonio, the "encouraged" retirement age is 75. A priest may request retirement from the archbishop as early as age 65. If Fr Wagner's discussion regarding retirement took place before he was 65, it isn't clear if he was eligible for benefits. On the other hand, he could simply have been placed on leave, although this is not Wagner's account.

In his 2024 letter regarding Lumen Christi, Abp Garcia-Siller referred to the school employing "unauthorized priests", which can only have meant Fr Wagner by mid-2025. However, there is no specific Catholic definition for "unauthorized". Abp Garcia-Siller may have meant "suspended", but this would have involved a different action from "retired", since retired priests maintain the faculties they had when they were active and can continue to celebrate mass and hear confessions.

The strong implication of Abp Garcia-Siller's remarks is that Wagner's priestly faculties had been suspended at some point either in connection with or following what Wagner characterizes as his "forcible retirement". However, Wagner is quoted in the 2024 Lifesite News article linked above saying he was originally asked to say Mass and hear confessions, but then he was asked to teach full-time. It would appear that as of 2024, he did not have the faculties to do this at that time, nor even the ability to wear clericals, although his school photo has him wearing a cassock.

In response, Lumen Christi Academy has declared it does not operate under diocesan jurisdiction and is not representing itself "in the name of the Church" but rather as a community of Catholic families. However, in the Catholic Church, priests do not function without the authority of a bishop or superior. A priest who doesn't operate within the jurisdiction of a bishop and with the bishop's authorization is not a licit priest outside of very exceptional circumstances.

According to the Fatima Center,

If a priest violates Holy Mother Church’s norms for a Sacrament, then although the Sacrament may be valid, it is illicit. A Sacrament performed illicitly will most certainly affect the effectiveness of the sacrament’s grace in the life of a soul (the principle ‘ex opere operantis’). This alone is sufficient reason for a Catholic to avoid any and all illicit Sacraments.

However, there is even a more compelling and necessary reason to avoid illicit Sacraments. Because the Sacraments are most holy and require the greatest reverence, an illicit Sacrament is always ‘grave matter’ (in other words, when done with sufficient knowledge and consent, it is mortally sinful). Thus, a priest should never knowingly offer any Sacrament in an illicit manner. Likewise, no Catholic faithful should knowingly participate in illicit sacraments.

It's difficult to reconcile the claims of Sanctus Rancb and the Lumen Christi Academy that they are providing "authentic Catholic education" if in the process of doing so they're knowingly encouraging their charges to receive illcit sacraments from an unauthorized priest. They are committing mortal sins themselves, as well as scandal by setting the grave example.

I'm told that one of Wagner's functions at Lumen Christi Academy is to clebrate the Latin mass. Supporters of the Latin mass need to recognize that this sort of freelance celebration with unauthorized priests is one of the factors that's making some Church authorities hostile to even licit celebrations of the Latin mass.

The Atonement Academy was a sad chapter in the history of traditionalist Catholicism that went some way to damaging its reputation with mainstream bishops like Garcia-Siller, who from everything I've learned appears initially to have been favorable to the parish and school. Strategies like those of Lumen Christi that claim to follow the lead of Atonement Academy will only damage the movement further.

I will be happy to add corrections, clarifications, and any relevant additional information to this entry.

Clergy Changes At Our Lady Of The Atonement

Following the news in my last post a month ago regarding Fr Lewis's departure as pastor, it was announced that a new pastor, Fr Gerald Sherbourne, will arrive on September 1. This is a little unusual, since a new senior priest in a diocesan parish often gets the title "administrator" for a year before being named pastor. An administrator typically makes fewer changes at a parish before becoming pastor, but Fr Sherbourne is going straight to pastor. Fr Joseph Reffner has been appointed parochial vicar (i.e. associate), replacing Fr Andrew Westerman.

Fr Sherboune had been an active-duty US Army chaplain, ordained into the North American ordinariate in 2013. Fr Reffner, also a former Army chaplain, had been serving the Research Triangle ordinatiate community in North Carolina prior to this assignment.

Until Fr Sherbourne's arrival in September, Fr Richard Kramer will continue to serve as parochial administrator. Fr Kramer has also been serving as the ordinariate's vicar general, and he will presumably return to Houston to serve in that capacity full time then. This is certainly an indication of the Atonement parish's importance in the ordinariate. Prior to Fr Lewis's departure, Fr Kramer had been at the parish for several months in a financial oversight capacity, which is also an indication of the problems facing the parish and the pressure Fr Lewis faced.

At the time Fr Lewis's departure from Our Lady of the Atonement was announced, Bp Lopes suggested he was pursuing diocesan opportunities for him that might be less demanding. On July 1, Fr Lewis's appointment as Parochial Vicar of St Joseph, Jacksonville, a parish of the Diocese of St Augustine, was announced.

What's Up Now With Our Lady Of The Atonement?

When I decided to stop regular posts on this blog back in 2021, I reserved the right to post now and then as new developments come up, and I've belatedly become aware of new problems at the Our Lady of the Atonement Ordinariate parish in San Antonio, TX. Let's recall that this parish, under the then-leadership of Fr Christopher Phillips, was both the showplace for the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision and then, briefly, its successor, the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter, which contained parishes and groups that worshipped using the Divine Worship liturgy, a Catholic missal that blends elements of the Anglican and Catholic liturgical traditions.

However, Fr Phillips backed Our Lady of the Atonement out of the Ordinariate-in-formation in 2012. What's known of these events is covered in this post here from 2019. The parish remained one of a tiny number of remaining Anglican Use-Pastoral Provision parishes until 2017, when faced with disciplinary action by the Archbishop of San Antonio, Fr Phillips elected to take the parish into the Ordinariate after all. Nevertheless, discipline eventually caught up with Fr Phillips when Bp Lopes of the Ordinariate restricted his priestly faculties in 2019 and banned him from the parish property. This appears to have been connected with a series of unpublished abuse allegations against Deacon James Orr, who had effectively run the parish's Atonement Academy, that Fr Phillips appeared to have covered up.

The passage of time, a different bishop, and a new pastor don't seem to have helped heal the parish at all. And typical of the Atonement saga all along, very little has been released. In January, Bp Lopes sent a letter to the parish discussing the health problems of its pastor, Fr Mark Lewis, and announcing that in March, Fr Lewis would begin a sabbatical (i.e., a leave of absence), during which he would "relocate to another region" and take early retirement as Atonement's pastor.

However, Bp Lopes indicated that he is in discussions with the bishop of the region to which Fr Lewis will relocate on senior priestly opportunities there which, however, do not require meetings. This appears to be a reference to the stresses Fr Lewis underwent at Our Lady of the Atonement. Bp Lopes appointed one of the associates currently at the parish as its administrator until he names a pastor in July -- and beyond that, as usual, we know very little, except that in the wording of Bp Lopes's letter, he and Fr Lewis had been discussing the possibility of the move "for some time".

In what must be a related move, on May 31:

The Atonement Catholic Academy has announced it will permanently close at the end of the school year, citing declining enrollment and rising educational costs as the primary reasons.

"Throughout the years, the Academy has been substantially subsidized by the generosity of the parish. Despite the support of our parish, the financial situation of the school has not improved and is not viable. The outsized amount of the necessary subsidy has negatively impacted the resources of the parish to a level that is no longer sustainable. Despite the efforts of the devoted faculty, staff, and school families who have supported the Academy throughout the years, maintaining the Academy, a tuition-based enterprise, is not possible," the school said in a statement.

. . . However, the facility won’t be empty for long as Valor Education, a tuition-free charter school offering K-12 instruction, will take over the space.

Typical of the parish's saga from the start, little concrete is disclosed here. A visitor provides some context:

Each week the Sunday bulletin of OLA posts the previous week’s collection and the weekly amount required by the budget.  For the last several months that I have been monitoring it there  has usually been about a 40% shortfall, although there were occasional “special gifts” which wiped out the weekly difference.  But obviously this was not sustainable.  Fr Kramer was appointed to the parish with some title like “Financial Oversight Officer” a few months ago;  Fr Lewis then took early retirement as Pastor (he is 65) and Fr Kramer became the PA.  A former seminarian has been serving as PV since his ordination to the priesthood last year.  

The weekly collection is around $25,000, which is comparable to what Our Lady of Walsingham, Houston [the Ordinariate's cathedral and largest parish] receives on a typical Sunday, so the problem appears to be management/expenses, not giving.  You reported on the parish’s attempt several years ago to raise $4 million towards the debt it had incurred for an expansion of the school building which in fact was never carried out.  

The post from 2019 that I linked above covers the school's difficulties as of then. Fr Phillips had started a very ambitious expansiom of the school that incurred heavy debt, but apparently due to continuing financial difficultes was never completed, and much of the school building remained empty while debt payments continued. At the same time, enrollment peaked around 2015, so the expansion was less and less justifiable.

This also leaves aside continuing internal problems at the school that don't appear to have been resolved following the death of Deacon Orr just before the Archdiocese of San Antonio announced that he had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct in 2019. It appears that even beyond the published allegations, taken below from bishopaccountability.org,

Accused in 1992 or 1993, prior to ordination as a deacon, of molesting a boy in a neighborhood pool. Orr was a volunteer at Our Lady of the Atonement at the time. The parish pastor admitted in 2016 to having received the allegation in the early 1990s, and decided at the time that it was not credible. He did not inform the archbishop. Accused in 2007 of attempting to sexually abuse a boy in about 1995. Allegations in 12/15 that Orr sexually abused two boys in the 1990s.

there is a grest deal else that hasn't been published. There is a reddit thread of former Atonement students and teachers recovering from their experiences at the school.

As you’re aware, Orr died in Jan 2019, days to weeks before the credible accusations of sexual abuse against him were published. At that time I was teaching the entire high school, including the senior class of 2019, who had been the last to have Orr as a geography teacher in their 8th grade year. The students in that class told me that he had “accidentally” showed them p*rn during class while attempting to teach them about Ancient Greece, googling “naked Greek men” on the projector in an alleged attempt to show them classical statuary. None of this was ever reported, of course. It’s also the only story I remember of theirs, but the impression I got was “why would we report this to anybody? And to whom? This is just how he was.” They knew, as everyone, that Orr was Fr. Phillips’ favorite.

Anyway, knowing that their experience with Orr was a cause of pain and confusion to my senior students, I went to Fr. Lewis’s office and asked him to come listen to them and say something - anything . . . . He agreed, and showed up one day. He asked zero questions and said nothing of substance, basically: “We honor people until proven guilty, and we don’t have any proof against Dcn. Orr.” (As you recall, these students themselves had had collective, credible, adverse experiences with Orr.) Then Fr. Lewis said, “If you have any further questions on the matter, you can ask Ms….Ms….[gesturing at me]…your teacher.”

I had been at the school a few months longer than Fr. Lewis (less than two years), had never met Orr, and had been working 70-80 hour weeks for those nearly two years (wish I were exaggerating). The combined fact that in that moment I realized that Fr. Lewis, my boss, 1) was also a company man more concerned with covering credibly accused clergy’s asses than with even listening to the experiences of the students of the school for a second, and 2) did not know my name after I had bled, sweat, and cried for the kids at this school on a daily basis was the turning point for me. That’s when I knew I had to leave.

I have the imnpression that Valor Education, which operates several charter schools in Texas, gets its money from public funds and would be in a position to pay rent for the space. This would solve several problems, ending the school's drain on the parish resources, helping to retire the debt, and finally closing the door on the school's unfortunate history.

But this doesn't solve the bigger conundrum that the Ordinariate poses: In recent years, Christianity overall, including Catholicsm, has ended its long declinie in the US, and membership has stabilized.

In fact, part of this stabilization has involved both younger Catholic laity and clergy who've become more conservative, even in mainstream novus ordo parishes. But the Ordinariate, which might have originally been thought to appeal to just that market with archaic-sounding liturgy, doesn't seem to have benefitted from this trend. The Atonement parish was -- at least maybe 35 years ago -- thought to be a bright spot in the conservative movement, but the results in subsequent years have been anything but bright.

When this blog was active, I covered many instances of scandal or implosion, especially resulting from inadequate vetting of candidates for the clergy, and early clergy burnout. This trend appears to be continuing, with seminarians originally under Ordnariate sponsorship electing to stay with their local dioceses for ordination, suggesting that the more conservative younger priests are finding novus ordo a more attractive and stable environment.

Somehow the Church has moved on; novus ordo priests are wearing cassocks, there are now other and better solutions to "beige Catholicism". The temporary apprarent success of the Our Lady of the Atonement model hasn't been replicated in the Ordinariate.

Another Squabble On The Catholic Far Right; Vaughn Treco Resurfaces Yet Again

Just days after the Church Militant board was forced to demand Michael Voris's resignation, the news broke that another organizationon on the Catholic fringe had fired its founder:

All, it with a heavy heart that I share this press release. Thank you, for my brother priests for their support. For now, please discontinue your support of the Coalition until the current board resigns. This is a Hostile take over by the board for their own secular purposes. pic.twitter.com/fLEoIVHhqp

— Fr. John Lovell (@Fr_Lovell) December 2, 2023

According to this post from 2022,

Fr. John Lovell is known as a “Canceled Priest.” Sadly, he is not alone. Fr. Lovell, who co-founded the Coalition for Canceled Priests in 2021, first ran into problems with his own bishop, the late Thomas Doran, in 2009 after reporting allegations of sexual misconduct by a teacher in the diocese. Fr. Lovell was immediately reassigned from his parish and sent for a psychological evaluation. Later, he was told to enroll at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. And in 2012, he was removed/canceled by the new bishop of Rockford, David J. Malloy. Ever since, Fr. Lovell has fought for his good name and helps other priests in the same or similar situations.

I simply can't comment on the circumstances of Lovell's removal, except to note that in 2009, only two years after his ordination in 2007, he'd gotten crosswise with one bishop, and by 2012, following apparent attempts to get him back with the program, he was "removed/canceled" by another. Whether this was a legitimate case of Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders, we'll likely never know, except that now, Lovell has been removed/canceled by the board of the organization he founded. All we know is that the board is saying nothing, and this isn't unusual in many cases of termination, as organizations want to avoid being sued for defamation, while the legal issue is often that employees can be fired for any reason anyhow.

Four "canceled priests" have signed the appeal on Lovell's behalf. They all style themselves "Fr", although I don't know how many have been laicized -- I do know that one of the signatories, Vaughn Treco, was undergoing laicization when I covered his situation here in 2019-20, so if this has been concluded, he isn't entitled to call himself "Fr". I'll get to Treco in more detail farther down, but let's look briefly at the other three signatories.

• Henry Clay Hunt III was removed from his parish, St. Joseph in Del Rio, TX, by Abp Gustavo Garcia-Siller of San Antonio in 2018 and made the chaplain for the criminal justice ministry. This followed a meeting at the Del Rio city hall in which Hunt objected to the election of the openly gay mayor, Bruno "Ralphy" Lozano, from which Lozano had Hunt forcibly ejected. Two years later, in 2020, the archbishop removed Hunt's faculties to celebrate mass in public and began the process of laicization. As is normal in such cases, the archdiocese did not provide other details.
• Joseph Nicolisi had his ministry restricted by the Diocese of Rockford, IL, in 2011 for the delict of living in concubinage with an adult woman. He appealed the penalty to the Roman rota, where it was upheld. According to the link, Fr Nicolisi continues to be forbidden from exercising the power of orders except for celebrating mass without anyone else present.
• Michael Suhy was removed from his parish in Plymouth, MI by Archbishop of Detroit Allen Vigneron following multiple meetings "in the hopes of assisting him to become better equipped to handle such a large parish with a school". He was removed, according to the archdiocese, because "Ultimately and unfortunately, his intransigence triggered a canonical process for his removal." Suhy claims that instead, the reason for his removal was his repeated attempts to report an archdiocesan employee for sexually harassing a man. Although Suhy was removed as pastor, his clerical functions were not restricted.

These are three widely diverse cases, and in at least one of them, there was a clear violation of canon law leading to the priest's restriction. The cases are so diverse that it's misleading to characterize them under an umbrella of "removed/canceled". In the case of Suhy, I think it's reasonable to trust the judgment of the archdiocese that the man was overwhelmed by the job of running a large parish. This can happen. I suspect as well that if that large parish had been up to date with the Bishop's Appeal, the pastor would have had wider latitude over any private cantankerousness about gays.

But this brings us to the case of Vaughn Treco, with which I'm much more familiar, since I covered it here. Vaughn Treco was removed as administrator of a tiny ordinariate group in Minnesota in late January 2019 due to the contents of a sermon he delivered the prior November, which in the view of Bp Steven Lopes of the North American ordinariate were heretical. Treco was offered the opportunity to recant his position and submit to further education, but he refused.

This had nothing to do, at least directly, with any views Treco might have held on same-sex attraction, but it was due to Treco's expressed view that Vatican II was illegitimate. We may argue about this in general terms, but to a Catholic priest, Vatican II is authoritative, and if a priest says it isn't, the bishop is fully within his rights to remove him. Case closed.

Treco was ordained a priest in the ordinariate in 2014, and I was expressing full-fledged reservations about him here as early as August 2015. He had been angling for ordination as a Roman Catholic priest for over a decade before that, despite the fact that he was married. On the establishment of the US ordinariate in 2012, which provided for the ordination of married former Anglican priests, this was a new potential route for him, but another difficulty was that he was a citizen of the Bahamas, and he'd been ordained there in a fringe Anglican denomination, when the ordinariate was intended for former US and Canadian Anglicans.

The best I could conclude as of the 2015 post, based on input from knowledgeable parties, was that there was some back-channel deal between the Archdiocese of Nassau in the Bahamas and the Archdiocese of St Paul-Minneapolis to ordain Treco via the ordinariate, when every indication was that Treco was never a serious candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood, in particular because he was married. However this was arranged, it wasn't a problem for the Archdiocese of St Paul-Minneapolis, because Treco would be under the ordinariate.

In addition to his minimal duties with the tiny Minnesota ordinariate group, he was also a hospital chaplain in the archdiocese there, which is where his problems began -- apparently his preference for celebrating daily mass at the chapel ad orientem rubbed the hospital sisters the wrong way, and for all I know, he might have been preaching heresies in his homilies there as well. Eventually pressure appears to have built from the archdiocese -- which had facilitated Treco's ordination in the first place -- for Bp Lopes to remove him. I never thought Treco was ever anything but an utter misfit who never should remotely have been considered for the priesthood, and his career was brief as a result. As far as I'm aware, he was undergoing laicization as of the time of his removal.

That Treco should be a signatory in this latest fringe squabble and feel entitled to style himself "Fr" says a great deal about the Priests for the Coalition. These little tempests in teapots also say way too much about the current Catholic fringe.

Yet More On Michael Voris And Church Militant

There have been coninuing accounts on YouTube and elsewhere from former Church Militant employees, both those who had left before Micael Voris's forced resignation and others, like Christine Niles and David Gordon, who've left amid the recent controversy. Ms Niles's YouTube statement is here. As a quick recap, I've already linked to Christine Harrington's first YouTube here; she's put up a second one that includes an interview with another former employee, Kristine Christlieb, here This in turn links to Ms Christlieb's Substack account, The Entire Board Should Resign.

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.

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.