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.