Voris Falls for the Second Time
/The Bishops Break Up a Schismatic Coup Attempt
For the time will come when they will not endure the sound doctrine; but, having itching ears, will heap to themselves teachers after their own lusts.
– 2 Timothy 4:3
When an unclean spirit goes out of a man it wanders through waterless country looking for a place to rest and cannot find one. Then it says, “I will return to the home I came from.” But on arrival, finding it unoccupied, swept and tidied, it then goes off and collects seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they go in and set up house there, so that the man ends up by being worse than he was before. This is what will happen to this evil generation.
– Matthew 12: 43-45.
As Yogi Berra once said, it was like déjà vu all over again. On Wednesday, November 22, I received a call from Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo wanted me to be “the first to know” that Michael Voris had been fired by the board of Church Militant TV. Later that day the CMTV board announced officially that Voris had been fired for breaching their “morality clause,” but without releasing any details. According to someone close to the organization, those violations included:
1. The discovery of gay porn on Voris’s laptop and
2. The fact that Voris stupidly uploaded pictures of himself onto the Microsoft one drive on his work phone and sent these pictures to various homosexuals, some of whom responded by saying how much they enjoyed masturbating to images of the soi disant Catholic crusader.
Some of the pictures were of Voris naked, some of them showed him in tight fitting gym shorts in various states of arousal. These images were sent to young male employees at Church Militant and also to others unrelated to the CMTV operation. Milo was one of those recipients. Milo worked for CMTV briefly, adding new depth to the Psalms by reading them in his English accent, but he also provided consulting work on how to move CMTV forward into the present. Milo says that Voris never propositioned him during his stay at CMTV, but that he also never stopped being “a queen” who was part of the homosexual demimonde in Detroit. He was seen at least three times in the last six months at the Adam’s Apple, a local gay bar. Milo claims that he himself never had a problem having male friends and that his own flamboyant behavior began to decrease after he abandoned the homosexual lifestyle, but he went on to claim that Voris never “left the locker room” and never learned how to relate to other men in a non-sexual fashion.
After the Internet lit up in response to the CMTV announcement, Voris intensified my sense of déjà vu by giving a more lachrymose version of the same speech he had given seven years ago. For those with short memories or no memory at all, I’m referring to my book The Man behind the Curtain: Michael Voris and the Homosexual Vortex, which describes in great detail what happened when Michael Voris’s homosexual past caught up with him in the spring of 2016. In his 2016 farewell speech, Voris admitted that: “For most of my years in my thirties, confused about my own sexuality I lived a life of live-in relationships with homosexual men. . . . As I have said publicly, I lived a horrible life and would be in Hell had I been killed before returning to the faith.” Then, without admitting that he had collected money under false pretenses, slandered people and tried to ruin their lives with reckless lawsuits, Voris claimed, that “I did not intend to deceive. I just didn’t see the need to provide up close detail of past sins in order to inform people of the faith.”[i]
Caught with his pants down in 2016, Voris played the sympathy card for what one observer called the “fag hags”[ii] and young men suffering from father deprivation, the groups which made up his main group of supporters. It worked then, and now he was giving the same speech, betting that the same group which had “dressed him up clean and nice,” to use Pap Finn’s words, would give him a third chance after he had pissed away the second chance they had given him seven years ago. After assuring us that he had never deviated from his mission, which “is always and remains the salvation of souls,”[iii] Voris once again admits that he has done “horrible ugly things,” but then says, “I’m not going to share them” because they are “nobody else’s business but mine.”[iv]
Unfortunately, many of “the horrible ugly things” which Voris did over the past seven years were done on camera, which means that they do concern other people, first of all the people he slandered, and secondly the people who were misled by his slanders. Father Paul Nicholson, who was Voris’s spiritual advisor until my article on CMTV came out in 2016, felt that Voris drove Rev. Peter Miqueli, “a New York priest” who had been “implicated in embezzlement and homosexual, drug fueled orgies,” to suicide.[v]
Miqueli resigned in disgrace in 2015 after being the subject of “extensive reporting by Church Militant.”[vi] After Miqueli was found dead in July 2020, the autopsy revealed “massive liver steatosis consistent with chronic alcohol abuse,”[vii] but the official cause of death was “arrhythmia due to occlusive coronary heart disease associated with severe cardiomyopathy,”[viii] which was consistent with drug abuse at the time of his death.
The man who bore the brunt of Voris’s ire was Cardinal Dolan. I remember a video of Voris badgering Miqueli’s hapless parishioners into saying, “Dolan’s got to go” and watching their bewildered response to Voris’s inexplicable rage at the hierarchy.
In the years following Voris’s first confession and the appearance of The Man behind the Curtain, Church Militant hemorrhaged subscribers and most probably would have gone out of existence had it not been for the McCarrick scandal, which broke over the summer of 2018 and catapulted Voris to unheard of heights of popularity among Catholics who were tired of the American bishops’ inability to deal with the spread of homosexuality among the clergy. Voris’s fans threw money at him, and he used that money to hurt a lot of people with a recklessness that ultimately brought about his downfall. Instead of making amends to these people, Voris left others to deal with the problems his recklessness had created. At the top of the list, Voris is facing an unwinnable libel suit which will eventually lead to punitive damages that will empty the already depleted coffers of Church Militant TV.
According to a lawsuit filed by the Manchester, New Hampshire Judicial Vicar Rev. Georges de Laire, Voris “published in January of 2019. . . multiple knowingly and recklessly false statements concerning Father de Laire’s work performance, his fitness to serve as a member of the clergy, his ethics, and other personal matters. These statements were first published in January of 2019 with no attempt to first interview Father de Laire, with little or no investigation, and despite Defendants knowing that what they were publishing was not true.”
That suit is scheduled to go to trial in February 2024, so to claim that “nothing touches the mission,” as Voris did in his swan song, is deeply self-serving, and dishonest. Voris sticky fingerprints are all over “the mission,” which was nothing more that a narcissistic fantasy Voris created to distract himself and as many people as he could deceive from the pangs of conscience that overwhelmed him as soon as the applause died down.
Within hours of CMTV’s announcement that he had been fired, Voris released a video giving his side of the story. Instead of apologizing to de Laire, Voris predictably turned the spotlight on himself and his “demons”:
I need to conquer these demons. The underlying cause of it has been too ugly for me to look at. It involves in one sense for me [Voris pauses as his eyes fill with tears] spiritual terror. And I’ve not wanted to go near it because [Voris tears up again] because. . . . (6:40)”
Voris did not finish this sentence. “That said, for the last few days I’ve been talking to people who can help me face this.”
Is Voris talking about a spiritual advisor? If so, he should explain first of how he treated the Rev. Paul Nicholson, the spiritual advisor who moved in with him during the early days of his “apostolate.” In a feeble attempt at damage control issued days after Voris got fired and seven years after its publication, Church Militant attacked my book The Man Behind the Curtain as “defamatory”[ix] and “based on calumny offered by a Canadian priest formerly associated with Church Militant, who betrayed his role as spiritual director to Voris.”[x] Missing from this attack was any explanation of why Voris, whose recourse to lawfare was notorious, did not sue me when the book first appeared. Voris was repeatedly asked this question but was unable to give a cogent answer until the statute of limitations finally ran out, making any lawsuit impossible. Father Nicholson had always disputed the claim that he had violated the seal of the confessional based primarily on the fact that he was living with Voris during the time he was his spiritual advisor, thereby blurring the lines between the confessional and personal revelations on an ongoing basis, which Voris would interrupt periodically by telling Nicholson “This is under the seal of the confessional.”
By the time that Church Militant got around to leveling the charge of calumny against me, Father Nicholson’s excommunication had been overturned and he was once again a priest in good standing but not in his original diocese in Canada, which collaborated with Voris’s notorious canon lawyer Marc Balestrieri to get rid of a priest that his colleagues had always felt was too conservative for their tastes. Balestrieri’s name eventually showed up in Rev. Georges de Laire’s libel suit against Voris as the true author of the CMTV article defaming him. Discovery documents showed that Voris had lent Balestrieri, who had no permanent address, $54,000, ostensibly to pay for his mother’s medical bills but presumably as payment for the article, which Balestrieri was now denying that he had written, prompting Voris to write:
“Marc – you are committing perjury. You know you write [sic] that article. What you don’t know is this morning we found proof – your digital fingerprints – all totally documented – on that article. Remember the email address – TomMoore@Churchmilitant.com.? We have all the receipts. You go through with this and we will rain down on you publicly. You are a liar, and a Welch.”[xi]
Responding to my book in the days following Voris’s ouster, Christine Niles said that it was based on lies which I had gotten from Nicholson, who was excommunicated for breaking the seal of the confessional. No one at the time picked up on the fundamental contradiction at the basis of Niles’ and Voris’s account. If Nicholson was telling lies about Voris, he was not breaking the seal of the confessional. If he broke the seal of the confessional, he was necessarily telling the truth. Voris, as Mike Parrott learned, was willing to sue people at the drop of a hat, but he let the statute of limitations run out on The Man Behind the Curtain as a tacit admission that what I revealed about him was true, and that those truths would come out in any libel suit.
The highpoint of his second mea culpa video came when Voris then announced that “I’m going to step away from the camera” (7:08) with no recognition that this is precisely the deal which Marc Brammer and I proposed to Voris seven years ago. Shamed by the eruption of his suppressed homosexual past, Voris first agreed to “step away from the camera,” to repeat the phrase he used in his latest apologia, but then reneged on his deal, as I pointed out in detail in The Man Behind the Curtain. Continuing in the same vein, Voris then has the gall to say “If Our Lord at any point in my past life has tried to put me in position to look at this, well I missed it. I missed it because I was terrified to look at it.”
Why does Voris think that I wrote The Man behind the Curtain if not to put him “in a position to look at this”? Voris “missed it” because at what was a crucial turning point in his life, the homosexual narcissism which continues to be his destiny, asserted itself and killed the deal he had made with those who were trying to help him. Assuming that his conversion was sincere, Voris drove out one demon when he returned to the faith. When he reneged on the agreement Marc Brammer and I offered him in 2016, Voris allowed seven more terrible demons to return to Church Militant, and now he was playing on his supporters’ sympathy to disguise the nasty things he had done in the service of those seven demons by referring to his narcissistic money-making scheme as an “apostolate.”
“Do not let all of my failings move over to the apostolate,” he told his followers. Yes, there is such a thing as a lay apostolate in the Church, but Bishops Vigneron and Rhoades denied him that title when they forced him to remove the name “Real Catholic TV” from his “apostolate.” From that point forward, apostolate became a category of the mind which emanated from the narcissistic psyche of Michael Voris and nowhere else. Voris’s arrogation of the term apostolate was a clear indication that he was angling to apply the term to himself. At a certain point, Voris told his followers that he was the true “magisterium”[xii] of the Catholic Church, which meant that he was a de facto bishop, but that delusion waned with time only to be replaced with a similar delusion. Either way, Voris was obsessed with the episcopal authority which he both lacked and simultaneously craved giving rise to a weirdly schizophrenic strategy which compelled him to attack bishops in general while at the same time shopping around for a bishop who would take him under his wing, thereby conferring on Voris the aura of authority which he so desperately craved. Until that bishop arrived on the scene, Voris would bide his time in exile bragging about his humility and urging donors to support the employees his reckless narcissism would ultimately betray.
By the 12:50 mark of his second confession, Voris left no doubt in the minds of his supporters that he was planning a return:
I am out of the apostolate so that there will be a very clear separation there. That staff deserves your continuing support. They are obviously hurt by all of this. Their work can’t be diminished because their leader failed. That mission can never go away. It just can’t. It’s way too important. Had I not had the love and support of those around me who are exhibiting that because of their Catholic faith . . . had I not had the Church to be there . . . I’m not sure what would have happened.[xiii]
At this point, Voris got teary eyed again:
Grace builds on nature, my nature [tears up again] my truths [he tells us knowingly, without telling us what they are] from my deep, deep, deep past are deeply damaged, and those need fixing and addressing. I would not be doing that if it weren’t for my faith. I am going to show trust in God that many of my close friends know that I have had issues with. I am going to trust that God will do what God needs to do.[xiv]
God doesn’t need to do anything. Voris needs to do something. If Voris were serious about his conversion the second time around, he would be making concrete plans to make restitution to the donors he had defrauded by shifting funds from his not-for-profit to his for-profit entity. He would also be making a public statement trying to repair the reputations of the many people he slandered. Instead, sounding like a hymn by Daniel Schutte, SJ, another homosexual, Voris says, “Here I am [Lord]. It took me 62 years to get here. My will is that I don’t want to do it for 60 years.”[xv]
Notre Dame Alumnus Michael Voris
Shortly after Voris posted his video, Christine Niles, who had jumped ship at Church Militant a week earlier, posted her own self-serving video, in which she gave her account of the “troubling things” that happened at Church militant based on “some of the decisions Voris was making”:
Quite frankly, his personality changed. He is not the man I came to work for in 2014. Quite simply, the lack of prayer was the saddest. That is something I will reveal. He basically had not been praying with the staff for about two years. And that right there is a massive warning sign. I remember when I first came to Church Militant, he was diligently leading us in morning and evening prayer, leading the daily Rosary, going to daily Mass. It was mandatory for all of us. It got to be less and less of a priority until it got to the point where we never saw him. . . . Voris said the first sign that someone is going to fall is that you stop praying. . . . You absolutely must be covered in prayer. It’s something I tell my children. . . . If there is any lesson to be learned from this, it’s that you cannot stop praying. To say that I am heartbroken and furious is an understatement. . . . We do not have the right to judge because you wouldn’t know if you would have done better. That doesn’t mean though that it hasn’t harmed a lot of people.[xvi]
When I mentioned the rumor that Christine Niles confronted Voris at a gay bar, Milo said the idea seemed plausible. Niles arrived at Church Militant claiming that she had had a vision from the Blessed Mother that she was supposed to become Voris’s wife.[xvii] She has a number of children by the man who abandoned her, according to Milo, and is very pious.[xviii]
After telling her viewers that she “poured my heart and soul into that apostolate,” (again that word), Niles announced “If you are hoping that I will divulge private details about this breach of morality clause, that’s not happening. I will respect Michael Voris’s privacy.” She then announced, “I’m not in the business of detraction.”
For once someone associated with “the apostolate” was willing to tell the truth. When it came to people like Mike Parrott, Niles never committed the sin of detraction because she was too busy committing the sin of slander.
Mike Parrott ran afoul of Voris and Niles when he organized a fundraiser for an FSSP priest he felt had been wrongly accused of having child pornography on his computer. Parrott was a computer forensic expert who had learned how to track computer traffic during his six-year stint in the Marines. He also felt that priests, like anyone else, were innocent until proven guilty. The attempt to give a priest whom Parrott felt was falsely accused the benefit of the doubt hardly seems controversial. It had nothing to do with Voris, but that was precisely the point Parrott failed to understand. By 2021, Voris felt that he had an exclusive claim on every scandal in the Church and was determined to ruin anyone who threatened to encroach on what he considered his turf.
The result was a lawsuit which forced Parrott to settle on unfavorable terms out of court, but which more importantly proved to be a pyrrhic victory for Voris because of the enormous amount of money he had to spend to stop a non-existent threat. Voris was blind to the fact that his “victory” ruined his reputation in the eyes of his supporters, who now saw him as the sadistic bully who had learned behavior like this during his years in the homosexual demimonde. According to Milo:
Voris’s lawsuit against Parrott was typically vindictive, bitchy gay behavior. He wasted millions on frivolous lawsuits and grandiose projects like the protest in front of the bishop’s meeting in Baltimore. He hired Mike Randazza who eventually won but at the cost of about $1 million in legal fees.[xix]
Milo was the mc for the Baltimore rally but concedes now that it was another pyrrhic victory because the sparse attendance didn’t justify the enormous cost of putting it on. “Homosexuals,” according to Milo, “suffer more from wrath than pride. Voris exhibited cruelty to his employees. At the same time he fired 40 staffers in April, he gave himself a $10,000 raise.” Michael Voris was good to Milo and asked him for advice on how to improve the media operation, but was furious when he got recommendations that contradicted what he wanted to hear and dropped Milo immediately.
Over the months preceding his ouster, the situation at Church Militant began to spin out of control, and as a result, Voris became less and less capable of resisting the homosexual impulses that had dominated his pre-conversion life. At some point he invited a young male staff member to his house and told him to open up his laptop. After following his instructions, the young staff member was bombarded with gay orgy pornography.[xx] After struggling to understand whether erratic nature of Voris’s behavior toward the end of his tenure at CMTV was intentional or symptomatic of an unconscious desire to get caught so that he could confess publicly and bring what he was doing out into the open, Milo concluded that “Michael wanted to be busted.” Like Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, who was simultaneously a Puritan saint and an adulterer, Voris both needed and dreaded the public confession that was necessary to expiate the sins associated with the homosexual life he was still leading. Voris was like the French homosexual philosopher Michel Foucault, who was so enraged at the culture’s failure to punish him for what he knew was grievously wrong, that he turned himself in to the S & M dungeons at the bath houses of San Fransisco for the punishment he knew he deserved but which the culture denied him.
Mike Parrott was one of the first people to comment on Voris’s ouster at CMTV. Within minutes of the release of Voris’s second, more lachrymose swan song, Parrott released a video of his own celebrating Voris’s demise with a glass of expensive whiskey. Schadenfreude is not a Christian virtue, but it is certainly understandable coming from the man who was probably the most egregious victim of Voris’s take no prisoners lawfare, and it is conspicuous by its absence from the sentimental responses Voris’s second attempt at exculpation generated. More typical was the response of “Edwin Abiog,” who tweeted:
I Love You with the same Holy Love Jesus and Mama Mary has For you … and I do feel your pain and I have my tears for you it shed because of that Holy Love I have for you .. courage my brother courage be yours I pray.. be triumphant like Saint Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross… only three were there for everyone left Jesus do not leave Jesus and his Church now for this is the hour of passion ….His Mother the Holy and pure Saint John the one that loves Jesus and Saint Mary Magdalene for she knows she is a sinner but truly believe Jesus and Accept Him wholeheartedly and followed Him she sin no more and did everything for the love of God because she loves Jesus … Be Holy Love For He Is Holy Love … Follow Him by Being Holy Love for the salvation of souls of your brethren and yours for it is Holy Love … that what Jesus did do the same ![xxi]
A significant number of the people responding to his swan song told Voris that he had brought them to the Catholic faith. At 10:38 on the morning of November 22, 2023, Sheldon Jessup tweeted that “your videos helped me become a Catholic. God bless you. We all have demons we fight. Some are more public than others. You were brave enough to begin this journey. May Our Lady Keep you.”[xxii]
But which Catholic faith are we talking about? For some of the people Voris brought into the Church, disillusionment was the immediate response to his mea culpa. On November 21, Philip McNichol tweeted: “I’m stunned. I’m confused. I’m in disbelief. I need answers. I listened to this man as direction for my moral life and he is telling me he is a moral disaster.”[xxiii]
The disillusionment which followed Voris’s fall from grace was not unlike the disillusionment which Bishop Pavao Zanic predicted as the ultimate fruit of the fraudulent visions which the rebellious Herzegovina Franciscans promoted in the name of Our Lady of Medjugorje.
When Voris famously called the Catholic Church the “Church of Nice,” he wasn’t referring to the city in southern France. He was talking about the Catholic Church founded by Jesus Christ, whose mission had failed. As the alternative to the Church of Nice, Voris proposed his own peculiar Church of Nasty, according to which bishops existed to be bashed and “itching ears” existed to be scratched. The gates of hell had prevailed against “the Church of Nice,” and so something more robust was needed as its replacement. Charity in speech had been replaced by slander as its lingua franca. All of the backbiting bitchiness and calumny that Voris learned from the time he spent in the homosexual demimonde now got repurposed as zealous defense of the faith. Anyone who questioned Voris’s zeal deserved anything he got. Anyone who questioned Voris’s leather bar version of Catholicism deserved to be not just refuted but destroyed, which is the lesson Mike Parrott learned when Christine Niles went to the Marine Corps and demanded that Parrott be given a dishonorable discharge that would bar him from receiving his pension, an episode missing from both Voris’s and Niles’s self-serving videos.
Voris with Notre Dame Alumna Christine Niles
The 500 Guild Prophets soon weighed in with comments and videos of their own. Timothy Gordon opined that Voris’s self-serving, narcissistic pity party was “arguably the most sincere Catholic message I’ve ever seen.”[xxiv] This may be true since we have no idea what messages Gordon has been seeing lately, but I couldn’t help but think that Sam Goldwyn had a better take on Voris’s speech when he said, “Sincerity is the most important thing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Gordon’s eagerness to forgive Voris, however, did not extend to me when he and Taylor Marshall accused me of calling Mother Angelica a lesbian based on a deliberately distorted view of what I said in The Man Behind the Curtain. Forgiveness is not the proper term because I never made any such accusation. Faced with the text itself and the numerous videos I did stating specifically, “I’m not calling Mother Angelica a lesbian,” they showed that they were more intent on carrying an unspoken agenda forward than they were in learning the truth. Neither Gordon nor Marshall ever apologized. They could not prove a positive, and I was unable to prove a negative. When I asked them to retract their claim, they ignored me in spite of evidence that was readily available on the Internet. Voris had established the new norm for discourse among the 500 Guild Prophets, and neither Gordon nor Marshall was going to back down and run the danger of being called a wimp by the Macho Macho Man from Ferndale.
Before long, an undercurrent of protest surfaced in the comment box. Voris was asking for the forgiveness he had denied to anyone he had targeted as a member of the Church of Nice. OMB Reviews wrote: “Where is the call for privacy for those you have exposed over the years? That’s hypocrisy.” Steve Skojec, founder of 1Peter 5, wrote:
Have you ever shown anyone you dug up dirt on, or hurt through collateral damage, the magnanimity you now desire as you avoid “trapping and exposing” your own lies and falsehoods? I gave you the benefit of the doubt in your last coming out video. Fool me once.
When asked to identify the main group supporting Voris, Milo claimed that it was older white women, somewhere between 45 and 65, oftentimes childless themselves, who viewed Voris as their errant son. “He’s got the prodigal son thing nailed,” Milo claimed. St. Paul referred to this group in his day as “silly women obsessed by their sins” (2 Timothy 3:6). That demographic included Maike Hickson, who has links to both Life Site News and the SSPX. Shortly after Voris got fired, Maike Hickson swooned: “You have my prayers. Being somewhat wrecked by the loss of my husband, I feel compassion with you in your brokenness and soreness. May God bring much good out of your collaboration with His Grace.”[xxv]
Maike was referring to the recent death of Robert Hickson, a founder of Christendom College, and inadvertently brought up the issue of the true allegiance of the folks running Life Site News. On September 23, 2023, Maike tweeted her “deep gratitude” to Saint Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Dillwyn, which is “a house of studies of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), established in the United States” for giving “Robert such a beautiful Requiem Mass and Christian burial. Bishop Fellay presided, many priests and seminarians helped! Thanks also to IHM chapel Front Royal for hosting reception and to family and friends.”[xxvi]
To begin with, the SSPX cannot celebrate a funeral Mass because their Masses are illicit. More importantly, Life Site News does not distinguish between groups which are in the Church and those which are not as long as they celebrate the Latin Mass. Bishop Fellay is one of the four bishops whose consecration by Archbishop Lefebvre led the Society of St. Pius X into schism in 1988. In that same year, Pope John Paul II issued Ecclesia Dei, the motu proprio allowing the celebration of the Tridentine Mass to followers of Lefebvre who might have gone into schism if deprived of it. Pope Benedict XVI then expanded what was essentially an ad hoc stop gap measure when he issued Summorum Pontificorum allowing celebration of the Tridentine Mass on a widespread basis. At that point the Latin Mass became a non-negotiable demand for the nascent para-Church whose “true allegiance” does not distinguish between groups which are in the Church and those that are not as long as they celebrate the Tridentine Mass.
According to St. Augustine, schism is a manifestation of lack of charity based on refusal to associate with the communion of the Catholic Church. It is a grievous sin which finds manifestation in lack of obedience to legitimate Church authority. In 100 A.D. Clement of Rome, Pope and Martyr reminded the Church that Bishops are responsible by divine disposition to order the activities of the Church, especially the administration of the sacraments:
He has enjoined offerings [to be presented] and service to be performed [to Him], and that not thoughtlessly or irregularly, but at the appointed times and hours. Where and by whom He desires these things to be done, He Himself has fixed by His own supreme will, in order that all things, being piously done according to His good pleasure, may be acceptable unto Him. Those, therefore, who present their offerings at the appointed times, are accepted and blessed; for inasmuch as they follow the laws of the Lord, they sin not.[xxvii]
Those who do not obey legitimate authority and the jurisdiction of Bishops leave the Body of Christ. According to St. Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr:
Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper(18) Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as where Christ is, there does all the heavenly host stand by, waiting upon Him as the Chief Captain of the Lord’s might, and the Governor of every intelligent nature. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize, or to offer, or to present sacrifice, or to celebrate a love-feast.(1) But that which seems good to him, is also well-pleasing to God, that everything ye do may be secure and valid.[xxviii]
This lack of obedience, and thus charity, became too great for the Church to ignore when Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without the approval of Rome. When Bishop Williamson as Lefebvre’s successor of the SSPX refused to sign the letter from Rome affirming that he accepted Vatican II in light of tradition, he refused to heal the schism. The schismatic attitude then took its natural course when he was expelled from the Society of Pius X for administering the Sacrament of Confirmation in South America against their wishes. The SSPX has continued to splinter into the Societies of Pius V and St. John (now suppressed), the Institute of the Good Shepherd, the loose association of the Resistance, and the FSSP. Splintering took place when some objected to leaving the Church by administering Sacraments without permission. But others fell away to take more extreme measures….
[…] This is just an excerpt from the Jan 2024 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!
Articles:
Culture of Death Watch
Javier Milei by E. Luis Alvarez Primo
Of Camels and Unitarians by E. Michael Jones
Sun Tzu and the Library Wars by E. Michael Jones
Features
Voris Falls for the Second Time by E. Michael Jones
Reviews
Israel’s Friends: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity by Sean Naughton
(Endnotes)
[i] Cited in E. Michael Jones, The Man behind the Curtain: Michael Voris and the Homosexual Vortex (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, 2016). [ii] Conversation with former employee of CMTV. [iii] Michael Voris @Michael_Voris, X (Twitter), Nov. 21, 2023, 6:10 PM, https://twitter.com/Michael_Voris/status/1727102250311733320 [iv] Michael Voris @Michael_Voris, X (Twitter), Nov. 21, 2023, 6:10 PM, https://twitter.com/Michael_Voris/status/1727102250311733320 [v] personal correspondence [vi] Christine Niles, “NY ‘Sex Slave’ Priest Dead: Foul Play?,” Church Militant, July 10, 2020, https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/ny-priest-accused-of-embezzlement-found-dead [vii] Larry McShane, “Autopsy for hard-partying NYC priest with a taste for S&M shows ‘chronic alcohol abuse,’ DailyNews, Nov. 24, 2020, https://www.nydailynews.com/2020/11/24/autopsy-for-hard-partying-nyc-priest-with-a-taste-for-sm-shows-chronic-alcohol-abuse/ [viii] Larry McShane, “Autopsy for hard-partying NYC priest with a taste for S&M shows ‘chronic alcohol abuse,’ DailyNews, Nov. 24, 2020, https://www.nydailynews.com/2020/11/24/autopsy-for-hard-partying-nyc-priest-with-a-taste-for-sm-shows-chronic-alcohol-abuse/ [ix] “On E. Michael Jones’ Book,” Church Militant, https://www.churchmilitant.com/main/generic/on-e-michael-jones-book [x] “On E. Michael Jones’ Book,” Church Militant, https://www.churchmilitant.com/main/generic/on-e-michael-jones-book [xi] Damien Fisher, “Expelled from the Vortex: Eight alleged whistleblowers fired, claim sexual and financial misdeeds by Voris,” Simcha Fisher, Dec. 2, 2023, https://www.simchafisher.com/tag/church-militant/ [xii] Conversation with Mike Parrott. [xiii] Michael Voris @Michael_Voris, X (Twitter), Nov. 21, 2023, 6:10 PM, https://twitter.com/Michael_Voris/status/1727102250311733320 [xiv] Michael Voris @Michael_Voris, X (Twitter), Nov. 21, 2023, 6:10 PM, https://twitter.com/Michael_Voris/status/1727102250311733320 [xv] Michael Voris @Michael_Voris, X (Twitter), Nov. 21, 2023, 6:10 PM, https://twitter.com/Michael_Voris/status/1727102250311733320 [xvi] Christine Niles, “My statement on the resignation of Michael Voris,” YouTube, Nov. 21, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNfQyhd5XQo [xvii] Call from Milo Iannopolis, 5:00 PM 11/26/23 [xviii] Call from Milo Iannopolis, 5:00 PM 11/26/23 [xix] Call from Milo Iannopolis, 5:00 PM 11/26/23. [xx] Call from Milo Iannopolis, 5:00 PM 11/26/23. [xxi] Michael Voris @Michael_Voris, X (Twitter), Nov. 21, 2023, 6:10 PM, https://twitter.com/Michael_Voris/status/1727102250311733320 [xxii] Michael Voris @Michael_Voris, X (Twitter), Nov. 21, 2023, 6:10 PM, https://twitter.com/Michael_Voris/status/1727102250311733320 [xxiii] Michael Voris @Michael_Voris, X (Twitter), Nov. 21, 2023, 6:10 PM, https://twitter.com/Michael_Voris/status/1727102250311733320 [xxiv] Michael Voris @Michael_Voris, X (Twitter), Nov. 21, 2023, 6:10 PM, https://twitter.com/Michael_Voris/status/1727102250311733320 [xxv] Michael Voris @Michael_Voris, X (Twitter), Nov. 21, 2023, 6:10 PM, https://twitter.com/Michael_Voris/status/1727102250311733320 [xxvi] Dr. Maike Hickson, @HicksonMaike, X (Twitter), Sept. 12, 2023, 3:26 PM, https://twitter.com/HicksonMaike/status/1701678733558428153 [xxvii] Clement of Rome, Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 40, A.D. 80. [xxviii] Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to Philadelphia, Chapter 8. [xxix] Clement of Rome, Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter 57, A.D. 80. [xxx] Amazon page for “What God Has Joined Together: The Annulment Crisis in American Catholicism by Robert H. Vasoli, https://www.amazon.com/What-God-Has-Joined-Together/dp/0195107640/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3PJ3W5UA2VOKO&keywords=Robert+Vasoli&qid=1701609606&s=books&sprefix=robert+vasoli%2Cstripbooks%2C83&sr=1-1 [xxxi] “Did Gary the Fairy Fall Off the Wagon?” The Eponymous Flower, Nov. 21, 2023, https://www.theeponymousflower.com/2023/11/did-gary-fairy-fall-off-wagon.html [xxxii] “Did Gary the Fairy Fall Off the Wagon?” The Eponymous Flower, Nov. 21, 2023, https://www.theeponymousflower.com/2023/11/did-gary-fairy-fall-off-wagon.html [xxxiii] “Catholic Megadevelopment VERITATIS SPLENDOR is long on rhetoric, short on details,” SIMCHA FISHER, March 3, 2021, https://www.simchafisher.com/2021/03/03/catholic-megadevelopment-veritatis-splendor-is-long-on-rhetoric-short-on-details/ [xxxiv] “Catholic Megadevelopment VERITATIS SPLENDOR is long on rhetoric, short on details,” SIMCHA FISHER, March 3, 2021, https://www.simchafisher.com/2021/03/03/catholic-megadevelopment-veritatis-splendor-is-long-on-rhetoric-short-on-details/ [xxxv] Conversation with Mike Parrott, 4:00 PM November 22, 2023. [xxxvi] “Church Militant Makes Drastic Cuts Voris scrambles to right the ship,” April 4, 2023, PDF, http://www.themediareport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2023-April-4-Church-Militant.pdf [xxxvii] “Church Militant Makes Drastic Cuts Voris scrambles to right the ship,” April 4, 2023, PDF, http://www.themediareport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2023-April-4-Church-Militant.pdf [xxxviii] “Church Militant Makes Drastic Cuts Voris scrambles to right the ship,” April 4, 2023, PDF, http://www.themediareport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2023-April-4-Church-Militant.pdf [xxxix] “Church Militant Makes Drastic Cuts Voris scrambles to right the ship,” April 4, 2023, PDF, http://www.themediareport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2023-April-4-Church-Militant.pdf [xl] Mike Lewis, “Has Fr Altman excommunicated himself?” Where Peter Is, July 9, 2023, https://wherepeteris.com/has-fr-altman-excommunicated-himself/ [xli] Mike Lewis, “Has Fr Altman excommunicated himself?” Where Peter Is, July 9, 2023, https://wherepeteris.com/has-fr-altman-excommunicated-himself/ [xlii] Mike Lewis, “On Strickland’s Removal,” Where Peter Is, Nov. 11, 2023, https://wherepeteris.com/on-stricklands-removal/ [xliii] Thomas Reese, “When can the pope fire a bishop?” National Catholic Reporter, Dec. 7, 2023, https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/ncr-voices/when-can-pope-fire-bishop [xliv] Zak Wellerman, “Former Diocese of Tyler Bishop Joseph Strickland cites defending ‘truth of Catholic faith’ as reason for Pope Francis removing him from office,” CBS 19, Nov. 28, 2023, https://www.cbs19.tv/article/news/local/former-diocese-of-tyler-bishop-joseph-strickland-defending-truth-of-catholic-faith-as-reason-for-pope-francis-removing-him-from-office/501-59de502e-56ef-4911-ae9a-899445ee532d [xlv] Zak Wellerman, “Former Diocese of Tyler Bishop Joseph Strickland cites defending ‘truth of Catholic faith’ as reason for Pope Francis removing him from office,” CBS 19, Nov. 28, 2023, https://www.cbs19.tv/article/news/local/former-diocese-of-tyler-bishop-joseph-strickland-defending-truth-of-catholic-faith-as-reason-for-pope-francis-removing-him-from-office/501-59de502e-56ef-4911-ae9a-899445ee532d [xlvi] “Bishop Strickland: Catholics alive during this crisis must remember they were born for this,” LifeSiteNews, Nov. 7, 2023, https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/bishop-strickland-catholics-alive-during-this-crisis-must-remember-they-were-born-for-this/ [xlvii] Mike Lewis, “Strickland’s attack on the sacred,” Where Peter Is, Nov. 8, 2023, https://wherepeteris.com/stricklands-attack-on-the-sacred [xlviii] Jeff Mirus, “Infiltration: An idiot’s guide to the problems of the Church,” Catholic Culture, May 31, 2019, https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/infiltration-idiots-guide-to-problems-church/ [xlix] Mike Lewis, “Strickland’s attack on the sacred,” Where Peter Is, Nov. 8, 2023, https://wherepeteris.com/stricklands-attack-on-the-sacred/ [l] Kristine Christlieb, “The Entire Board Should Resign,” Trust But Verify, Nov. 29, 2023, https://trustbutverifyreport.substack.com/p/the-entire-board-should-resign?r=2haa2x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web [li] Letter to the Board, “Dear Board Members of St. Michael’s Media, 11/19/2023. [lii] “Bishop Strickland barred from saying Mass in Diocese of Tyler, Texas,” LifeSiteNews, Dec. 7, 2023, https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-bishop-strickland-barred-from-saying-mass-in-diocese-of-tyler-texas/ [liii] Bishop Strickland barred from saying Mass in Diocese of Tyler, Texas,” LifeSiteNews, Dec. 7, 2023, https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-bishop-strickland-barred-from-saying-mass-in-diocese-of-tyler-texas/ [liv] Bishop Strickland barred from saying Mass in Diocese of Tyler, Texas,” LifeSiteNews, Dec. 7, 2023, https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-bishop-strickland-barred-from-saying-mass-in-diocese-of-tyler-texas/ [lv] Matthew McDonald, “Bishop Strickland Can Say Mass in Tyler, Though He Says He Was Advised to Leave,” National Catholic Register, Dec. 8, 2023, https://www.ncregister.com/news/bishop-strickland-says-he-has-been-advised-to-leave-diocese-of-tyler-but-hasn-t-been-told-he-can-t-say-mass-there [lvi] Dr. Maike Hickson @HicksonMaike, X (Twitter), Dec. 7, 2023, 1:11PM, https://twitter.com/HicksonMaike/status/1732825293696487592
