Michael Voris Apologizes

This is surprising, and very cheering: Michael Voris apologizes for unintentionally seeming to attack the pope. For several years he has run a show called The Vortex on his ChurchMilitant.TV, which, as the name suggests, offered All Bad News, Indignantly Reported, All The Time. The Church needs people to expose and criticize problems, but the way this was done in The Vortex didn’t seem to me always edifying or helpful.

But this new report says much good about Voris. He begins explaining that he’d reported the Reddit story about Cardinal Raymond Burke saying the pope’s not speaking out on the issues being raised by the Synod was harming the Church. He’d done so for journalistic reasons, and good ones, I might note. I would have covered the story were I him.

“In hindsight,” he says, “that was a mistake, because another unintended impression was generated: that we were criticizing the pope.” ChurchMilitant.TV is an apostolate dedicating to “further[ing] the cause of the Church,” he explains, not a merely journalistic work. For that reason, “it was wrong to air the story.”

After describing “those in the Catholic blogosphere who do not like the pope,” especially those who suggest he’s evil, a heretic, or not the real pope, he decries the fact that these people are using his reports to support their claims. Francis is the pope, he says, and there is no legitimate Catholicism apart from him. He closes:

Pope Francis is the pope. He is the Holy Father. We are called to love the Holy Father, to pray for him. He is the very first name I mention in my daily offering of the Rosary. The Holy Father should not be publicly criticized by lay Catholics, much less mocked and called insulting names and made the butt of jokes, which criticizing him leads to. . . . I want no part of that.

Three cheers for Michael Voris. The temptations to public indignation being as strong as they are for most of us who write on Church matters, he’s an example to follow.