Into the Vortex: A Young Man Recounts His Experiences at Church Militant

Folks who used to read my old blog may be aware that I had a brief run in with the folks at Church Militant several years ago as a result of a review of their Homosexuality FBI that I published at First Things.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Church Militant, they’re basically the Catholic equivalent of conservative conspiracy radio. The tropes are very similar: all of the other media is lying to you, all the time, including most of the Catholic press. So you have to come to their site in order to get “the truth.”

The truth, of course, is never nice. And it’s also not necessarily true. Scandals, and rumours of scandals, make up the meat and potatoes of the Church Militant diet. In my own encounter with them, for example, I was originally invited (or more accurately challenged with taunts of cowardice) to come and be a guest on their radio show in order to substantiate my criticisms of their production. When it became clear that I was, in fact, willing to engage and that I could in fact back up my critique, a series of excuses and deferrals followed. They never did end up having me on.

This didn’t prevent them, however, from doing a show about my work in which Voris and his producer speculated about my motivations. Specifically, they opined that probably I am still attached to my lesbian past, fondly remembering, perhaps even pining for my ex-girlfriend. Now, to be fair, they made it clear that they didn’t actually know me, and that these were speculations – but calumnious speculation in the public square, even if it’s identified as speculation, is still contrary to the Church’s teaching on respect for the reputation of persons (cf paragraph 2477).

Of course, I was a very small fish in the Church Militant frying pan. Usually they go after Cardinals, Bishops, Priests…Popes. And not just Francis – recently, even Benedict XVI has come under fire as a collaborator with the pernicious and ubiquitous evils that they believe plague the Church. More often than not, they don’t bother to specify that their speculations are speculative, that their sources are dubious, or that they are merely spreading gossip rather than reporting on fact.

I’ve often wondered why this is. To be honest, my first reaction to encountering Voris’ stuff was to conclude that there had to be some kind of conspiracy: I mean, how could a faithful Catholic who wanted to defend the Church think that printing salacious attacks on Her ministers would be an effective way of achieving that end? How could maligning and undermining the legitimate sources of teaching authority within the Church be construed as upholding Catholic teaching?

I was grateful, therefore, for a recent blog post by a young man who writes as Miles Ecclesiae, describing his own infatuation and subsequent disillusionment with the Vorisite ideal:

I never thought I would be the person to write something like this. After all, I’ve spent most of my five years being a faithful Catholic denouncing idiots who wrote these posts. I was a fervent daily watcher of Church Militant, and Michael Voris and others like him in Catholic news were my heroes. They were the revolutionaries who were going to save the Church from the jaws of the wolves in cardinal’s clothing.

Through this influence, for four and a half of five years, I had an uncontrolled fiery passion for all things Catholic. I told people “the way it is,” and if they didn’t like it, take it up with God. For me, everything was black and white, Good Catholic vs. Bad Catholic. I believed the Body of Christ was 90% cancerous with modernist heretics and estrogen-filled men who wanted to dialogue with sin and falsehood, and it needed a good amputating so we could purify the Church.

In my mind, the Pope needed to excommunicate the vast majority of cardinals and bishops to save the Church from their evil teachings. Catholics both clerical and lay needed to be penalized and reformed. We needed to go back to mandatory kneeling and Eucharistic reception on the tongue, more Latin in Mass than the average Roman citizen could speak, and so much incense you couldn’t see the person in front of you (I still wouldn’t mind this one, mostly for the smell.)

I was an ardent defender of the Truth, and I viciously attacked anyone who dared question someone like my main hero, Michael Voris.

Four years of living my Catholic faith like that was dispelled in four months. And how did that happen? It’s quite simple, really.

I worked at Church Militant.

The rest of the article is definitely worth a read, especially if you, or someone that you know, is inclined to trust Church Militant as a reliable source of edification.