UPDATE: Told you so https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/02/24/michael-voris-church-militant-shirtless-selfies/
Michael Voris, the founder of the disgusting right wing Catholic organisation, The Church Militant, has resigned. The press release didn’t give any details except that Voris “has been asked to resign for breaching the Church Militant morality clause. The board has accepted his resignation.”
The organisation was reluctant to give details of Voris’s moral failure, saying the board “has chosen not to disclose Michael’s private matters to the public.” To me, the situation is pretty obvious.
After the deaths of his brother and mother in the early 2000s.Voris became, what I would call, a “reconverted Catholic with a vengeance”.
After his reconversion, he became an “aggressive global advocate for conservative Catholics… on a burning mission to save Catholicism and America by trying to warn the public about what is a decline of morality in society,” a Detroit Free Press Staff Writer reported.
The Church Militant has attacked many things but is well known for two; attacking the Roman Catholic Church itself and the LGBTQ community. It has been classed as a “hate group”.
Voris kept his “sinful past” guarded for many years, but 8 years ago he revealed the details.
“For most of my years in my thirties, confused about my own sexuality, I lived a life of live-in relationships with homosexual men. From the outside, I lived the lifestyle and contributed to scandal in addition to the sexual sins. On the inside, I was deeply conflicted about all of it. In a large portion of my twenties, I also had frequent sexual liaisons with both adult men and adult women.”
The Church Militant’s board chose “not to disclose Michael’s Voris’s private matters to the public”, but on Tuesday night, Voris released a 13 minute video on X where he revealed.
“Sometimes it takes very horrible events, even at your own hand, in your life to surface certain things that need to be faced. There are some very, very ugly truths from my past that I, for essentially 62 years, have avoided facing because … I wanted them resolved, but I understand that touching that pain is going to be a very horrible thing.”
“I need to conquer these demons,” he said, referring both to what he called “act-out demons” and “the underlying cause of it.”
It seems pretty clear to me what this is all about. I’ve been there.
For years, I also struggled to suppress my sexuality. I tried everything to rid myself of the “curse of homosexuality”; conversion “therapy”, exorcisms, fasting. I expected marriage would finally fix it. It didn’t.
When people suppress, deny, and hate their homosexuality, it surfaces in ugly ways: sometimes publicly, sometimes lurking in dark, secret places. Many become anti-gay preachers (the list of caught out anti-gay preachers is enormous). Thank god I was never one of those. Possibly Voris’s internalised homophobia has been the driving force behind his anti-LGBTQ activities. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon.
For me, my suppression and self-hatred played out as a sexual addiction. An obession that plagued me for decades. “What you resist, persists” was definitely true in my life. I lived a double life. It all came undone when, at 40, I fell in love with a man and I was exposed. The cloak of denial I’d wrapped myself in for years was ripped away. Like Voris, I was quick to try to make amends and confessed ….but giving no details; they were too horrific, too shameful. To name our demons is to own them. Spiritualizing them, as Voris has done, is a form of Christian denial. I lived like that for ages.
Considering Michael Voris has been such a controversial public figure, the media will search out the details he is reluctant to reveal of what actually happened and splash it across our newsfeeds with click-baiting headlines.
The public scandal and humiliation are devastating. One never recovers quickly from these traumas, but I’m one of the lucky ones who made it through the hurt, pain and grief, became authentic and found a new purpose in life. A life, as an openly gay man, that is making a difference to thousands now.
I hope and pray that Michael Voris finds the same, but I know it will take years.
Right now, he doesn’t need another reconversion to his religion; he needs a conversion to authenticity, humility, and integrity.
Dear Anthony,
So wonderful to renew contact with you after you so sensitively handle me and my mess after I left the church as a catholic priest when I was living in Minyip,
Victoria. You gave me what the church couldn’t give. Often I was in tears as we journeyed through your wonderful course a d when we caught up at the Melbourne Metropolitan Church in Burnley for your book launch.
Please remember me in your prayer. Last June I was diagnosed with aggressive prostrate cancer. I have the ticket but not the timetable lol. You are a light to many in darkness. Thanks for being my light
The memories are treasured. Vin
Vin…..so lovely to hear from you. I’m sorry to hear the news about your health. Challenging times ahead. You are in my thoughts my friend. I have found memories of those times we had together as well.
You are a beautiful human being Anthony. Xxxx
You’re very kind Fay
Anthony, I am still not with you on your advocating that homosexuality is a legitimate style of living, never alone as a Christian.
I”m reading ‘The Great Dance’ by C Baxter Kruger, on page 76 he relates ‘The Dream’ with the statement “We are trying to create life;” but life is already created. It is simply an illusion which various persons try to create? And what happens to the people who give themselves to the illusion? What happens to the people who give themselves to participate their illusion, who place their hope in it and give of their time and energy and effort?
Our inventions are more than just distractions. They exacerbate our blindness and create within us a rift between who we actually are in Christ and what we are making of ourselves. There is the real “us in Jesus Christ” and now there is “who we think we are.” And there is our real life in Christ, and then there is the life that we are trying to live. Each step we take in the pursuit of our inventions deepens the incongruity. Each step in our bizarre ritual, in effect, gives actuality and size to our “false selves” and denies and strangles and suffocate our “true selves.” We create a legend in our own minds, and we pursue it, which stifles the “real us”and our “true life” and leaves us empty and sad and lonely. [ See Frederick Beuchner’s Telling Secrets, page 45]
Page 84: The Spirit of adoption, the Spirit of truth, has been let loose upon the world, upon you and me. And he comes to teach us, to enlighten us, to bear witness to the truth. He comes to help us see through the darkness and see who we are in Jesus Christ and comprehend the astonishing gift we have been given in him.
I read Paul writing to the Romans “I have discovered this principle of life – that when i want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love God’s law with all my heart. But there is another power (law) within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. Oh what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God! The answer is Jesus Christ our Lord. So you see how it is; in my mind I really want to obey God’s law, but because of my sinful nature I am a slave to sin.” (Romans 7 verses 21,24)
How does ABBI respond to Paul’s instruction as recorded in Colossians 3v16,17? ‘Let the message of Christ, in all its richness, fill your lives. Teach and counsel each other with all the wisdom he gives…And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father.’
From what I have read through ABBI it seems you justify homosexuality as biblical and Christian, not an illusion; not an invention. Baxter’s book and the gospel Paul writes about disagree and so do I.
You’re right. Homosexuality is not a legitimate style of living, It’s an orientation just as yours is oriented towards the opposite sex, I’m assuming.
LGBTQ Christians are everywhere as are churches that fully embrace them as children of God.
Paul the Apostle strugged with his sin nature, but he also knew that Christ could and would save him.