Michael Voris: Trapped and Exposed

Why do conservatives keep falling for cult leaders with double lives?

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Please forgive me for putting on my old Church-commentator hat for a moment. This is a story that for me represents both an old professional rivalry and a connection to some of my own long-held misgivings about the state of affairs in Catholic commentary, which was for so many years my bread and butter.

Michael Voris, the founder and face of St. Michael’s Media and its “apostolate” known as Church Militant (CM), has resigned his position in the wake of unspecified violation(s) of the organization’s morality policy.

I have long been a critic of Voris and CM, as I had many run-ins with them and the guardians of their weird little fiefdom during my time at the helm of OnePeterFive. The recent developments concerning Voris are a vindication of my long-held suspicions about the man and his “apostolate” — suspicions I tried to share with my audience, usually only to receive admonishments in return. “We’re all on the same team,” they’d say, or, “We just need to stop all this Catholic infighting.” As nasty as the Church Militant staff was to any who dared criticize them or even take a different viewpoint on key issues like the destructive nature of the current papacy, it was an organization that nevertheless somehow managed to garner quite a number of truly zealous admirers.

The official Church Militant statement concerning Voris’s misdeeds is about as vague as could be, despite paying lip service to “transparency”:

Church Militant/St. Michael's Media was founded as a bastion of Catholic truth and a light to the faithful in hard times. This is why we are being fully transparent with you all.

Michael Voris has been asked to resign for breaching the Church Militant morality clause. The board has accepted his resignation.

We understand this is a shock to you all, but our founder and former CEO is stepping aside and focusing on his personal health.

The Board of Directors has chosen not to disclose Michael's private matters to the public. The apostolate will be praying for him, and we kindly ask you to do the same.

Church Militant/St. Michael's Media is just as positioned to save souls as it ever has been. There are more than 40 full-time employees on the cutting edge of Catholic truth moving forward with renewed fervor.

The apostolate will remain unwavering in its reporting and its commentary — defending Holy Mother Church from errors both inside and out.

Voris himself took to video — harkening back to his “coming out” video in 2016 — to offer a long, rambling statement in a pseudo-apologetic tone while saying nothing specific and taking no actual ownership of…whatever it is that he did. It was a performative display of self-pity and obfuscation disguised as a public apology, and all but the self-pity aspect (which got Voris a little verklempt) came across as insincere to the point of bordering on apathetic.

Whatever it was, it was not an apology. No, Voris did not “repent.” Let’s not be coy about dismissing such foolishness. And frankly, the calls not to “kick a man when he’s down” certainly weren’t something I saw in circulation any time Voris himself smelled blood in the water when it came to the moral failings of other Catholic public figures.

It is important to remember that Church Militant — “Catholic TMZ,” as I like to call them — built their entire business model on ruthlessly exposing ecclesiastical (and adjacent) scandals, and it made them very successful for a media organization their size.

There have been different takes on the Voris story, as one would expect with such a polarizing figure. Peter Smith and Matt Sedensky at the Associated Press offered the MSM view with its attendant biases against conservative Catholic media. Still, they zeroed in on the vacuity of his video quite astutely: