I want to share this quote with you from an honorable priest and professor of philosophy, theology, and religious studies, Fr. Daniel Horan, OFM.
He teaches at St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. He also teaches at my alma mater the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas.
Fr. Horan is speaking with Heidi Schlumpf of the National Catholic Reporter and with David Dault, an assistant professor of christian spirituality at Loyola University, Chicago.
The three appear in a podcast called The Francis Effect. This specific program is dated March 14, 2024. Part of their discussion was over the fall of Church Militant.
Church Militant had a website that showcased articles, web videos, and live streams, and operated by St. Michaels Media. It is a favorite of extreme Catholics since Church Militant would call out what it saw as a Catholic Church too friendly to gays.
For this reason it has been labeled by some as a "hate group" that peddles in anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ narratives that the critics claimed were misleading or outright false, and certainly sensational.
In the podcast they are discussing the resignation of its poster boy Michael Voris over what the board said was a breach of morality, one they did not specify.
There is no evidence to suggest it was criminal in nature.
Church Militant was sued for defamation by a priest out of New Hampshire and the Court ruled in the priest’s favor and Church Militant had to pay $500,000.00.
They are set to shut down and their website is already offline.
The words Fr. Horan uses to describe the work of Church Militant are acceptable considering he is a priest and priests do dabble in these realities.
This is what Fr. Horan says when asked about the news that Church Militant had, in my words, dissolved after eating its own fruit.
Fr. Horan:
Yeah....I think that’s right and I have a couple thoughts.
One is to Heidi's point and then David you built on that, that, its the multi-headed hydra like he cut one off another one pops up. So I agree, I don’t think, to use the language that is…is more often probably heard in circles like that of Church Militant, the devil is still around. Satan still at work and this is the devil's work. I have no doubt about it. When you go after the pope, when you go after people who are advocating and…advocating for the love of the Gospel and the love of neighbor, especially for those who are the most marginalized, and you vilify them, that’s the work of satan. I hate to sound so traditionalist about this.
Some people like Voris would be surprised to hear me say this but I believe it to be true. And so, yeah, there will be other people who will take the bait and be tempted to act in bad faith ways. I think the one thing I appreciate about this lawsuit and the judgment is that it hopefully it gets bad faith actors to think twice about......before they start acting as negligent as Church Militant did. And then the second thing I’m thinking about is, if you take a step back, and you ask how did they get away with this, its because we are talking about an uneven balance of tolerance for this kind of evil, and what I mean by that is, people like Michael Voris and his team at Church Militant and like-minded people do not follow the rules. They think they are exceptions to it, they can say whatever they want, that the law does not apply to them, that good practices in charity and the strictures of kind of best practices around journalism are not anything that they need to be concerned about. They’re writing stories that are completely made up from whole cloth. Their always anonymous sources, there’s no verification or checking and the truth is a lot of the things they’ve been saying about a lot of people myself included are defamatory and libelous. I will get you just a couple of highlights here, right
In September 12, 2019, in a vortex segment, titled Climate Change, Voris specifically targeted me in response to a column I wrote in NCR and he began with the line, Daniel Horan “the Franciscan poster boy for all things gay in the church,”.....so that’s kind of interesting. He's challenged in articles on the site, have challenged my orthodoxy which is ironic given that I’m a catholic theologian and a friar and a priest in good standing in the church that’s never been challenged or questioned. They've use language like saying that I forgoe the magesterim, that I am "a hetrodox franciscan priest,” but one of my favorites goes back to some years ago, around 2018, when Voris who absolutely despised the Los Angeles religious education congress, which is a ministry of the archdiocese of Los Angeles, attacked a bunch of speakers myself included as well as bishop Robert Barron, Fr. Brian Massengale, and others in the title of the article is still one of my favorites, "heretics on parade.”
So I'm like its very interesting that this guy feels like he has, to your point David, some sort of supra-magisterial position where he can…he can call in to check, Pope Francis’ orthodoxy, a catholic theologian's orthodoxy, a sitting bishop or cardinal’s orthodoxy, this is beyond delusions of grandeur, this is a disturbed worldview that I think using the language that they would be most familiar with, is demonic.
Let me say that I have no objections to this description. As an honorably laicized catholic priest I understand and appreciate the perspective in Fr. Horan's words.
Fr. Horan adds that he used the language of the devil as a way of “leaning into that for effect because this is the kind of language that Voris regularly used.”
I share in his views and for me, I would define the work of Church Militant as the absence of John 13:34-35 and 1 Corinthians 13:4-7.
In more secular terms, it is the absence of friendship, respect, understanding, kindness, empathy, compassion, charity, prudence, honesty, and the presence of antagonism, hostility, cruelty, betrayal, ad-hominem attacks, divisiveness, indifference, hatred.
Rotten fruit often stays rotted until it is cast out, or it comes to an end some other way.
In this case, the only fruit thrown out is the one with the initials CM on it.
Other similar types of fruit have other initials on it.
The primary one that comes to mind have the initials dJt on it.
He too like Church Militant was sued for defamation.
Rather than paying $500,000.00, he must pay $83,000.000.00.
A million dollars eight-three times.
DJT's movement and Church Militant share similar traits.
And like Church Militant, this movement will soon meets its end as well.
Some will survive and press on with the battles ahead, and their narrative will remain, but its days of faux glory are coming to an end.
Rotten fruit may be big business but eventually, when people see that it is rotten, it will be cast aside.
The rotten fruit Church Militant put out led to their demise.
You can see it on their webpage that is no more.