“Why I Left Church Militant” – A Former Employee’s Tale

Interesting read from a former Church Militant employee. The young man, who blogs under the name Miles Ecclesiae, describes his experience with detachment and a plain matter-of-factness. There is no bus driving here. He still has admiration and respect for Michael Voris, as a person and fellow Catholic. However, it’s the way things are being done at Church Militant that bothered this man’s conscience, that caused him to leave.

Here’s how his story starts:

This is a very weird blog post for me. 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.

Read the rest. The young man is on the journey of becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. In the past, he had “an uncontrolled fiery passion for all things Catholic.” I seems he’s learned to rein in the uncontrollable part, and is developing a fiery passion for people.  What a grace to have discovered this at a young age.

(Full disclosure: I used to support Church Militant. Several times a year, I’d stop into the studios, chat with Michael and some of the other employees, see what projects they were working on. I had provided them with packaging and shipping materials for several years. They are good people who believe they are doing the work of God. Their catechetical products are faithful and clear, with excellent production quality (the CM studios are first-rate). As time went on, though, I came to realize that the tactics and methods – especially with regards to The Vortex – were wrong. The tipping point for me was the episode late last year on Cardinal Dolan and the St Patrick’s Day parade brouhaha (when he was Grand Marshal). The Vortex went way beyond “exposing lies and falsehood”. So I don’t support or recommend them any longer.

I don’t slam them either.)

Image source: Herb Neufeld [Creative Commons] via Flickr

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