Church Militant's nonsense not authentically Catholic [View all]

Clip from Church Militant's website, showing selection of latest videos

Michael Sean Winters | May. 11, 2017

The Atlantic video about Church Militant and their founder Michael Voris was, at the same time, fascinating and frustrating.

The fascination stems from the easy way that normalcy and extremism seem to coincide in the lives of Voris and his colleagues. One minute he is eating pizza with his dad, and the next he is prepping for a broadcast that will, like all his broadcasts, be viciously extreme and extremely vicious. He drops by a Subway for a sandwich, and then is shown spouting gibberish.

"In all of the great debates we have had in America, we've never as a country sat down and had the debate over which of these religions is the right religion," he observes. Huh? We have that conversation almost every day, both among the churches and within them. What we have not done, mercifully, is let that conversation descend into a replay of the Thirty Years' War. The inability to recognize the value of tolerance is shocking. He is followed in the video by his colleague, Simon Rafe, who compares Donald Trump to the Emperor Constantine, in that he is allowing "the cream of the crop, the Christians, to rise to the top." I am not even sure what that means. I would love to know what Jared Kushner thinks of it.

The frustration with the video is that it provides no context to what Church Militant does. I am sure that a secular reader of Atlantic will be horrified by what they see and hear on this video, and that horror will overlap with mine, but I know, too, that there is a horror unique to a Catholic viewing this video.

https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/church-militants-nonsense-not-authentically-catholic

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/525231/church-militant-a-right-wing-media-empire-in-the-making/