Church Militant - the website

Church Militant Website

For several years recently I have paid close attention to the output from a website known as Church Militant.com. Its chief spokesman is Michael Voris, a Roman Catholic layman and a traditionalist.

Week after week – and sometimes day after day – Mr. Voris produces a five to eight-minute video. Some videos are also placed on Facebook. In each and every Vortex video Voris opens by saying that “lies and falsehoods are trapped and exposed …”

Voris’s and Church Militant’s sole focus is directed toward exposing the corruption within the Roman Catholic Church. And Pope Francis is not excluded from examination and scrutiny. Indeed, Voris and his associates have dug deeply into the church’s corruption over the years and have made and are making known their discoveries to the public.

One can say that through the nature of his work Michael Voris is a reformer. Any Reformation of a large and traditional ecclesiastical organization from the inside takes time, and as far as we know Voris has been at this work for more than ten years and he is very good at it. His and Church Militant’s exposé of corruption in his church is having its positive effects, but slowly.

Once in a while, however, Voris feels it necessary to attack Protestantism and is quite the soldier in advancing the never-ending motif that salvation comes through the church, through the Roman Catholic Church only. Protestants are heretics, according to Voris. This language is not helpful.

Protestants, too, believe in the Church, of course, but they/we believe that salvation comes through the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

It seems that Voris the Reformer forgets that Dominican Martin Luther had very good reason to question the practices of the Roman Catholic Church in that period of history. Corruption ran high. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church subsequently reformed, slightly. Luther’s correction was necessary.

Voris’s identification of current-day abuses and corruption within the Vatican and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic is not a vain pursuit, but to slam Protestants in the process provides no value to Voris’s otherwise well-articulated and cogent arguments. His slam is also misguided. Devaluing Protestantism adds nothing to Voris’s mission. Such commentary is irrelevant to his cause. Any potential or existent moral support he might secure from Protestants could be mitigated.

Think about it. Michael Voris might become an historic reformer as the years evolve. A little self-evaluation might be in order. Martin Luther had his shortcomings. So might Mr. Voris.

The Church is the gift from God’s Holy Spirit and Jesus is Lord and Savior.

God Love You.

Worth Earlwood Norman Jr speaks for himself. He is a priest and archdeacon in the Special Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy of the Anglican Church in North America and is publisher of Archdeacon Books. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

24Dec2019