In an hour-long interview with a YouTuber, Eugene Michael Jones repeats much of his anti-Voris rant verbally. (For those interested, I reviewed that book at length here and here.) The strangest new thing he says in this video is that it's much better to be an off-camera writer than an on-camera opinionater, in terms of avoiding excesses of vainglory. See around the 35-minute mark, where Jones opines that writing more readily lends itself to reflection than talking to a camera. My experience of reading many blogs—not to mention Jones's essays—argues otherwise.
Papal Intentions
Sometimes I wonder at what point it becomes questionably moral to pursue a plenary indulgence. As we all know, such an indulgence requires praying for the pope's monthly intentions. P. Francis's most recent prayer intention is that all countries would be successfully bullied into accepting refugees. In a month when we are encouraged to pray for the dead and win indulgences for their repose, it is most unfortunate that the pope has tried to guilt Catholics everywhere into asking God to fulfill his questionable vision of world politics.
Tolkien's Love Story
May 2017 will see the publication of Dr. Tolkien's story of Beren and Lúthien as a standalone tale, much as his son did with The Children of Hurin. I think that many of his stories work better separated from their original Silmarillion framework than as cogs in a larger machine, and I expect this will be one such example. Maybe I'm just looking forward to the version of the story where Sauron is a giant evil cat.
Descent into Hell
Mel Gibson has officially confirmed plans for a sequel to The Passion of the Christ, which, for all its flaws, remains my favorite religious movie. He hints at the inclusion of Jesus's descent into the Limbo of the Fathers as a kind of dramatic backdrop to what could otherwise be an action-light story. One hopes that Gibson will not present a Balthasarized version of the Descensus Christi ad Inferos, but only time will tell. I am also expecting good things from his new film Hacksaw Ridge.
The Ghost of Counter-Reformation Past
Speaking of the legacy of Hans Urs von Balthasar, a blogger at Bp. Barron's Word on Fire website has written a rather scathing criticism of the celebration of Reformation Day. There's no mention of the pope's imprudent gestures in this regard, but it's good that even clericalist-leaning apologists are willing to break ranks with the usual back-slapping now and then.
Continued from Part I, a critical examination of The Man Behind the Curtain: Michael Voris and the Homosexual Vortex by E. Michael Jones.
Was the New York Threat Real?
When Voris released his revelatory “Vortex” episode “Limiting God,” he claimed to be doing so because, in his own words, “We have on very good authority from various sources that the New York archdiocese is collecting and preparing to quietly filter out details of my past life with the aim of publicly discrediting me.” Jones states flatly, “This was not true,” and that “he began his Vortex with a lie” (ch. 8). However, earlier in the essay Jones strangely seems to say the opposite:
Marc Brammer got a call from Mark DeYoung, a seminarian at Dunwoodie, the same seminary which Voris had attended for two years during the ’80s. The current crop of seminarians at Dunwoodie were avid Voris fans, but they were being told that Voris had been dismissed for good reason and didn’t know who to believe. DeYoung had told Brammer during one of his trips to New York that the seminary officials were willing to release Voris’s dossier to the public if Voris felt the rumors were false. Voris had always maintained that he had not been dismissed because of homosexual activity but because of his spiritual immaturity, failing to understand that spiritual immaturity had become a code word for homosexuality. (ch. 6)
This may not have been the imminent threat of exposure that Voris thought, but it seems to be close enough to what he said in the “Vortex” that it substantiates the essence of his claim. The real threat, though, was not the archdiocese but the constant stream of accusations of a past gay lifestyle on social media sites by people who knew him in his earlier days.
Armchair Psychiatry and Shocking “Revelations”
E. Michael Jones believes himself to be an expert in psychiatry-from-a-distance. Even though his graduate studies were in English and American literature, he cannot seem to write anything that does not include the psychiatric diagnosis of mental disorders in some distant subject. His diagnosis of narcissistic tendencies in Mr. Voris depends heavily on Dr. Van den Aardweg’s The Battle for Normality, which is quoted (and, thankfully, properly cited) liberally throughout The Man Behind the Curtain. I have no problem with the Dutch doctor’s book, which I have not read, but his decades-worth of private practice have surely earned him the right to opine in general terms on the psychological aspects of homosexuality.
Sadly, Dr. Jones quotes Van den Aardweg like a fundamentalist quoting the Holy Writ: as a source of proof texts that he can apply to whichever subject he sees fit, on the barest thread of evidence. He takes the insight that homosexuality and narcissism are often tightly linked, and proceeds to diagnose Michael Voris with an extreme case of narcissistic tendencies in all aspects of his life. “Homosexual desires,” Jones opines, “are rooted in ‘self-centeredness or immature “egophilia,”’ which leads to ‘hyperdramatization,’ which conventionally goes by the term ‘narcissism’” (ch. 2).
In Dr. Jones’s view, both the deviant behavior and the preachy bluster of Mr. Voris find their roots in the common source of that narcissism which developed early in life as a result of rumored sexual abuse and the inability to connect to his schoolyard peers. Then Jones takes a surprising left turn to diagnose Mother Angelica with a similar case of egophilia, which supposedly is self-evident in her 1993 rant against a bishop who had cast a young woman as Jesus in a dramatic presentation of the Passion:
Mother Angelica, née Rita Rizzo, and Michael Voris were wounded children. Rita’s father walked out when she was six years old, at the start of the Depression, plunging the family into poverty and subjecting Rita to ridicule at the Catholic school she attended.... Both Voris and Rizzo sought solace from their childhood woundedness in the religious life.... [As far as I can tell, Voris entered the seminary, not the monastery, and Jones provides no evidence whatsoever that Rizzo entered the convent for the aforesaid reasons. –J]
Mother Angelica’s case was different. There is no evidence that Mother Angelica ever acted sexually on the wound she received in childhood. The discipline of pre-Vatican II convent life kept whatever impulses she might have had under control. During the ’70s, however, Mother Angelica was prayed over by an itinerant charismatic by the name of Robert DeGrandis and received the gift of tongues. This event eventually led to a more and more public life, until in 1981 she founded her television apostolate. Receiving the gift of tongues can often be accompanied by a reduction in inhibition, specifically sexual inhibition.... The fact that Mother Angelica never acted on the childhood wound sexually does not mean that the wound wasn’t there. The narcissism that flowed from it gradually found expression in her apostolate as well.... Why did both EWTN and CMTV end up in de facto violation of Canon 1373? The short answer to that question is narcissism. (ch. 2)
You read that right, gentle reader. E. Michael Jones implies that Mother Angelica was a repressed lesbian who channeled that repression into criticisms of the episcopacy. This is what comes of armchair diagnoses. The reason why those in the psychological sciences are very hesitant to diagnose even well-known historical figures with deficiencies or disorders is that they are unable to examine and cross-examine those persons in a clinical setting. To toss out mental health diagnoses willy-nilly as Jones does is to become the Catholic version of Camille Paglia.
Who’s the Real Narcissist, Dr. Jones?
Two can play at this armchair game. Let’s give it a try.
Jones accuses Voris of narcissism and “salacious” (ch. 7) reporting in his apostolate. As for narcissism, Dr. Jones spends a great deal of the first chapter talking about himself, specifically his influence on Terry Carroll’s views on the SSPX and how Jones really (really!) isn’t an anti-semite, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the essay. Also, Jones wants you to know that he was definitely smarter than Mr. Michael Davies, and he thinks it was very funny when Mark Shea reacted to an interview of Jones on CMTV like a barking dog. It’s not until the second chapter that Jones begins to get over himself and writes about the topic of the essay.
As for the “salacious” touches and name-calling that frequently gets Voris in trouble, Jones himself calls Voris “Gary the Fairy” four times (a play on his full name of Gary Michael Voris), makes fun of his hair (something Jones and I can agree on), and quasi-subliminally suggests that the young men who work at Church Militant TV are in danger of perverse attack by quoting such warnings as, “The young don’t deserve to [be] spiritually sodomized in all this.... Voris is getting to f[—] these kids in a spiritual way” (ch. 7). Jones adds a flamboyant touch in one insult: “Even if Voris has been washed in the blood of the lamb [sic], Marc Brammer is still out $250,000” (ch. 9). Earlier he mocks the CMTV cruises by saying their clientele “was typical of fag/hag culture” (ch. 6). The ebook’s pedestrian photoshopping of Voris as a masquerader is indicative of Dr. Jones’s unsuccessful attempts at cleverness. And finally, Jones also goes on to repeat accusations that Voris was sexually abused by both parents, but in such a way that the reader can never discern if the accusations were actually grounded.
Looking at it from another angle, both Jones and Voris share the middle name “Michael,” and also share in the eccentric affectation of hiding their first names (the E. stands for “Eugene”). This is doubtless an effect of deep-rooted narcissism, stemming specifically out of a desire to redefine themselves in ways that rebel against their parents who named them. By rejecting their first names, they are rejecting the authority of their parents and sinning against piety and the Fourth Commandment. By taking the name “Michael” as their monikers, they are identifying with a saint who, in popular sacred art, is always depicted as both youthful and masculine—superficially, the ideal homosexual fantasy.
(Yes, this section is sarcastic, but it is almost exactly the kind of argumentation that Jones uses persistently throughout The Man Behind the Curtain.)
“Where Lies and Falsehoods...”
Jones clearly has a great deal of mental energy at his disposal, and the zeal to use it as he sees fit. One feels rather envious of this fact when skimming through his voluminous output. His choice of targets is sometimes perplexing, however, and his methods of argumentation crumble under their own weight long before the last page is read. I do not doubt that Michael Voris and his apostolate are worthy of a critical eye, but Jones is incapable of avoiding self-serving sophistry while dishing out his accusations.
The problem of exploiting Voris’s spiritual advisor is the most egregious herein. If Jones published through a separate publishing house he would never get away with that sort of temerity. Because of this, it was almost physically painful reading this essay to the end.
The recent self-epublished essay The Man Behind the Curtain: Michael Voris and the Homosexual Vortex by E. Michael Jones, PhD is worth considering for a few reasons, prime among them its best-seller status within multiple Amazon Kindle ebook categories. Unlike this post, Jones’s essay is a few levels above mere bloggish ephemera that will be buried under the 24-hour news cycle.
My familiarity with Jones’s writing is slightly higher than zilch and quite lower than comprehensive. I am aware that he has published his Culture Wars magazine for about twenty years. A few years back I read his Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film; I found its premise of horror fiction as an outworking of sexual guilt intriguing but decreasingly compelling as its repetitive 312-page argument dragged on. He has published many bloated essays through Amazon’s Kindle service, but at least a few of them—Tolkien’s Failed Quest, Requiem for a Whale Rider, and Protectors of the Code—I have personally found informative if not very well argued.
Dr. Jones has been accused of anti-semitism for years, a fact I would not bother to bring up if he did not do so himself at surprisingly great length in The Man Behind the Curtain. His social commentary has raised eyebrows and drawn accusations of race-baiting, homophobia, anti-traditionalism, and anti-capitalism. I have no intention of writing a general exposé of Jones’s writings, and will try to keep my commentary to the essay at hand.
The Good
The most worthwhile parts of The Man Behind the Curtain are to be found in chapters six through eight: “Church Militant: The History Leading to the Crisis,” “The Man Behind the Curtain Comes Out and Continues to Hide,” and “Damage Control.” These chapters have the largest amount of factual, sourced reporting and the smallest amount of interpretive commentary. The chapters are still problematic, as I will show further on, but the reconstructed timeline of Michael Voris’s “coming out” is a good reference, if only as a way of keeping the chronology straight.
That is honestly the nicest thing I can write about this essay.
Questionable Citations
The very first endnote in this ebook is a reference to Michael Voris’s Wikipedia page. This should be enough to give even the casual reader pause. One does not need academic pretensions to be worried about citing a protean online encyclopedia in a serious journalistic work. The bulk of Jones’s citations are online, which is not intrinsically problematic, especially considering the subject under discussion. He also cites Gerard van den Aardweg’s The Battle for Normality: A Guide for (Self-) Therapy for Homosexuality (Ignatius Press, 1997) throughout, albeit to the point of nausea.
More worrisome than the citations used are the citations never given. Jones frequently writes of past occurrences without bothering to produce any evidence that they actually occurred. His section on Mother Angelica is a perfect example, where he can cite chapter and verse of her famous 1993 anti-episcopal complaint, but is too lazy to provide evidence for his exotic claims about her earlier life. At one point he quotes Maureen Mullarkey concerning Voris without a citation, but later in the essay he actually cites her “Studio Matters” blog correctly with a link. He is inconsistently sloppy.
Many of the statements about Voris’s earlier life are merely stated without a shred of evidence or reference. Others are presented as hearsay from sources presumably close to Church Militant. Jones writes of ex-lovers from Voris’s past who posted accusations online, but does not give names and dates, even though Facebook always displays both.
Indeed, the frequent factoids about Mr. Voris’s sordid past are the most troublesome parts of Jones’s citational shortcomings, especially considering their apparent source in Voris’s spiritual advisor.
Broken Trust
The identity of Voris’s spiritual advisor/director is left anonymous throughout this essay. (I will refer to him simply as Fr. Advisor from here on out.) Presumably this is to protect the advisor’s good name, to distance him from scandal, and to preserve confidentiality. If your irony meters aren’t shooting through the roof, there is probably something wrong with your soul.
Jones states that “Voris became involved with his spiritual advisor during the fall of 2010.... Voris was looking for a chaplain who could say both the novus ordo and extraordinary forms of the Mass” (ch. 6). He says that Fr. Advisor was being harassed by a powerful homosexual priest in his diocese, and looked to the position at Voris’s studio as a way of escaping this hostility. Once in Voris’s employ, Jones writes, Father was trapped “by a combination of financial dependence and bad theology” (ibid).
Many insights into Voris’s psyche are explicitly said to come from Fr. Advisor. Other supposed facts seem like they must have been revealed by Voris personally to his advisor. The rest apparently were quietly extracted from disgruntled Church Militant workers under the cover of anonymity.
The morality of including any private conversations between a person and his spiritual director is highly questionable. Unless Voris and Fr. Advisor had mutually agreed against confidentiality (an unlikely scenario), I do not see how the publication of this anonymous priest’s private conversations with his advisee is acceptable by any standards, especially in the context of Catholic spiritual paternity.
The Vorticose Prayer Chain
The timeline surrounding Voris’s “coming out” is, as mentioned earlier, related in surprising detail in chapters 6-8 of The Man Behind the Curtain. Some of these details are extracted from Voris’s online videos and postings at the time, others from related (albeit still unsourced) news items, but many are emails written by those close to Church Militant.
A collection of emails specifically from Marc Brammer, Terry Carroll, Michael Voris, Frank Coan, and Fr. Advisor, some of them quite personal and angry, are quoted at length. They show the unfolding realization of financial misconduct within the St. Michael’s Media organization, and the gradual understanding of the depth of Voris’s manipulations behind the scenes.
One wonders how Jones got his hands on these emails. Were they forwarded to him by one of the participants? Perhaps Fr. Advisor attached them with the rest of his diary entries. Maybe one of the others was angry enough with Voris to hire Jones as a hatchet man. Or maybe the answer is to be found in this brief admission in chapter 6:
On Friday, April 15 [of 2016], Ryan Walker, one of Voris’s backers and, more importantly, the only person Voris could consider a friend [And to Mr. Walker’s credit, he does not seem to have contributed to Dr. Jones’s essay. –J], drove from Detroit to South Bend, Indiana to attend the Notre Dame Blue/Gold game with two of his sons. His original plan involved bringing Voris and Matthew Pearson, Voris’s assistant, to South Bend to confer with Brammer and E. Michael Jones about future programming.
Is this a hint that Jones was in fact a part of this large email group? Did he publish all of these men’s letters on his own initiative? If so, did he bother getting anybody’s permission first? Considering his overall lack of journalistic scruples, one has to wonder.
More to Come
There is far too much to say in one post. Part II will be coming soon. In the mean time, enjoy this musical interlude.
This is the Rad Trad's 200th post, fitting as we are two weeks away from the blog's first anniversary. On the anniversary the Rad Trad will unveil the blog's new patron saint and give some statistics on the "state of the blog."
The Rad Trad is not much a fan of Michael Voris, although he thinks Mr. Voris is well intentioned and does say things that others shy away from saying. Recently Mr. Voris began a series called Dispatches, a program of five episodes recounting the state of affairs in the Catholic Church in America using the statistics published by the American bishops in the Official Catholic Directory, meaning the numbers presented are not the program's own, but the bishops'.
Here is the second episode in the series (begins 2:42), which would be more watchable if Mr. Voris would remain in one place!
In short, things are bad. A third as many religious sisters as a 50 years ago and double the average age. Half as many priests, but a tenth the number of seminarians (which also means many men who are being ordained now may not have been ordained in previous days). Mass attendance, in the United States, is also less than a third of what it was five decades ago and a net of 2,000 parishes have closed in the last two decades. All of this despite the population nearly doubling in the same period.
The organization of the Church in America is in a state of decay and it will eventually implode. The question in the Rad Trad's mind is: what happens when the Church structure does implode? Will bishops continue attempting to maintain, as they do now, the organizational features of the Church as it existed in their youth? A priest or two in every parish, several Sunday Masses, weekday low Masses, nuns, Catholic schools, and a lot of well funded social clubs? The reality is that this is no longer a feasible means of running the Church. The Rad Trad has written elsewhere on what happens when the Church is structured like McDonald's, so he sees no need in reiterating those points. Parishes built for three for four full Masses and two priests often have two half-capacity Masses and one overworked priest. This model not only suffers from lack of personnel, but it is very expensive. Running a parish can be financially plausible as long as the Masses are well attended and the congregation contributes. Beneficence remains, but attendance has dwindled. Barring a grand and immediate revival of the American Church, the old system will die, but what to do about it?
The Rad Trad hopes there might be a future in oratories and in collegiate churches (not to be confused with the Oratory of St. Philip Neri or collegiate churches full of retired monsignori). Living alone is not really natural. "Back in the day" there were usually two or three priests per parish. This kept the priests honest and also provided a normal social structure. It also meant parishes were well-staffed and could split duties among the priests rather than hire laymen (secretaries, financial consultants, lay catechists etc). Could an oratory system not recover some of this element and more? In the first millennium the priests of Rome, and in most European dioceses, lived in main houses in town and only went to the parishes for Sundays and feasts. Otherwise they would remain at the cathedral or main churches of the city and sing the Office and Mass daily there. There were two effects of this: 1-there existed fellowship in Christ among the priests and 2-the main churches became centers of Catholic life unto themselves. A large, beautiful church with the Divine Office and a high Mass daily is not just another parish, but a proper destination. Such places, where they still exist, are often the most vibrant churches in the area, as they practice the full Liturgy (the life line of the Church to Jesus Christ) and have full resources for running community programs (concerts, lectures, devotions, retreats, and the like). In most places though, the only different between a large church and a small one is the size. Nothing else. Whichever performs worse is not even likely to close, but to be "clustered" with some other parishes, stretching the priest and the utility bills further other more land and with fewer faithful.
Could an oratory system not be a solution to this coming predicament? Imagine that the city nearest you has only a few Catholic churches and that they are quite large and that their Sunday Masses are very full. Each one has 3-10 priests (depending on the town) who sing Mattins/Lauds every morning, offer Mass every hour, hear Confessions daily, the priests hold their own jobs (teachers, chaplains, chancery work etc), Vespers in the evening, and special events scattered throughout the week. Depending on the population of the surrounding area the church could perhaps run a school. Such a parish or oratory would undoubtedly be the center of Catholic life in the city, if for no other reason that it is one of the only churches and that it does everything well. Moreover, having all the priests under one roof and putting the faithful of the area in one parish cuts down on the overhead. Perhaps a few of the priests could go to small chapels or parishes in surrounding areas to celebrate Mass on Sundays and Holy Days. When a parish or chapel maintains a stable or growing congregation that could support two or three priests (no fewer) it could become an oratory. This modest proposal both cuts costs and improves the quality of return. It makes the church a spiritual focus and creates standards for future growth, unlike the current structure which seeks to stave off decay. The ancient Roman churches operated this way. Monasticism grew in Europe in the same manner. Monks were housed under one abbey's roof until enough there were enough monks to run a full second monastery, in which case an offshoot priory would be established. After time, if the priory proved itself viable, it could become an abbey. This system seeks to represent the faith in its fullest to a world that currently thinks the faith to be either a mere intellectual proposition or a social function. Complaining about Mass attendance and pointing at the "renewal" transpiring before our eyes will not recover the Church in the United States. Reorganization and reform must accompany renewal.
This proposed oratory system differs from the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in that it is a structure for the diocesan priesthood, not its own vocation centered around a particular saint's spirituality. And it differs from a collegiate church in that the priests in residence would have no special honors or revenues. Priests, although better supported, might make less salary in this system where one large congregation supports a great many priests, which could make it attractive to bishops and annoying to the rest of the clergy. Yet it is a start.
