A gay guy with AIDS was the face of Catholic traditionalism
After decades in hiding, Michael Voris is out at Church Militant
Michael Voris has been a fixture in the Catholic world. The founder of the Church Militant media empire, he was the showman who willed a traditionalist brand into being.
But now Voris has been fired, with Church Militant makes a curiously vague statement about his “breaching” a “morality clause.”
What could this be about?
His life had seemed to be an open book.
In his 2015 memoir, Militant: Resurrecting Authentic Catholicism, Voris writes of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s amid the Sexual Revolution, as he “fell prey” to the lure of sex. Doesn’t say much more than that.
He worked as a T.V. journalist. Into the 1990s, he writes, his personal life was a lot of “one night stands” and “pangs of guilt…”
He returned to Catholicism because of his mom.
In his often-told story, back in 2001 she was deeply distressed over his religious status. As he puts it, she prayed “to be given whatever suffering needed so that I would be granted sufficient grace to revert.”
That is, she’d asked God to afflict her if her son would be ‘saved’. Not long after, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and died.
At her funeral, Voris recalls, he spoke to her coffin: “Mom, what you went through for me, you will not have gone through in vain.”
He returned to Catholic practice, and launched a media empire.
Traditional Catholics needed a T.V. show, and he would be the star. Michael Voris became the unusual standard-bearer of right-wing values.
There was a degree of fun, with kitschy props.
He’d rant on subjects “the homosexual infiltration of the church.” This theme centered all his views, to sometimes unexpected ends. He thought of the old Latin Mass, beloved by very traditional Catholics, as a magnet for homosexual priests, so he favored ditching it.
He was on a crusade against gays in general. He hosted the stories of victims of clerical sexual abuse—the better to focus on what Voris saw as the undue and unwanted influence of homosexuals on the church.
He outed clerics with a mix of aggression and glee.
One target, a bishop who was Black, he called the “African Queen.”
One could only pause in amazement at the publicly “ex-gay” conservative Catholic man who said that half of Catholic clergy were, in fact, closeted homosexuals—often left to die of AIDS in silence.
For traditional Catholics it was a riveting spectacle.
It seemed the birth of an ultra-right-wing branch of the church devoted to doctrinal purity. Dissenting views were dismissed as a “cancer.”
And Church Militant, in turn, was dismissed as “Taliban Catholicism.”
With the instincts of a tabloid journalist, Voris oversaw research into the lives of “traitorous” church officials, from bishops to nuns, who were found to support abortion and other issues. But gay issues were his signature concern.
He often insinuated he was a Catholic official. That led to ongoing tension with actual church officials. Voris settled on his odd designation of Church Militant as “the apostolate”—as if taking authority directly from Jesus.
Voris kept adding to his range of products.
There was daily political commentary. There were luxury cruises.
And there were wigs. Lot of them.
As he became a noted anti-gay figure, gay men were remembering him on social media.
One report in 2014 noted Voris had a partner (Bryan) who’d died of AIDS in the 1990s, then he had another partner. Another report recalled him “as gay as they come,” and said that Voris had contracted HIV.
Pressured to make a statement, Voris wrote a startling blog post in 2016. His early sex life, he said, had been with men. As he puts it:
“I will now reveal that for most of my years in my thirties, confused about my own sexuality, I lived a life of live-in relationships with homosexual men.”
In 2017, noted Catholic commentator E. Michael Jones published an exposé.
His short book, The Man Behind the Curtain, would be, he’d tartly note, mostly disregarded. But he paints a startling portrait of Voris the traditionalist posing as a “super-macho Catholic crusader,” then joking about his gay past.
Guys “never thought he was gay,” Voris would say, “not even when he was having sex with them.”
Voris would display photos of his old partner—the one he thought had given him HIV.
He’d spend hours at home, surrounded by Disney memorabilia, searching social media for old lovers.
Then he went to work at Church Militant, while hitting on young men who worked there.
He had an on-camera wife.
Christine Niles was jokingly known around Church Militant as “Mrs. Voris” and seemed to be in love with him. As E. Michael Jones writes, she’d “left her husband, and became Voris’s most vociferous defender.”
In 2016, she was on hand to tidy up after his outing. In a Facebook post, she says he’d left his “diabolical” life of “horror.” She writes:
“God has restored a rightly ordered sexuality and authentic masculinity to Michael. There is simply no vestige of the old life. He is truly ‘a new creation in Christ.’ And that’s a beautiful thing! Time to move on.”
Voris also had a fake “son.”
An executive producer at Church Militant was often on hand as Voris’ assistant, and presented as if a son—or more. As Jones writes:
“He was living in a fantasy world in a toxic relationship with poor Matthew who had to bunk with Voris as they traveled around the world. Voris would buy him clothes; Voris would correct his grammatical mistakes, just as if he were his father.”
Jones traces the drama that led to Voris admitting his gay past, in which “he admitted that he was HIV positive, but denied that he was dying of AIDS.”
After the outing, Voris seemed different.
It’s like the fun had gone out of anti-gay crusading. He stopped wearing a wig. The macho-femme Catholic warrior for Jesus character faded.
He was observed to be less often praying. He seemed to have developed other interests.
On November 21st, Church Militant put out a shock announcement.
Voris had been discovered in some unspecified “morals” violation, and his resignation apparently demanded. The Board of Directors explains he is “stepping aside and focusing on his personal health.”
“The apostolate,” they add, “will be praying for him, and we kindly ask you to do the same.”
It disclosed nothing—and did?
As current Catholic “ex-gay” Milo Yiannopoulos notes on Telegram:
“You can’t say a former homosexual has breached a morality clause, knowing what will be assumed, and then coyly claim not to be disclosing private matters.”
Details dribbled out about Voris being seen with gay porn and at gay bars, and noticed sending text messages like “I jacked off to your hot pic.”
And Catholics aren’t supposed to masturbate.
Voris made as vague a statement as the one Church Militant put out about him.
His interest in the details of gay Catholic private lives seems to have fled, curiously enough, when it came to his own.
“Uh, there have been, uhm, failings, in that area with regard to me, my own, personal behavior, not just the most recent stuff here, but all sorts of other things…”
What could he be talking about?
“There are some very, very ugly truths from my past that I’ve, essentially, for 62 years, have avoided facing, because I didn’t want to. I, uh, I wanted them resolved, but I understand that touching that pain is going to be a very horrible thing.”
Christine Niles made a statement too.
She’d resigned from Church Militant on November 9th, she revealed, since there’d been problems with “the environment.” She won’t be divulging “private details.”
As a business decision, there would’ve been concerns to benching the star player. As one onlooker notes on X: “There is no such thing as Church Militant without Voris. It will crash without him.”
For some Catholics, that would be a relief. Another comment on X:
“I do now hope that CM sinks without trace: a nasty and useless outlet pretending to be for ‘Tradition’, yet in the end insanely hostile to it.”
Catholics in this context seem wonderfully forgiving.
“Even if he relapsed, that’s his private life and his struggle,” one notes. “Only prayers for him.”
There’s other takes.
“So the founder of a tradcath publication has turned out to be gay? Lol.” 🔶
