Far Right Catholics Join Evangelicals in Favoring Trump Over the Gospel Message

This blog frequently looks at (i) the still raging sex abuse scandal and moral bankruptcy in the Roman Catholic Church and (ii) the rejection of the Gospel message - and, I would add, any shred of morality - by evangelical Christians who continue to embrace Donald Trump.  While seemingly two separate issues, the two are intersecting as far right Catholic "news" outlets continue to increasingly join evangelicals in their preference for enraging in political fellatio or Trump and members of his ministry of propaganda and an outright rejection of Christ's Gospel message.   A piece in the National Catholic Reporter - which is not controlled by the Vatican - looks at the manner in which Eternal Word Television Network ("EWTN") is rapidly becoming the Fox News of religious broadcasting networks, including fawning interviews of Trump sycophants and outright liars like Sarah Huckabee Sanders.   Here are article highlights: 

On Memorial Day, viewers who tuned into EWTN's News Nightly for "news from a Catholic perspective" were treated to two previously recorded one-on-one interviews by anchor Lauren Ashburn.

In the first, a 10-minute sit-down with Mike Pence during his March visit to Ave Maria University in Florida, the vice president bashed "media elites and Hollywood liberals," called Democrats "the party of abortion on demand, even the party of infanticide" and described President Donald Trump as "the most pro-life president in American history." 

In the second interview, Ashburn served up softball questions for 11 minutes with former White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders. The EWTN anchor gushed about the latest unemployment numbers and asked why the mainstream media hasn't given more coverage to this accomplishment, held up a devotional book she learned Sanders reads daily before asking about religious liberty . . .

The segment was clear evidence of how a television outlet once devoted to expressions of Catholic piety and conservative catechesis and apologetics has grown into a truly influential media empire, well connected to Republican politicians and the Trump White House. EWTN, where the "Catholic perspective" is unabashedly partisan, has also become the media star in a web of connections including wealthy conservative Catholic donors and some of the most public anti-Pope Francis forces in the Catholic world. Those connections, traceable through a maze of non-profit organizations, helped fuel EWTN's development. It is a complex tale involving the matchup of a peculiar brand of U.S. style conservative Catholicism with conservative political ideology and economic theory.

Less than two weeks before the 2016 presidential election — while Trump was still embroiled in the "Access Hollywood" controversy in which he was caught on tape joking about sexually assaulting women — EWTN news director and anchor Raymond Arroyo did an "exclusive" sit-down with the candidate at Trump's Miami hotel.

Arroyo asked about the tapes and gave Trump two chances to apologize or take back the extremely lewd comments about women, but the candidate insisted it was "all made up" and "just locker room talk," adding that "You can't go back. You have to look forward." In the end, he blamed the "nasty primary" and "nasty campaign."

During the 15-minute interview, Trump refused to talk about his prayer life and rambled about the Affordable Care Act being a "disaster" and religious liberty being "in tremendous trouble," but he gave clear, succinct answers when it came to an issue that is a central concern to the EWTN audience.

"Yes, I am pro-life," Trump affirmed. "You said you are going to appoint judges who are pro-life," Arroyo said, again in statement form. "Right," said Trump.

Although the network had been friendly in the past to the Republican party because of shared positions on abortion, gay marriage and religious liberty issues, EWTN's political partisanship has become more visible since Trump's election, most notably on its two news shows, "News Nightly" and "The World Over."

Both shows regularly include as guests political conservatives discussing domestic and international policies.

Since 2017, Arroyo has been a regular contributor to Fox News and has substituted for Laura Ingraham on her commentary show on Fox News. Ingraham has stirred considerable controversy for defending a white nationalist, mocking a Parkland school shooting survivor and calling immigrant detention facilities "summer camps."

While secular alternatives to Fox News exist — from its counterpart on the left, MSNBC, to more centrist major network broadcasts — no alternatives are available to EWTN in the Catholic world. Once it overtook an early and flawed attempt by the U.S. bishops to form their own network, EWTN quickly became the only major Catholic voice on the television landscape in the United States — and that voice has gone global.

[T]he network founded in 1981 in the monastery garage of a then-unknown Poor Clare nun named Mother Angelica, arguably has more influence than the official church leaders, especially since their authority, already in decline, was further diminished by their mishandling of the clergy sex abuse crisis.

The bishops themselves are now apparently shaped by the EWTN empire. According to a recent study of the U.S. episcopate, the EWTN-owned National Catholic Register is the religious publication read by the most bishops, with 61 percent saying they read it.

But what the bishops — and others, Catholic and non-Catholic alike — are getting is a very particular slice of Catholicism from EWTN and its affiliate organizations, one not necessarily representative of the U.S. church as a whole. Polling and ongoing studies of the Catholic population in the United States consistently finds a far greater diversity of views and tolerance for questions than is the case on EWTN broadcasts. EWTN has become the only regularly televised image of Catholicism in America.

The media portions of the organization — from EWTN to the Register to the Catholic News Agency — are hardly objective, doing a type of "journalism" expected on Fox News but not necessarily from what started as a devotional network where the homebound could find televised Mass and other spiritual programming.

In addition to its slanted political coverage, EWTN and its affiliate journalistic enterprises also have connections to economic libertarian ideologues, including EWTN governors' board member and major donor Timothy Busch, who has said he supports anti-union "right to work" laws, opposes minimum wage increases and advocates for free market capitalism as a tool for raising people out of poverty.

This merging of ideological and political causes with theological ones is concerning. Said Massa [Jesuit Fr. Mark Massa, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College]: "When religion links itself to political causes, it always turns out badly for religion."

Knowingly or not, EWTN may accelerate the exodus of younger generations from Catholicism.  It certainly is increasing the perception that Catholicism is a morally bankrupt tradition that cares only about abortion and persecuting gays while covering up for sexual predators. 

Don’t Blame the Catholic Church Sex Abuse Crisis on Gays

Photo by Chris Karidis on Unsplash.

Many on the far right of the Roman Catholic Church ranging from reactionary bishops and cardinals and, in my view, parasitic, self-enrichment organizations such as Church Militant and Bill Donohue's Catholic League (which is comprised of one well paid Donohue and one staffer) are working overtime to blame the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal on gays - specifically, gay priests - rather than the Church's clericalism, the Church's bizarre 12th century dogma on sexuality, or the Church hierarchy's active cover ups of abuse.  As always, scapegoating gays and shielding the reputation of the Church is the prime goal regardless of the lies and subterfuge required.   In response, a piece in America, the official outlet of the Jesuits - historically the best educated and most zealous defenders of Catholicism - argues that this scapegoating effort is wrong and not to be believed.  Indeed, gay Catholics, perhaps more than any others, have had to truly ponder the Gospel message and what - if one believes them to be more than myths of ignorant herders - the Old Testament seeks to tell.  Because of this, psycho-sexually mature gays have much to teach the Church. Here are excerpts:

This is not a fun moment to be Catholic, I know, and we are all grasping for sense and answers. But here’s the thing: Using an abuse and accountability scandal to scapegoat Catholic queerness is not O.K.

Take, for example, this letter from Bishop Robert Morlino. I trust the bishop has the best intentions, but some of his most scorching indignation aims not at the abuses of power and accountability he is supposed to be talking about but at homosexuality, in general, which he reminds us the church regards as “intrinsically disordered” and that “cries out to heaven for vengeance” and possibly—the referent is not fully clear—is to be “hated with a perfect hatred.”

There are other concurrent truths, too. . . . . Each time I read something like this, I think of how, over and over, the people who have saved my faith when it was on the brink happened to be queer folks. I suspect this is not an accident. I cannot be sure, but I expect it was their experience of marginalization and their humanness against it that helped me see where God is.

Some of these people have been of the left, some of the right. Some have been on TV, some will never be so seen. Sometimes things have even gotten inappropriate. But that was not because they were queer. Straight folks in the church cross boundaries, too, just as much.

I came into this church right in the heat of the Boston Globe revelations. I was baptized in 2003. Many times I have been grateful to have been called to this church as an adult (barely, I was 18). But I was old enough to know the difference between the nonsense and the glory.

I would not have begun to know God were it not for a person, harbored in holy orders, whose life could only be described as queer, and who drew me in, safely and respectfully, when the straight dudes wanted to drive me out.

I never noticed queerness in one of the people I looked to early in my Christian life as a guide and model. But years later I ran into him with his partner at a famously welcoming evening Mass, on the other end of town from where he lived.

And it was from some corners of this church, believe it or not, that queer experiences seemed to make the most sense. From one corner, a nun had to keep her ministry to the trans community secret. From another, the sweetest friendship I have ever seen was between a famous, withering Jesuit and a woman whose husband, while dying from AIDS, the two of them had tended to decades earlier.

In a sense, there is some truth that the problem of abuse has to do with a problem of queer sexuality. It is the problem of a repressed, denialist, immature queerness that discovered itself a little after Vatican II but was not able to go beyond that.

There is a revelation at hand here. It is not a liberal revelation or a conservative one. It is something else, something ancient. Blindness to it has caused so, so much pain. It has caused good people and good leaders to be their worst selves.

As I traveled my coming out journey, I read a great deal on religion, the Bible and Catholicism and worked with a licensed therapist who was an ordained minister. In the process, I suspect I gave more thought and analysis to my faith than the average Catholic and many members of the Church hierarchy who seem most focused on power, status, control of others and living like "princes."

Debating the Crisis in Catholicism

As a former Catholic - 10 years as an altar boy (the first few when the mass was still in Latin), 4th Degree Knight of Columbus - from a family once strongly Catholic, I still watch from afar the unfolding drama of the Church wracked by a never ending sex abuse scandal (dioceses in New York and Pennsylvania are the center of the storm at the moment in America, but the problem remains global) and the effort of "conservatives" to cling to a 12th century understanding of sexuality.  Like many former Catholics, the only times I now darken a Catholic church door is for a wedding or a funeral.  The few in my family who are still churchgoers have now opted for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ("ELCA") which offers a Catholic liturgy without all the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church.   Meanwhile, "conservatives" fling arrows at Pope Francis and decry efforts to bring the Church even remotely into the 21st century. Two articles look at the spectacle as highlighted by a new book by New York Times right wing columnist, Ross Douthat - who seemingly would bring back the Crusades and the public burning of heretics and gays if he could.  One is by Andrew Sullivan and somewhat more sympathetic to Douthat in New York Magazine and another in The Atlantic which takes Douthat to task.   Both face the reality that Catholicism and Christianity are in trouble in America.  First, highlights from Sullivan's piece: 

How does anyone remain a Christian in our current modern moment? The moral implosion of American Evangelicalism in the cult of Trump, the rise of casual anti-Christian bigotry in popular culture, the continuing sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, the emergence of a movement for Christian cultural retrenchment in the church (Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option), the revolution in gay rights in the West, and the slow slide of church attendance and religious observance seem to have conspired to bring the matter to a head. And in this fevered and often ill-tempered debate, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by much of Ross Douthat’s new book lambasting Pope Francis as a small-minded heretic. 

I certainly understand his fear that in the perilous shoals of liquid modernity, the ship of the Catholic Magisterium (the authoritative teaching of the church) could run aground. I also understand his grief at what was lost as the church revamped itself in the 1960s and 1970s — the liturgy, the enchantment, the unquestioned papal authority, the reverence, the silences and the darknesses, now wiped away into too many banal ceremonies, in churches lit as if they were a branch of Target. For Ross, as for me, the church in the 1970s seemed to be abandoning the sacred and the sublime for the mundane and the modern.

[B]ut where I have to differ with him [Douthat] is in his view that Pope Francis is somehow making all this much worse — that he is, through intemperance and recklessness, risking outright schism in the church in a way that hasn’t happened for centuries. By Douthat’s account, Francis is to the church what Donald Trump is to American democracy. He’s an existential threat.

How on earth could that be? For Ross, so much seems to come down to the Pope’s willingness to contemplate allowing divorced and remarried Catholics who want to be a part of the church to receive Communion . . . . Francis’s merely airing these questions — as well as the place of homosexuals in the church — represents to him a look into the abyss of doctrinal chaos. The fact that nothing has changed in official church teaching at all is scant comfort. The elaborate, intricate edifice of Catholicism, built and repaired for two millennia, unchanging and authoritative, is endangered. To Ross, Francis’s actions threaten to send the church drifting into a kind of lame “moral therapeutic deism” that has plagued the mainline Protestant denominations — or, more likely, precipitate full-on schism.

Where to start? First off, as Paul Baumann observes in Commonweal, the church has been, er, let us say, flexible about this rule for aeons, starting with the Gospels themselves. Yes, the Gospel of Mark has Jesus barring any divorce, period; but the Gospel of Matthew adds a caveat — with Jesus saying you can divorce if your partner commits adultery. So not quite as definitive. For centuries, moreover, there was no Catholic sacrament for marriage — it was entirely a secular thing, acknowledged by the church. The Orthodox churches — not just the Protestants — have long allowed for divorce. Catholicism itself, especially in America, hands out annulments that operate as de facto divorces like confetti.  . . . Indeed if the formal rules strictly applied, and communion was never allowed except after a full confession, virtually no Catholic in America would be participating in the Eucharist at all.

We’re talking here about caring for people whose marriages have failed and who want to come back to the church and its sacraments. That’s all. We’re not talking about a formal end to the existing doctrine against divorce. We’re not talking about a second marriage in church. We’re talking about pastoral adaptation to an individual’s position and sincerity in wishing to be reconciled with God. We’re talking about not rejecting people looking to follow Christ. And that means gay people as well, people who, despite so many pressures among their peers, despite widespread cultural taboos on being Christian and gay, insist on coming to the Lord’s table.

This stringency on sexual morality — combined with flexibility on so much else — is part of what has rendered the church toxic for so many, especially given its own recent, horrifying sexual standards. When you barely bat an eye at the rape of children and come down hard on someone who left a toxic marriage, you run the risk, to say the least, of seeming somewhat lacking in moral integrity.  . . . . is it really worth creating a schism over a pastoral attempt to include those beached by a bad or toxic marriage?

Is a modern Christianity even possible without the enchantment, mortality, fear, and ignorance of the past? And what we do with the fact that neither Benedict’s retrenchment nor Francis’s outreach seems successful in stopping the slow slide of institutional and cultural decline, and the emptying of the pews, especially among the young?

Part of me wants the simple certainties and mysteries of the past; part of me is profoundly grateful that the world has indelibly changed. Reimagining what faith can be in the context of modernity will not be easy. But exactly the wrong tack to take, it seems to me, is an ever-more intense and bitter internal fight over the legacy of the last 50 years in the Catholic Church.

To me, Douthat - like his evangelical counterparts - desperately needs two things: (i) others to look down upon and condemn, and (ii) a simple checklist that allows him to feel good about himself even if it requires being brain dead.

The second piece in The Atlantic is harsher, and deservedly so.  Here are excerpts:

Across every continent, in every country, Catholics “find themselves divided against one another,” writes the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in his new book, To Change the Church. On one side stand the orthodox, who see doctrine and tradition as the best antidote to a changing world. On the other stand the liberals, who yearn for a Church that focuses on pastoring rather than enforcing rigid rules. This “widening theological and moral gulf,” Douthat argues, is potentially “wider than the chasm that separated Catholicism from Orthodoxy, and later from Lutheranism and Calvinism.”

That’s a bold claim to make. After all, the schisms of East and West, Catholic and Protestant, were world-shaking, often bloody events. But in today’s Church—and specifically in this pope—Douthat sees the possibility that the Roman Catholic Church will once again break apart.

Ostensibly, his beef is with Pope Francis, whom Douthat paints as an unyielding and stubborn manager who has spent his five years in Rome failing the clean up the Vatican’s messes, hurling insults at conservative clerics, and pushing radical doctrinal changes without buy-in from major wings of the Catholic hierarchy.

His focus is almost always on one topic: the pope’s efforts to address issues related to family. Early in his papacy, Pope Francis convened two meetings of Catholic bishops, called synods. The pope seemed to feel that the Church had not figured out how to serve people whose lives don’t fit the Christian ideal, from single moms to same-sex couples to those who have been civilly divorced and remarried.

While many Church leaders welcomed this pastoral flexibility, others complained that it created ambiguity—“what is sin in Poland is good in Germany,” wrote four conservative cardinals in a letter to the pope—or even directly violated the teachings of the Church.

Douthat was, and is, in the latter camp. He began tossing the word “schism” around. He published a scathing Times column accusing the pope of being the “chief plotter” in the Vatican’s Renaissance-court-style politics. A large group of prominent liberal American clergy and theologians published a response letter, pointing out that Douthat does not have theological credentials, warning him of the seriousness of accusations of heresy, and arguing that his “view of Catholicism [is] unapologetically subject to a politically partisan narrative that has very little to do with what Catholicism really is.”

Francis’s solution is to embrace a flexible, ecumenical spirit, both within Catholicism and without: It’s no coincidence that he has put rapprochement with Roman Catholicism’s closest cousins, the Lutheran and Orthodox churches, high on his priority list over the last five years.

[U]nity matters in the Church—little c or big. Jesus calls on believers to be one flock in community together, and any loss of comity might be interpreted by some as evidence of human failure to make good on that vision. This pope will test whether it’s possible to maintain connectedness among communities of incredible diversity in a time of immense change—or whether the politics of the day inevitably lead to tribal fights among the faithful.

Personally, I believe the Church continues to do immense harm, and not only to the ever growing numbers of sex abuse victims.  Fear and self-hate are not positives and not something that will attract new adherents.  Throw in the hypocrisy and outright meanness of so many Christians , both Catholic and Protestant, and it is easy to see why 36% of those under 30 have walked away from Christianity.  What Douthat wants will only accelerate the exodus.  Francis, for all my criticisms of him, at least is trying to look for a solution. 

Reality Check: Young People Are Not the Problem

If one listens to right wing Catholics - e.g., delusional sites like "Church Militant which wants to return to the days of the Spanish Inquisition - the woes of the Church in today's world lies with the younger generations who are accused of moral and intellectual failings.  Any and every excuse and scapegoat is preferable to acknowledging that most of the Catholic Church hierarchy is a moral cesspool.  (A similar denial of reality afflicts the leadership of the Republican Party.)  If right wing Catholics and members of the hierarchy want to understand why younger generations are fleeing Catholicism like passengers fleeing a sinking ship, they need to look in the mirror.  Ditto for the Republican Party.   A piece in the National Catholic Reporter responds to the self-delusion of the Catholic right.  Here are excerpts:

If the recent conference at the University of Notre Dame — where speakers postulated reasons for young people's disassociation from the Catholic Church — represents the approach going into the upcoming Synod of Bishops on young people, we would beg church officials to postpone the gathering.

What we heard was a familiar litany, placing blame for missing young people on:

·        Technology — specifically youths' obsession with smartphones — which supposedly robs them of the contemplative mind and makes them "suckers for irrelevancy."
·        An aversion to "orthodoxy," a term the user brandished with the certainty that his strain of orthodoxy is the immutable version of the truth.
·        The "dumbing down of our faith."
·        The pervasiveness of pornography and relativism, of course.
·        And a new danger — the "bland toleration" of diversity, a curious addition.

According to this analysis, it is the young people, not the church, who are in crisis.

It isn't that healthy young people might be repulsed by the way that church leaders mishandled the sex abuse crisis for decades. Nor is it the money scandals or callousness toward gay and lesbian Catholics or the bishop-driven one-issue politics that has reduced religion and faith to a bumper sticker in the culture wars.

No, they say, the problem lies with young people who have acquired culturally influenced defects.

The cultural critique has value, of course, and the disaffection of young people from all manner of institutional involvement — from the local symphony orchestra to the Rotary Club — needs continued examination to figure out how institutions can be relevant to young people.

Before becoming too convinced that the reason for the disaffection lies with everything and everyone else, church leaders need to seriously examine how their own shortcomings and failures have contributed to young people leaving the church.

It is reasonable to understand that teens and young adults, living in a civil culture that increasingly accepts their LGBT friends and family members, find unacceptable the intolerance and outright discrimination of some Catholic officials and organizations.

It is understandable that a young person would rather not be part of an institution that preaches God's mercy but shows little mercy toward divorced and remarried parents.

Young people, especially young women, who know how their mothers and grandmothers struggled to gain equality in the wider culture, don't care to become involved in an institution where women are marginalized.

Isn't it also reasonable, speaking of vocations to the priesthood, that parents might hesitate to encourage their sons to join a clerical culture that has been depleted not only in numbers, but also in credibility and moral standing?

Unless church leaders at the highest levels thoroughly examine how our community became so distorted — corrupt like a white sepulcher — a synod about attracting younger members will ultimately prove a waste of time and effort.

Perhaps the breathless pursuit of young people in its embarrassing obviousness should be set aside to give church leaders time for deep reflection on what it means to be authentically humble. Replace fanciful answers to questions few are asking with a simple sign, containing one line, in each bishop's office: "You may be the problem."

A similar analysis needs to be undertaken by Republicans: there is a reason a super majority of Millennials vote Democrat.

Neanderthal Catholics React to Pope Francis' Apology to Gays

While I give no credence to Pope Francis' recent remarks that Christianity and the Catholic Church owe gays an apology for the mistreatment that has been inflicted on us by Christianity, because when given the opportunity to change Church doctrine on gays, Francis has yielded the field to the gay haters within the Church hierarchy.  However, while Francis'  remarks are meaningless in terms of marking any change in the Church, they have nonetheless sent right wing Catholics into conniption fits - even as they have targeted other senior members of the hierarchy rather than Francis himself. Supporting their raging anti-gay animus, these Neanderthals reach back to writings from the 11th century for justification.  Indeed, they rely on some of the same mentally disturbed "church fathers" who laid out the Church's bizarre obsession with all things sexual.   Lifesite carries one such diatribe directed against Cardinal Reinhard Marx.   Here are samples of the spittle flecked batshitery that passes as thoughtful argument in this world of ignorance and sexual obsession:

[Cardinal] Marx’s statements seem to fly in the face of repeated affirmations by some of the Catholic Church’s most authoritative documents, including the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which calls homosexual sexual acts “acts of grave depravity” which are “intrinsically disordered,” and “can never be approved.” They also contradict the Vatican’s 2003 instruction on homosexual unions, which forbids support for legal recognition for homosexual unions of any kind.

St. Peter Damian, a cardinal who wrote the most extensive treatment of the issue of homosexual unions in the Church’s history, also had a very different understanding of the value of homosexual relations from that of Cardinal Marx. 

According to Damian’s work on the subject, the Book of Gomorrah, written in the 11^th century in response to a plague of homosexual vice among priests and clergy, homosexual unions are in no way beneficial to their participants; to the contrary, they are utterly destructive to them, spiritually, psychologically and even physically, throwing them into an emotional and spiritual confusion that makes them subject to demonic manipulation.  

Damian writes that “this vice, which surpasses the savagery of all other vices, is to be compared to no other. For this vice is the death of bodies, the destruction of souls, pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the intellect, expels the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart, introduces the diabolical inciter of lust, throws into confusion, and removes the truth completely from the deceived mind.”

Damian recognizes that the logic of homosexual vice leads to ever-more degrading and self-destructive acts, a reality confirmed by those who have come out of the gay lifestyle. The homosexual relationship “violates sobriety, kills modesty, slays chastity,” writes Damian. “It butchers virginity with the sword of a most filthy contagion. It befouls everything, it stains everything, it pollutes everything, and for itself it permits nothing pure, nothing foreign to filth, nothing clean.”

In contrast to Cardinal Marx and other Catholic prelates who have recently advocated affirming homosexual relationships or tolerating them, Peter Damian writes that we must avoid the “cruel mercy” of staying silent in the face of evil, and even warns that we become the “murderer of another’s soul” if we do not speak against the immorality of their behavior.

There's more, but the take away is that these folks are seriously mentally disturbed and in need of a serious mental health intervention.  I truly find it remarkable as to just how srcewed up these people are and how desperate they are to have others to condemn.  If there is an evil to be defeated, it is they themselves.

UPDATED: Here's what Damian and his fellow nutjobs thought about sex in general:

". . . .the reformers as a group considered sex and other pleasurable experiences tainted by evil and a potent source of sin.  They were not merely suspicious of sex, but hostile to any sexual activity at all save for marital relations undertaken expressly and consciously to conceive a child.  . . . . were determined to limit marital sex to the absolute minimum, and on penalizing extra-marital sex as harshly as possible."

" . . .  married couples were allowed sexual intercourse under only three conditions: 1) for the explicit purpose of conceiving a child; 2) to prevent the temptation of marital infidelity; and 3) to yield to the unrelenting demands -  most likely sinful - of their partner. Even then the sexual intercourse could not be performed in the daytime, had to be in the "missionary position', could not be performed on Sundays, Wednesdays or Fridays - removing the equivalent of five months of the year - and was not to be performed during Lent or other forbidden times. . . All other sexual activity was categorically condemned."

In short, these men were seriously mentally disturbed.

Anti-Gay Catholic Activist Michael Voris Confesses Gay Past

Having been raised Roman Catholic, in my view few things screw one up more emotionally and psychologically - especially if one is LGBT.  When I first came out, it took a year and a half seeing a psychologist who was also a Presbyterian minister to make the initial step of letting go all of the damage done to me by my Catholic upbringing.  Even after that, it took more counseling to finally find self-acceptance.  Sadly, some never overcome the poison from their psychologically twisted Catholic upbringing (other denominations - e.g., Southern Baptists - can likewise mess one up in a major way).  Worse yet, others find that by clinging to such batshitery, they can make a living and seemingly care nothing about the harm that they do to others by peddling misogyny.  The "ex-gays for pay" crowd are but one example of this phenomenon.  Blogger friend Joe Jervis reports on another psychologically afflicted individual who seemingly cannot let go of the poison of his Catholic upbringing: Michael Voris of Church Militant, an ultra-right wing Catholic site.  It turns out that Voris is gay - despite protestations that he has returned to the Church - and has unloaded a lot of bullshit about his past.  Here are some highlights:

Thanks in part to pressure from virulently anti-gay and comically bewigged Catholic activist Michael Voris, last week the Catholic Church fired its news service editor for tweeting against North Carolina’s hate law. Yesterday Voris posted a video on his website, Church Militant, in which he confesses that for most his thirties, he lived a sexually sinful life of “live-in relationships with homosexual men.” Voris claims that he makes this revelation because the New York Archdiocese has been plotting to out him over his past. From the transcript for the video:

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. From the outside, I lived the lifestyle and contributed to scandal in addition to the sexual sins. On the inside, I was deeply conflicted about all of it. In a large portion of my twenties, I also had frequent sexual liaisons with both adult men and adult women. These are the sins of my past life in this area which are all now publicly admitted and owned by me. That was before my reversion to the Faith.

I had great pain to overcome from childhood and my youth and instead of recommending myself to God in my youth, I gave in to the flesh and died spiritually. I shudder every time I think what would now be my lot had I died in a traffic accident or something. I gave up myself — my masculinity, my identity, my self-understanding, my own dignity as a baptized Catholic.

The sad truth is that Voris has not overcome the pain and damage of his childhood and youth.  If he had, he would not be wallowing in the anti-sex batshitery that is the Church's stock in trade.  Joe continues with this:

Back in 2010 I posted several times about Voris, his attacks on President Obama, on LGBT rights, and his call for a “benevolent Catholic dictatorship in the United States.”  These posts prompted a JMG reader to write and tell me that he’d once been close friends with Voris, who, according to the reader, had been a producer at the CBS affiliate in Detroit.

From the reader’s email: “It really pains me to see Mike spitting this vitriol into the public, and it also pains me to see a guy who was once a deep and close friend be the subject of ridicule and derision. But I also recognize that he’s brought this upon himself. Until he can face his own demons, he’ll only be able to demonize that which scares him.”

During my 2010 exchange of emails with the above-quoted JMG reader, he asked that he not be named should I report on his account of Voris’ past. As I was unable to independently confirm that Voris had, as Voris himself now puts it, once lived a sexually sinful life, I decided against outing him based on an anonymous claim. That issue, obviously, is now moot. At this writing, nearly 1400 Church Militant commenters have effusively praised Voris for his revelation.

1400 psychologically and emotionally damaged commenters who, like Voris, cannot let go of the brainwashing they received growing up.  I would further add this: does Voris believe this crap or has he cynically decided that embracing such dysfunction is an easy way to make money?