Michael Voris, founder and president of Church Militant, resigns after breaking ‘morality clause’

Michael Voris, president and founder of Saint Michael's Media, which operates as a news website in Michigan under the officially registered name of Church Militant, has resigned for breaching the organization’s “morality clause.”

“Church Militant/St. Michael's Media was founded as a bastion of Catholic truth and a light to the faithful in hard times. This is why we are being fully transparent with you all,” the media organization began in a statement published on its website Tuesday.

“Michael Voris has been asked to resign for breaching the Church Militant morality clause. The board has accepted his resignation. We understand this is a shock to you all, but our founder and former CEO is stepping aside and focusing on his personal health,” the statement continued.

The leaders of the organization, which employs more than 40 full-time staff, chose not to disclose the nature of Voris’ actions. However, their 62-year-old founder, who previously admitted to engaging in sexual relationships with both men and women in his 20s and 30s, said he now has to "go away and address and work on" painful truths from his past that he described as “horrible, ugly things” in a statement on X.

“There are some very, very ugly truths from my past that I, for essentially 62 years, have avoided facing because I didn't want to. I wanted them resolved, but I understand that touching that pain is going to be a very horrible thing. And so, I am looking at what is happening right now as an opportunity, God given even, if you could call it a dark grace or black grace, that's kind of one of those pseudo theological expressions, seems to be appropriate here,” he said.

“There are things I have to go away and address and work on. They are, again, horrible, ugly things, not going to share them. Nobody else's business except mine. The consequences of me not dealing with those, obviously, are some people's business. And that's what I'm making this video for,” he continued. “To be able to say that first of all, for anybody who has been impacted … you have my deepest heartfelt apologies, my most sincere. There's nothing I can say to make it good. I can't. So to the extent that I can say and be completely upfront about it, that is true.”

In a 2017 interview with The Atlantic on Church Militant and its founder, Voris talked about the early and mid-life confusions he experienced with his sexuality.

“I had some early to mid-life confusions. Most of my years in my 30s, I lived a life of live in relationships with homosexual men in a large portion of my 20s. I also had frequent sexual liaisons with both adult men and adult women,” he said.

He also talked about his mother’s struggles with mental illness and how that affected him.

“My mother had a mental illness, she was bipolar. Everything in the environment revolves around that mental illness. I wound up believing my parents didn't love me. I left home, I got to a career that I did really well in, and opportunities just presented themselves,” said Voris, who, prior to his time at Church Militant, enjoyed a career in television broadcasting for which he received four Emmy Awards for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.

“I wasn't sure of who I was,” he said of his life in sin.

“My return to the faith began when I found out my mother's cancer had returned just a few months after the original operation, stage 4. … And then, in the middle of that, I get a call from my sister-in-law that my brother just suddenly died of a heart attack at 48. And I was like, whoa, this all comes to an end,” he recalled.

He said, “despite my mom's mental illness and everything, we were extremely close, she was a beautiful, loving, caring woman.”

“She said to me one day about three months before she died, she said, ‘I never believed that you were homosexual or gay. I believed that you were acting out in response to the fact of how I had created this situation at home that you didn't know how to deal with it.’ And boy, that was the hammer,” he said, recalling how he decided to change his life.

Voris explained in his statement on Tuesday that he's relieved that he was being forced to confront his demons because “I had written my resignation letter already a handful of times this year.”

“Like I said, in one sense, [I’m] kind of relieved. I need to conquer these demons. And I'm not talking about just acting out demons. That's a symptom. It's horrible. It's awful, it's sinful, I'm not downplaying it at all. What I'm saying is, the underlying cause of it has been too ugly for me to look at. It involves an awful lot of one sense for me like spiritual terror, and I've not wanted to go near it,” he explained.

“I have spent the last couple of days or so … talking to people who I believe can help me face this, and professionally. So I am going to, I don't want to use the word retreat. But I'm going to step away from the camera. And I'm going to go concentrate on that,” Voris said. “I have the obligation as a Catholic man to go present myself to God.”

God Love You pic.twitter.com/SBRFDP9vKD

— Michael Voris (@Michael_Voris) November 21, 2023