Laity engaging in spiritual battle to help persecuted priests
DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) – Not willing to give up after the loss of their leader, members of the St. Joseph Battalion are keeping the group alive and urging prayer warriors to help persecuted priests.
After Theodore McCarrick’s predation and the Church’s tolerance and cover-up of it was exposed, Fr. Mark Goring, a priest of the Companions of the Cross, was inspired during prayer to start the St. Joseph’s Battalion to address corruption in the Church.
Through a website and YouTube channel, Fr. Goring called on the laity to take up the mission of acting as “prayer warriors” to “call the entire Church, especially the clergy, the episcopal hierarchy, and Catholic institutions to model and live an authentically Catholic life.”
After Fr. Goring’s successful campaign to prevent Cdl. Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., from presiding at the Mass of the March for Life Youth Rally in January, his superiors silenced him. He was forbidden from posting videos for the St. Joseph Battalion or calling out the hierarchy for corruption.
Since then, Battalion members have continued campaigns through two Facebook groups and a YouTube channel.
The Facebook groups started simultaneously; one is based in New Hampshire and another in California. The California group is currently on day two of a novena campaign to help a priest overcome difficulties preventing him from publishing a book on consecration to St. Joseph.
Members of the group maintaining the website note, “We regard Fr. Goring as a white martyr, with his persecutors coming from the Church itself.”
A third member of the Battalion, living in Texas, was inspired to start a YouTube channel. He told Church Militant he doesn’t want his name used because he is not looking to replace Fr. Goring but is only acting a “placeholder.”