The Flashlight: Church Militant's Hit Piece on the Wyoming Carmelites Gets Busted! Part 1

Welcome to the Flashlight where grifters and gaslighters are trapped and exposed.

This episode of The Flashlight will discuss Church Militant (CM) and their two videos, Counterfeit Carmel (CC) and Behind the Spotlight (BS) that target the Wyoming Carmelites as a "scam" hiding what is really a ring of homosexual perverts grooming young novices for abuse in the mountains of Wyoming.

Since the airing of these two hit pieces, push back is coming from former novices who, unlike CM's whistleblower, (He was at the monastery for LESS THAN A MONTH.) spent a combined total of over SEVEN YEARS with the monks some of it overlapping the whistleblower's time there. Their testimony is compelling. (Visit their website and YouTube channel.)

You can see three of their videos in my earlier post. A fourth former novice of the Wyoming Carmelites has now joined his brothers to defend the monks against Church Militant's vicious accusations.

Why is CM so focused on this particular Spotlight exposé. That's not too hard to explain.

CM garnered more attention with CC than with any other Spotlight to date. They  accumulated more views, hits, and more social media coverage and presumably sucked in more paid subscribers than ever. It was a huge success from their perspective of gaining viewers. They pursued their target with the agenda of destroying the monastery which their slander has damaged. In the BS video they promote "building up buzz" on social media to make sure they get as much attention as possible with their hit piece.

In the earlier post, I described how Christine Niles chortled over the numbers they reached with CC. After the analyst's report, she enthused, "That's fantastic! Those are the results I'm looking for." Attention and money are big motivators for grifters and CM got lots of it with CC. So it's easy to understand why they reprised CC in BS which was clearly intended to build up Christine Niles' reputation as a crackerjack reporter and dispel any doubt about her professionalism. And it is definitely a one-hour puff piece for her complete with close ups of her walking in spiked heel shoes (The games afoot!), choosing just the right jacket for the Spotlight, playing chess with her children, talking on the phone, telling us how much she loves Jesus and how blessed she is, showing she cares for her little team of whistleblowers, etc. 

But think about Christine's words for a minute. 

"That's fantastic! Those are the results I'm looking for." 

What results exactly? 

She says nothing about looking for the truth. The important thing to her and to Michael Voris about the Spotlight seems to be the analytics. How many hits? How many viewers watched the entire episode? Unstated, but apparently never out of CM's mind -- how many donations did CC produce and how many paid subscribers did it rope in? Oh...and how much damage were they able to do to the monks?

And all this based on their whistleblower, Augustine Inferrera who never gets one tough question from Niles in all her interviews. 

Keep in mind that the young man was at the monastery for four weeks (Feb. 23 - March 21, 2020) and his experience was corroborated by another young man who was there for only two weeks. But Niles gives the impression at the beginning of CC that Inferrera was there for a year when she states he was discerning his vocation with the monks "for a year." How many unsuspecting viewers assumed that her statement referred to how long Augustine was at the monastery? Did that imprint on their minds and did they miss the facts later?

In reality, Niles' investigation leading to vile and serious accusations that the monks are a hotbed of homosexual predators grooming novices for perversion involved two young men with a combined experience of six weeks at the monastery. 

On the other hand, so far six former novices with a combined experience of over seven years at the monastery have come forward to dispute Augustine's claims.  The first, Nick, was an army infantry vet who spent four months with the monks and responded to the CM Spotlight on their website. You can read his testimony here which was totally dismissed by the CM grifters because he didn't give his last name or agree to be interviewed by them. He didn't support the agenda so he wasn't useful to them.

Another, Tyler K., who entered in the middle of Augustine's month-long stay, says he never experienced what Augustine describes and calls Augustine's claims of homosexual grooming a "complete fabrication." 

Tyler seems to be the catalyst for gathering other ex-novices to share their experiences at Carmel and is part of a group of former novices/postulants who started a website to defend the Wyoming Carmelites. Check out the videos of these young men at J+J+M+T. The heading stands for Jesus, Joseph, Mary, and Teresa. As I said above, they also have a YouTube channel. See if you aren't impressed with how normal, healthy, mature, and inspiring these young men are, at least two of whom are now married. 

Christine Niles accepted without question (as she does with her other "whistleblowers") all the claims and opinions expressed by Augustine Inferrera. Much of what he says in his 40 page dossier is hearsay, opinion, and interpretation leading to his claim that the monastery is a hotbed of perversion and should be closed. CLOSED! Based on his one month at the Abbey. They are an evil scam, Augustine tells us! And Daddy agrees.

His dossier includes some facts, but much of it is opinion, extrapolation and presumption. My immediate reaction reading it and listening to the interviews was to wonder how mature Augustine is.... and how prudish and naive. For example, making a big deal about group showers. They're common in the military and in boys' locker rooms. I experienced them myself at the local pool in the women's locker room. 

But, according to other novices, there are, in fact, curtains on the showers. Joe McClane of Catholic Drive By interviewed one of the dissenting former novices, Michael Farrell from Ireland, who was at the monastery for two years (2019-2021) and was there during the time Augustine attended. You can listen to McClane's ten minute interview with Farrell starting at minute 29:57. Farrell directly disputes Augustine's accusations about the showers and discussed his objections to the hard work ostensibly leaving them no time for prayer. McClane commented that one of his patron saints, Maximilian Kolbe, worked his friars hard at the mission in Nagasaki. 

One wonders how reasonable Augustine's expectations were upon entry despite his "year of discernment." Did he arrive expecting to spend most of the day in chapel? Was his primary objection the hard manual labor, the same type of labor St. Francis of Assisi did to repair the Church at San Damiano? And all that talk about the monks working out and being buff? Really? Is it credible to believe that after a long day of manual labor these men head to the gym for recreation?  

Hey brothers, let's go to the gym later. I'll bring the heavy rocks for lifting.

Continued tomorrow.......