Note: Airing this out publicly might be a mistake. I may take this post down soon from Substack, but really needed to write it all down and get it off my chest. Prayers appreciated.
Early Sunday morning, I posted the following on X (formerly Twitter) about a situation that began at least four years ago (I found a message I wrote in 2020 seeking advice from someone on how to best handle this), but it has continued relentlessly in its current form since 2022. Lightly edited:
After enduring years of online stalking and relentless public defamation from a Catholic deacon (who is thankfully not in public ministry at this time). I recently sent a letter of complaint to his archdiocese. For years, I have tried to ignore his behavior. I blocked him nearly two years ago. I was advised by several people that if I stopped responding to him he would eventually stop.
Unfortunately, he has only intensified his defamatory posts against me, including insinuations that children were not safe around me.1 (For the record, I have never engaged in inappropriate behavior with or around children, nor have I ever been accused of it. I have never been charged with any crime or boundary violation, for that matter).
My intention was to notify this troubled man's superiors of his online behavior because he has asserted several times that his return to ministry is under consideration.
My hope was that the archdiocesan officials would reach out to him and he would quietly stop this behavior.
Instead, he decided to advertise his conversation with his archdiocese and to share the screenshots I sent to his superiors. 2
Hopefully his decision to continue his public behavior despite his diocese's attempt to address the problem confidentially will keep him from ever returning to ministry. But his decision to continue in his defamatory attacks against me personally may force me to take additional action.
All I want is for this person to stop the defamation and personal attacks against me.
In the conclusion of my post, I made a personal appeal to this man:
Make a private apology and delete the posts and we can resolve this like adults and put it behind us. But if you are going to continue this defamation of me, I may have to pursue other options.
Unfortunately, this post caused several more eruptions from him on X, “refutations” of my statements above, and a determination not to be “silenced.” It is distressing to be the personal nemesis of someone halfway across the country whom I've never met and would honestly like to never hear from again.
He seems to have justified his nonstop attacks against me (not my ideas and not my writing) as some sort of moral duty, regularly responding to people who ask why he is so obsessed with me by posting statements like, “Defending the faith against bullying attackers like Lewis, who cause division and confusion, isn't merely optional.”
Look, I know I’m not perfect. Years ago, I prided myself on my ability to keep my cool when traditionalists on social media would call me stupid, an idiot, a heretic, a papolater, a modernist, and all sorts of things. None of it got to me. But pride comes before the fall. They finally broke me when I wrote an extremely personal piece about the impact of Pope Francis on my faith and my relationship with my late mother in August 2020.
People said the most horrible things — that I was evil, that I was a horrible son, that I had betrayed my mother, that I had written a hit piece about her for “attaboys” and “clicks,” that I’d thrown my mother “under the bus.” People started new Twitter and Facebook accounts simply to attack me personally over the article. And they still do, from time to time.
The trolls didn’t seem to care that my siblings were all consulted, all of them provided input before I submitted the piece, and that they voted, with two of the three supportive of it. The critics didn’t care that I took great pains to honor my mother and to describe her in as positive a light as possible. I stripped out any mention of her faults that fell outside the scope of the article. I prayed over it. I asked many priests and close friends to review drafts of the article because I was greatly concerned about preserving my mother’s reputation and good name.
After that article opened the door, the avalanche of insults began. I regularly received messages and saw countless posts filled with foul language, accusations about my sexuality, and ridicule about my weight and appearance. There is a group of maybe 10-15 people (many of whom use their real names) who stalk my writing and social media posts with “sock puppet accounts” to take screenshots about me and ridicule me.
I’ve been given the nickname “potato head” by Jonathan Partington, a retired maths professor from Leeds, who has decided to spend the final years of his life mocking and ridiculing Catholics with whom he has theological disagreements under the veil of an anonymous blog and Twitter account. Other trolls think it’s hilarious to post a close-up photo of my face in response to Tweets ridiculing me. Quite often there’s a dialogue in a thread in which one commenter will ask, “Does he really look like that?”
It’s not just random trolls, either. A respected Catholic philosophy professor and death penalty advocate with a large following has written many long social media posts singling me out for criticism, in which he calls me names like “ignoramus” and “nincompoop.” A veteran Catholic journalist decided to spend several days ridiculing me for being overweight and fitting in bad “cake” puns about me.
Of course I’ve blocked all these figures, but when these influencers attack me like this, their hoards of followers go after me. I block as many of them as I can, and for this they ridicule me further, describing me as “thin skinned” and call me a coward who is supposedly unable to address their brilliant arguments.
(That said, I do get a good laugh from people who think I am an operative receiving some sort of payment to infiltrate the Church or something. I wish.)
I’ll admit that occasionally the online attacks do strike a nerve, and I sometimes lash back. I’ve had to apologize a couple dozen times for harsh responses. I think it’s important to admit fault when a line has been crossed.
But I think I’ve done a good job of sticking to some fundamental rules, such as never using foul language and never using dehumanizing insults (such as calling someone a “piece of _” or some kind of animal or monster).
Unfortunately, the “Catholics” who troll and attack me are not as discerning.
And this out-of-ministry deacon is one of the more nasty attackers, possibly because the sheer volume of his attacks against me far outweigh those of anyone else. He’s called me a “vile scumbag,” “lying snake,” “incapable of rational thought,” “the most toxic hypocrite in Catholic social media,” “a cult propagandist,” “literal scum,” “an utter scumbag,” “a quisling and a shill,” and “a puppet-clown with not a shred of truth in him.”
That’s just since December.
I don’t want to destroy the man’s reputation, I just want to be left alone in peace. Based on his dramatic and defiant public response to his superiors, I seriously doubt he will ever be deemed fit for diaconal ministry again. Surely he has his own trials and demons to conquer but that doesn’t excuse his making me his punching bag.
I don’t make a habit of writing to people’s religious or diocesan superiors about their online behavior. (I have done it twice before, for different reasons.)
Look, I’m about as open a book as you’ll find. You don’t have to sniff around to figure out my secret agenda. I’m happy to tell you all about myself. I am a lifelong Catholic, a husband and father (of four) who loves the Church and the pope. I helped start a website because I wanted to help explain Pope Francis to people. There are many Catholics out there who want to love and support the pope but who hear nothing but a negative and distorted portrayals of everything he does.
Where Peter Is exists to tell the other side of the story. We do our best to present Pope Francis’s teachings and message from a perspective in line with his vision. We aren’t trying to spin or “popesplain.” We’re just trying to provide the most accurate presentation of his papacy as we can. No one draws a salary from Where Peter Is (although any potential benefactors out there are invited to help change that). One might think that those who disagree with us would at least find us useful as opposition research. But instead, our critics act as if we are pure evil and seem offended that we even exist.
Making a public confession like this might not have been the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Surely other trolls will be delighted to know this has hurt me, and will attack me all the more for it. I may take it down at some point.
But this deacon’s online behavior has been, by far, the most relentless, extreme, obsessive, and personal that I’ve ever encountered. He just doesn’t stop. This has been going on for a long time without stopping and the distress it’s caused me has become a serious distraction. It has negatively effected other parts of my life. It’s caused me to become more irritable and less able to focus. I’m at my wit’s end here.
Some have suggested getting off social media. The problem with this is that Where Peter Is would not exist without social media. Virtually all of our regular contributors discovered us through Facebook and Twitter. I recently made a post noting my realization that none of the four founders of the site — Pedro Gabriel, Paul Fahey, Brian Killian, and myself — have ever met each other in person. We met on Facebook. (Naturally, the out-of-ministry deacon took a screenshot of this and described us as “the Craptastic 4.”)
Our connections with many bishops, priests, and figures in Catholic media were also forged on social media. I met Jeannie Gaffigan, Austen Ivereigh, and Bishop Richard Umbers on Twitter! The vast majority of our web traffic is driven by social media. If I was to back away from Twitter and Facebook, there isn’t anyone else to fill the void.
Anyway, this cry for help comes at a time when I really need assistance in running the site. I am ridiculously overcommitted and I have more unopened and unanswered emails than I know what to do with. I’ve promised people that I will get around to editing their article submissions, but the pile just keeps getting bigger. People have offered to help, and either get lost in my disorganized shuffle or they walk away.
Unfortunately, we haven’t completely gotten over the organizational hurdles yet… accounting and bookkeeping and filing and paperwork to hire someone. I feel like I am drowning. I never set out to be an entrepreneur, and I am completely overwhelmed at what we need to do.
In the past year, our work has been noticed. Many of the people and stories we’ve followed since the beginning (such as Cardinal Burke, Archbishop Vigano, and Bishop Strickland, as well as the problems in the traditionalist movement, and the political radicalization of conservative Catholics) have borne out in shocking ways, and people have turned to us to explain what’s going on in the Church.
In recent months, our contributors have received more media requests from around the world than ever before. I’ve had bishops and cardinals and journalists and curial officials and professors and theologians tell me how vital our work is but right now I feel like I’m being crushed under the weight of it.
To put it plainly: I’m struggling.
I am more confident in the importance of our mission than ever. I am proud of the work we’ve done, especially when I hear from so many Catholics who thank us for pulling them back from the brink of leaving the Church or from descending into radical traditionalism. I hear daily from people who are simply grateful to Where Peter Is for helping them understand Pope Francis better.
I trust that if we are meant to continue, God will find a way for that to happen. If not, there are plenty of other things I can do.
Anyway, I wrote at the beginning of this long post that this is a request for prayer. And I ask for your prayers for myself, for the future of Where Peter Is, and for all those who have contributed to this extraordinary work.
Also please pray for the deacon and for other Catholics with similar struggles. He is a child of God and a brother in Christ, and he has infinite dignity.
He has made this sort of comment about me several times (and many more times against others). Later he claimed that he said his posts stating that children should be “kept away” from me were due to my “theological” views, but this post (in which he shares a screenshot of my comments in response to a controversy that erupted in January about a book written by Cardinal Victor Fernandez) strongly implies that he thinks I am some kind of predator:
It seems, based on his later posts, that the archdiocese didn’t actually send him my letter or the screenshots, but they apparently send him the times and dates of the images I sent them. He then went through them to make his own screenshots and shared them on social media.