Holy War

How Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, and other militant right-wing activists are hellbent on transforming the Catholic Church— starting with the pope

- By Kathryn Joyce. Illustration by Michelle Rohn

AT around the fifth hour of November’s “Enough Is Enough” prayer rally, hosted by the Catholic right media outlet Church Militant, event emcee and fallen alt-right star Milo Yiannopoulos bounded onstage to reveal a dramatic wardrobe change. Gone were the rock-star white suit and purple shoes he’d been wearing since morning, replaced by a black shirt, black suit, and heavy crucifix, which gleamed from the jumbotrons all the way to the back of Baltimore’s Pier Six Pavilion, where the concert venue jutted into the city harbor. The bleached-blond tips of his floppy hair— fashy-short on the sides and Donald Trump combover-long on top—had been shorn in a final makeover after his year of ostentatious renunciation.

At the podium, Yiannopoulos assumed an air of exaggerated modesty. “The path to salvation is a series of baby steps,” he told a crowd of some 1,500 predominantly white, mostly middle-aged rallygoers. “I’m glad I got to share one of them with you today.” Whooping and whistling, the audience rose in a standing ovation. And throughout the day, as Yiannopoulos interspersed homophobic slurs—like calling the Catholic bishops meeting next door “sodomites” and Covid masks “fag muzzles”—with banter about Versace loafers and demands for more flattering stage lighting, the crowd roared with laughter, all of them in on the joke.

There were, as they say, layers to this assemblage of some of the noisiest partisans in the ongoing civil war within the American Catholic Church.