Michael Coren and the Wrong Way Across the Tiber

Michael Coren is not brave.

He is useful.

That is the difference.

There are men who convert because truth burns through them. There are men who cross rivers because conscience gives them no rest. There are men who lose income, reputation, friendships, certainty, and institutional protection because they can no longer lie.

Then there are men who discover a new moral vocabulary exactly when the old one stops paying.

Coren made money as the Catholic man with answers. He wrote Why Catholics Are Right. He stood in front of cameras, columns, studios, churches, and lecture halls selling conviction. Rome was not merely his spiritual home. Rome was content. Rome was product. Rome was authority with a cover price.

Then the market changed.

The old conservative Catholic performance became embarrassing. The new progressive Anglican performance became available. And suddenly the man who had sold Catholic certainty discovered Anglican nuance, sexual progress, public contrition, and clerical usefulness.

How convenient.

Yes, people change. Christians repent. God save us from a world where nobody is allowed to grow. But do not insult us by pretending every pivot is Pentecost.

Some conversions cost everything.

Some conversions come with a new audience.

Coren’s public record is not hidden. He was once one of Canada’s most visible Catholic conservative voices. He later left Catholicism for Anglicanism, publicly supported same-sex marriage, and entered Anglican ministry. In his own Anglican Journal writing, he described his break with Rome around papal authority, contraception, homosexuality, and equal marriage.

Fine.

That is the record.

But the record does not require applause.

This is where I lose patience.

Because I know performance.

I know what a collar can hide.

I know what it means to preach truth while managing a private collapse. I know what it means to mistake charisma for holiness, survival for vocation, applause for confirmation, and institutional usefulness for the voice of God.

I know because I did it.

That is why this is not cheap sectarian score-settling. It is not Catholic versus Anglican. It is not conservative versus progressive. It is not old Coren versus new Coren.

It is about the difference between confession and reinvention.

In Redemptive Trauma, I called the book my “final confession, as a defrocked priest.” The spine of the thing was never respectability. It was naming the gap between the public priest and the private wreckage. It was admitting how easily survival becomes performance, and how easily performance becomes a life.

So when I say I swam the Tiber the other way, understand what I mean.

I came back toward Rome carrying wreckage, not opportunity. Rome did not offer me a job, a collar, a column, or a soft landing. Rome did not make me respectable. Rome did not turn my collapse into a speaking tour.

I came back because the lies that once helped me survive had finally stopped working.

That is the difference.

Not purity.

Not superiority.

Difference.

Coren left Catholicism and somehow still landed on stage.

New theology.

New tribe.

New collar.

Same performer.

And we are all supposed to pretend this is courage because the language changed.

No.

The Church is full of men who survive every collapse by renaming it growth. They are never wrong. They are only evolving. They are never exposed. They are only journeying. They are never opportunists. They are prophets misunderstood by yesterday’s audience and embraced by tomorrow’s.

Spare me.

A priest should smell like sacrifice.

Not career management.

A convert should tremble.

Not rebrand.

And a man who spent years selling Catholic certainty should not be surprised when some of us refuse to genuflect before his Anglican afterlife.

Because an Anglican collar is not a cross.

A column is not confession.

A book deal is not repentance.

A platform is not Pentecost.

Applause is not absolution.

And reinvention is not resurrection.

I do not hate Michael Coren.

That would give him too much.

I simply do not believe the performance anymore.

I have worn enough costumes myself to know the difference.

The cross does not flatter you.

The cross does not platform you.

The cross does not protect your brand.

The cross strips you until there is nothing left to sell.

That is why I came back.

Not because Rome is easy.

Because I had finally learned the hard way that cleverness is not holiness, charisma is not truth, and a collar — especially an Anglican one — is not a cross.