Westen Strikes Back! Claims LifeSite Firing Was Illegal, He Remains CEO
Blocked emails, a Pachamama Mass, and a boardroom full of Sith: LifeSite’s founding Jedi won’t go down without a fight.
The primary factual source of this story is Stephen Kokx’s excellent reporting. Click below for his article.
The mask has come off at LifeSiteNews.
Once the flagship of faithful resistance to the Francis pontificate, LifeSite has now become an eerie echo of it: authoritarian toward tradition, reverent toward eco-liturgies, and increasingly ruled by a strange cocktail of technocracy, syncretism, and spiritual confusion.
What began as an internal board dispute has escalated into a full-blown identity crisis. On July 2, John-Henry Westen, the co-founder and longtime face of LifeSite, was suddenly removed as CEO and board member by what he and others are now calling an illegal vote. On July 16, Westen fired back via a personal email account, informing staff that Board Chairman Dominic Ismert had reviewed the action and found it invalid under LifeSite’s bylaws. “Until the Board convenes to make a lawful determination,” Westen wrote, “I remain both CEO and on the Board of LifeSiteNews.”
He directed staff to restore his privileges, including access to internal systems. But co-CEO Robert Hoover, a former Microsoft executive with no prior experience in Catholic media, immediately countered with a company-wide email stating the July 2 vote was valid, labeling Westen “former CEO,” and ominously warning that some staff “may temporarily lose access to Teams and email.”
Lockdowns and Loyalty Tests
According to multiple internal sources, Hoover has imposed what employees are calling a “tyrannical company-wide lockdown.” Staff fear that access restrictions and email revocations are being used to “smoke out” anyone still sympathetic to Westen. Some editors have reportedly been blocked from publishing anything without prior review by unnamed senior managers, a practice that was never LifeSite policy until this week.
Among those reportedly targeted is journalist Stephen Kokx, who says his IP address was blocked from accessing LifeSiteNews.com entirely after he publicly criticized the new leadership. Kokx had pointed out that Deacon Keith Fournier, LifeSite’s senior legal counsel and spiritual consigliere, had openly endorsed the controversial “Care of Creation” Mass and defended charismatic glossolalia (praying in tongues) as a spiritual gift.
If this all feels familiar, that’s because it is. Censorship, spiritual confusion, suppression of tradition: it’s the Synodal Church in miniature. Only now, it’s wearing a LifeSite badge.
Deacon Fournier: From Charismatic Catholicism to Climate Liturgy
If Robert Hoover is the technocratic face of LifeSite’s hostile rebrand, then Deacon Keith Fournier is its theological soul.
Fournier isn’t just the legal counsel. He’s a high-ranking director and now public spokesman for a very different LifeSite; one that hails eco-liturgies as “gifts” and treats critics of Vatican syncretism as backwards reactionaries.
In a July 15 column titled “There is Nothing New in the ‘Care of Creation’ Mass,” Fournier dismissed all concerns about the new Leo XIV-approved liturgy. “There is nothing new here,” he assured readers. “We need a human ecology, a relational environmentalism, a Catholic way of being ‘green.’ This Mass for the Care of Creation is a gift, not something to fear.”
In classic bait-and-switch fashion, Fournier loads his article with quotes from Pope Benedict XVI about “human ecology” and environmental responsibility. But what he fails to admit is that the new liturgy has nothing to do with Benedict’s vision. Benedict warned of ecocentrism and new forms of pantheism. Fournier just baptized them.
The prayers of the new Mass speak of being “docile to the life-giving breath of [the] Spirit” and living “in harmony with all creatures.” The language is horizontal, sentimental, and cosmically vague. There’s more animist poetry than Eucharistic theology. But to Fournier, that’s not innovation, it’s tradition.
This is the same Fournier who took to social media in June to defend his decades-long practice of praying in tongues. When a former Pentecostal pastor called it fake, Fournier snapped back: “No. It is not.” In his own words: “I KNOW it can be an authentic gift of the Holy Spirit. It is for me.”
Fournier seems to represent the perfect Vatican II Catholic: doctrinally plastic, spiritually expressive, bureaucratically obedient, and liturgically progressive; just Pentecostal enough to feel supernatural, just green enough to feel modern.
And now, he’s co-running LifeSiteNews.
Synodal Silence and the New Party Line
It’s not just about the “Creation Mass.” What’s unfolding is a broader shift: from opposition to accommodation. LifeSite’s old DNA was combative, uncensored, and rooted in the instincts of the faithful. Westen’s LifeSite took direct aim at the architects of the revolution: Francis, Fernández, Paglia, Grech. It printed what Trad Inc. was too scared to say. And it paid the price.
But now?
Now the outlet is controlled by men who praise Pachamama-infused liturgies as gifts, who see climate Masses as continuity with Benedict, who reinterpret the encyclicals and buzzwords of Leo XIV as if they were written by St. Pius X.
A cartoon posted to X recently summed up the absurdity:
That’s the new LifeSite; where you can worship the rainforest, but you can’t question the coup.
A Moment of Decision
The emergency board meeting scheduled for July 22 will determine Westen’s fate. But it may be too late to save the soul of the organization.
The question isn’t merely who runs LifeSiteNews. The question is whether the outlet that once stood as a voice for faithful Catholics still exists in any meaningful form or whether it has already been synodalized into just another brand of soft-serve orthodoxy.
The very outlet that exposed globalist ideology, doctrinal compromise, and ecological apostasy is now being run by men who praise Care of Creation Masses and defend charismatic outbursts as “authentic spirituality.” One has to wonder what Leo’s Vatican offered, or threatened, to secure such a transformation.
If the board trades a prophet for a manager, and the Cross for the climate, they may keep the servers running, but the faithful will quietly walk away. And the grift, like the Gospel they once preached, will be left behind.
I always had reservations about Deacon Fournier since he dresses like a priest and he is only a deacon. Who is going to know he is only a deacon when he dresses like a priest? It is inappropriate in my opinion.
Where there is Microsoft execs, the blue screen of death is never far behind.