Warren Throckmorton: John Catanzaro prepares defense in license suspension situation, describes self as special advisor to Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/06/05/press-release-suspended-naturopath-special-advisor-to-mark-driscoll-mars-hill-church/

John Catanzaro, a naturopath whose license was suspended earlier this year in the wake of allegations that he misled cancer patients into taking vaccines that were not approved, has been preparing for his hearing in August and has been building the case for his defense in media activities.

Warren Throckmorton links to materials Catanzaro has made available and notes that Catanzaro describes himself as having been special advisor to Mark Driscoll and to Mars Hill Church.

The part about being on the Advisory Board Council might be something to investigate further but there's a blog post already available noting how significantly publicly listed statements about the governance of MHC in 2012 and 2013 have been. 

Throckmorton has noted that Wenatchee The Hatchet has documented that Catanzaro's contributions to The Resurgence have been pulled and that Catanzaro is no longer a featured writer.  What Throckmorton didn't mention that is worth repeating is that The Resurgence website now has robots.txt so that all the links Wenatchee the Hatchet had via The WayBack Machine to Catanzaro's contributions no longer work.  However, as recently as a January 2014 interview Mark Driscoll was making reference to the second naturopath he consulted and cumulatively the case seems to be from the last eight years of Driscoll statements that John Catanzaro was his naturopath. That "John" who was a naturopath and a minister Driscoll referenced would seem to be Catanzaro.

To date there's no indication that Mark Driscoll has acknowledged since the suspension that he's even had a naturopath.  Something that could use some clarification is that there are two John Catanzaro LinkedIn profiles Wenatchee The Hatchet has found and one of them has "a" John Catanzaro mentioning Deepak Chopra

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/02/warren-throckmorton-blogs-more-about.html

There are, in fact, multiple John Catanzaros but if the two linkedin profiles were for one and the same naturopath in the Bothell area it's weird to think that Mark Driscoll's naturopath made any linkage to Chopra, who was one of the people Mark Driscoll debated in 2009 on the existence of the devil.

What is not clear from Catanzaro's recent reference to himself as having a special advisory role to Mark Driscoll and an Advisory Board Council role is how formally he was contracted as a member.  That would "seem" like a good guess, that he was in some capacity a contracted member, and yet in 2014 MH has stressed that the Board of Advisor's and Accountability has men who are not actually part of Mars Hill in any fashion now and that this means they are not as likely to be beset by conflicts of interest.

Evidence for that claim has not, as yet, been produced.  In fact in the overall history of Mars Hill Church it would seem more that the members of the BOAA may not only be historically interested parties through personal contact with Driscoll or MH pastors, but have played advisory roles in the past or are active and current executive elders.

While Mark Driscoll has mentioned from the pulpit about how grace toward leaders is a good thing and that everyone makes mistakes if this approach were applied to the relationship Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll seem to have had with John Catanzaro the massive purge of materials Catanzaro contributed to Mars Hill associated websites wouldn't have happened, would it?  Not only did Mars Hill associated websites purge every active trace of John Catanzaro they've even got robots.txt active so you can't even use archive resources to find what Catanzaro published under the umbrella of Mars Hill Church and with the endorsement of Mark Driscoll.  If Mark Driscoll got the same treatment from Mars Hill for his seven books with verifiably plagiarized content in them that Catanzaro seems to have gotten merely for the ALLEGATION that he has misled patients (Catanzaro does still have time to clear his name here in August 2014) would Mark Driscoll even be a pastor?  Driscoll can talk from the pulpit about how leaders and public ministry figures need grace all he wants but until his apparently former naturopath gets a comparable extension of "grace" from Mars Hill it seems as though there could be a double standard at play here in which Driscoll talks about getting grace and people who have advised him over the years get scrubbed away from the public history and internet presence of Mars Hill.

Not that that's never happened before.