Battle Engaged in Charlotte, plus Weekly Roundup for May 30, 2025
It seems appropriate to start this week’s roundup with a topic roiling the Catholic world: the aggressive regime of petty micromanagement that has turned the diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, into a warzone and made it the focus of worldwide attention.
All rational solutions rejected
I did a 15-minute segment on this last night with Raymond Arroyo — a quick way to get oriented on what’s happening there:
I mention how the four pastors directly affected by the bishop’s decree sent him a letter prior to its promulgation, urging him to reconsider and giving him concrete reasons why he would be able to adopt a different line. Here’s that letter. (The date of May 27th is when it was released to the public, not when it was originally sent.)
All in vain.
Many, many people have been writing about this debacle. I shall draw your attention to the cream of the crop.
As Kevin Tierney explains in “The Vibe Shift Comes for Bishop Martin,” obviously some insiders in the diocese are leaking important documents to the public in order to throw a wrench in the works. (The theory that allies of the bishop are doing so in order to test the water or insinuate his will without the need to implement it in official documents is fundamentally unserious and untenable; see The Pillar’s article about how Martin has already been chided by Prevost for his poor governance.) Accordingly, Rorate Caeli was able to obtain and publish the bishop’s envisioned master plan for liturgical reeducation in the diocese, which has been (temporarily) shelved due to the uniformly negative response.
In “The Neurotic Liturgical Vision of Bishop Martin,” Unam Sanctam Catholicam offers a brilliant dressing-down of this document:
Bishop Michael Martin's recently leaked draft document “Go in Peace Glorifying the Lord by Your Life” is probably the pettiest, nastiest, most malicious episcopal letter I have ever read. The level of micromanaging displayed in this 7,700 word screed beggars belief. The letter—which runs twenty printed pages—sets a new bar for pedantry with its obsessive attempts to regulate every minute aspect of the liturgy in the Diocese of Charlotte, right down to what prayers a priest says privately while vesting alone in the sacristy. It is a stunning display of small-mindedness by a prelate of exceptional hubris, who announces that he is going to “set his own preferences aside” before he ruthlessly imposes them on his clergy, who lauds “the rich tradition that has been handed down to us” before systematically destroying it with the zeal of a Jacobin, who claims to “encourage unity in worship” while proposing liturgical norms guaranteed to plunge his diocese into chaos. It's dissonance reaches Orwellian levels of double speak....
Ultimately, it seems Bishop Michael Martin has mistaken the sacred liturgy for his personal Pinterest board, curating a sterile, minimalist aesthetic that would make even the most ardent Puritan blush. With the zeal of a bureaucrat armed with a ruler and a vendetta, he’s sculpted a 7,700-word monument to his own hubris, where tradition is praised in one breath and guillotined in the next.
In a similar vein, John B. Manos of the Bellarmine Forum writes, in “When Crisis PR Misses the Mark: A Satirical Look at the Diocese of Charlotte’s TLM Train Wreck”:
I’ll admit it, as an attorney who’s been a Supreme Court clerk, an assistant attorney general, and beyond, I’m no stranger to watching PR disasters unfold. For me, it is the continuation of the forensic work I did as a chemical engineer, looking at fatal accidents and explosions. If you’ve watched gory police procedurals like Silent Witness or others, you know when the body is on the slab in the mortuary and they are figuring out how the murder was committed — that’s what this is like for me. Words and communications piece back like wound marks and bullet trails to tell me what’s going on.
Even with that sort of background, the Diocese of Charlotte’s handling of the Traditional Latin Mass cessation is leaving me slack-jawed. How could a situation dripping with such spiritual weight be met with such tone-deaf crisis management? It’s like watching someone try to fix a broken stained-glass window with duct tape and black plastic sheeting. I’m forced to wonder: if this is the “polished” PR response, how chaotic must things be behind closed doors for the crisis team to even be called in? Buckle up, because we’re about to unpack this mess—complete with satire, questions, and a hard look at what went wrong.
Without mentioning +Martin by name, Anthony Esolen (“Slumming as Only Pharisees Can Do”) skewers the entire mentality of his project — one we have seen enacted or enforced countless times in the past five or six decades:
Ordinary human beings are attracted to ceremony, as they are attracted to music and art: ceremony is the music of human gesture, extended to a congregation, an assembly, a platoon, a school, in the service of what is beyond them all, and that means, though it may be but implicit or as secret in their souls as a pearl in a box, in the service of the divine....
Some Pharisees parade their holiness as ceremonious show; they are whited sepulchers full of corruption and dead men’s bones. But there are Pharisees also of the reverse sort, who raise themselves above mere commoners by their disdain of ceremony: “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like that other man, who genuflects whenever he passes the tabernacle, as if you cared for a bent knee; I know you better than that.”
Sure, ceremonies can be overdone. But let Uncle Screwtape remind us that the devils work to get us all in a lather over the vices we are least likely to fall into, while we ignore those that have got us by the throat. Our danger lies not in ceremonious excess but in deficiency.
And Pharisees who go a-slumming are hypocrites of informality and negligence, because Pharisaism has to do not with actions as such, whatever they may be, but with the desire to be seen performing them. “Look at how modern I am!” says the high priest of minimalism, or the nun with the habit curtailed.
Yes, I see you.
By the way, if you’re looking for a convenient one-stop-shop for all of Pope Francis’s bad ideas and initiatives concerning divine worship, look no further than Rita Ferrone’s “Francis’s Liturgical Legacy: Embracing diversity and popular piety” at Commonweal. An added “benefit”: the author offers us a masterclass in tendentiousness!
For a wider history of the Charlotte situation, see:
A laywoman in Charlotte wrote to me:
I wanted to thank you for speaking up for our TLM community. This cruel persecution is very hard to take when there’s no formal public discussion about it other than what happens on social media, after which it seems to just be forgotten about, so it is heartening to have someone speak in defense of our situation. I cannot begin to convey the sorrow and dread we feel at having our beloved Mass so callously taken away, and to be so viciously cast out of our beautiful church into an ugly bunker someplace far away. It’s so difficult to bear, especially after 12 years of painstakingly building up the sacred liturgy through “countless” hours of efforts, prayers, and sacrifices from so many families. This is the Mass of my childhood! Through it, as a young girl, I came to understand that God loved me. It is the Mass which brought my husband back to the Faith and has inspired our children to want to be saints. It is our home.
This lady’s 9-year-old daughter burst into tears when she heard that the Latin Mass was going to disappear from their parish in North Carolina. “Why is the bishop taking it away?” That’s not the only report of grief among children that has come to me. There’s a special place in hell for prelates who inflict this kind of spiritual abuse on their people. Come to think of it, didn’t Our Lord say something in the Gospel about those who give scandal to the little ones? Better for a millstone…? (Hey, that’s an idea for a bishop’s future diocesan campaign: “Millstones and Mass Rocks.”)
I hear this kind of story regularly. And I know enough people personally to know they’re not “making it up” (as some vicious enemies have suggested). It’s as real as real can be. It’s partly my own story too.
This is why I insist, in season and out of season, that any prelate who pushes this kind of evil is not acting on behalf of Christ and His Church, but on behalf of the Father of Lies and his infernal kingdom. It is not Catholic but diabolic to do this to believers who are deeply rooted in the practice of their faith and who find joy, nourishment, and strength in the traditional Roman rite. This, moreover, is why such decrees have zero canonical licitness; they are acts of violence and should be viewed and treated as such.
Think how screwed up someone’s ecclesiology needs to be to think that a bishop has a perfect right to suppress an ancient and venerable form of divine worship and that it is a matter of virtuous obedience to collaborate in its suppression, regardless of the pastoral damage and pain it will cause to many souls. If we had the ability to tell a Catholic from 1,000, 500, or even 100 years ago what our bishops are doing to Catholics who love the Church’s tradition, they would not believe us — they would think we were absolutely bonkers. This, perhaps, is a way to begin to conceptualize the extent of the crisis in the Church — by far the worst of its entire history thus far.
Examination of Conscience for Priests
When a pastor goes along with a bishop’s policy to shut down all parish TLMs in pursuance of Traditionis Custodes, how is he not thereby endorsing the numerous lies on which that motu proprio’s policy is based? Among which are the following:
the lie that there is only one form of the Roman rite, when it can be shown Paul VI never legally mandated the Novus Ordo to the abrogation and exclusion of the old rite (as vindicated in a string of documents from 1971, 1984, 1986, 1988, 2007, and 2011);
the lie that the new missal contains all the riches of the old missal;
the lie that the bishops’ surveys showed they found SP inadequate and wanted the use of the old rite curtailed;
the lie that now bishops were being given more room to make decisions about the old rite when in fact Rome restricted their authority more than ever, except for the power to destroy, contrary to 2 Cor 13:10.
How is it not a form of spiritual abuse to accept lies and to enforce them on the faithful?
How is this not analogous to other kinds of abuse perpetrated by clergy on laity in the past several decades?
How can a priest live with his own conscience when, having received the immense grace of learning and loving tradition, and seeing it transform the people he serves, he now tells them “we must be obedient to its cancellation”?
How is this not a besmirching of the beautiful virtue of obedience by yoking it to irrationality, impiety, contempt, and cruelty?
How is the 180-degree shift from treasuring immemorial tradition to chucking it out the window at the command of an ideologue consistent with a mature, rational, coherent faith?
How can preachers ask the laity to live out their vocations fearlessly in the world, when the laity see the preachers living in constant fear of their own superiors in the Church?
P.S. The laity are not stupid. Those who have been attending the TLM for a while can instantly tell the difference between it and a souped-up Latin Novus Ordo. Don’t add insult to injury by suggesting we’ll feel chipper if only we just give the new rite a chance.
Priests will say in response: “If I keep doing the TLM against the bishop’s will, he will take away my faculties.”
A Church whose “shepherds” can cancel out her own immemorial tradition, treat the faithful who love it like lepers, and walk all over their clergy like so many doormats, is a Church that has already lost its legitimacy, credibility, and sanity. So, Fathers, if you’re being totally honest with yourselves, you have a much bigger problem on your hands than your faculties.
Better for YOU to be the good shepherds who will keep tradition alive, give the faithful bread instead of stones, and nourish your own souls with the truth God has shown you, than to walk away from it and become accomplices with such villains. Let the accursed Judases hang themselves by their own legalistic nooses.
“But you don’t have to agree with a bishop’s rationale in order to be obliged to follow his policy of restricting or eliminating the TLM,” priests rejoinder.
This is false. If the sole reason for his policy is his rejection of traditional Catholic faith and worship (and in the case of Bishop Martin of Charlotte, this motivation is beyond all doubt, as he has made no secret of his modernist views), then the clergy should refuse to follow a policy that has this as its origin and aim. Simply ask the question: “Why in the world would a Catholic bishop ever wish to suppress liturgies that are flourishing with devout families, well-integrated into their parishes and supportive of the pope and the diocese?” The answer is: no Catholic bishop would ever wish this; therefore the bishop is not a Catholic, possibly not even a believer in God, and certainly one who has no fear of God’s judgment.
I will repeat what I have said elsewhere: if there had been no priests in the 1970s who were willing to go directly against the pope’s and bishops’ attempt to make the Novus Ordo obligatory and to outlaw the old rite, there would be no traditional Mass left today. Period. It’s as simple as that. You can wring your hands as much as you want, but the history is the history.
I admire, laud, venerate, and celebrate such priests as exemplars when the same situation is repeated by a pope (Francis) or bishops (e.g., +Martin) who are equally unwise and equally malicious. Moreover, we must give thanks for Archbishop Lefebvre, without whose witness the traditional movement might still be hiding in basements.
OBVIOUSLY, I hope and pray for a more peaceful resolution, one that respects everyone's rights and duties. But I will never defend an attitude that essentially consists in surrender and results in suppression, nor should anyone else who values the inheritance of the Church because of what it is rather than how it makes him feel good. Those who merely prefer what is traditional are usually ready to give it up at the first difficulty. Those who know that the Church lives only by her tradition and to the extent that she remains faithful to it will not be such pushovers.
Let us be bound by truth
God only knows what further attacks against the Catholic Faith’s lex orandi, lex credendi, and lex vivendi are in store for us in the years to come. If we do not wish to see what we value and ought to value burned down to cinders, we had better be prepared to resist the vandals to the fullest extent compatible with the Faith.
This is why, in 2023, I published Bound by Truth: Authority, Obedience, Tradition, and the Common Good (Angelico Press), which bears the dedication:
For all priests who have sacrificed comfort, security, ambition, or reputation to remain true to Catholic Tradition and to keep it alive for Christ’s faithful: the Lord is your inheritance and the Church will one day sing your praises.
The chapters of this book are exactly suited to this juncture, especially for dioceses that have seen bloodbaths: Charlotte, Tyler, Austin, Detroit (inter alia). If you have ever asked the question: “What should we do? What can we do?,” this book is for you.
Time to close the workshop
Whenever TLMs are shut down, the question of the Latin Novus Ordo always pops up. This is truly a non-starter, a contradiction in terms. In the old rite, Latin, chant, and silence form a sonic iconostasis that surrounds the Mystery in a sacred enclosure. The new rite was designed for verbal comprehension and that’s why nearly everything’s said out loud in the vernacular, usually facing the people. The old rite’s vertical, theocentric approach to worship and the new rite’s horizontal, anthropocentric approach—baked into their respective structure, texts, and rubrics—are at loggerheads.
I understand the desire to try to “do the new rite well,” but I’m afraid it’s a wild goose chase that will always be marked by arbitrariness and frustration (what, after all, does “well” mean? there is no single answer!), and dogged by the constant risk of being changed or undermined at a moment’s notice, by a new pastor or by a new episcopal diktat. After more than 25 years working as a choir director in both the Novus Ordo and the TLM contexts, I reached a point where I just couldn’t deal with the schizophrenia and stress anymore, and said to myself, I’m done rolling boulders uphill to see them roll down again. And the last 7 years, exclusively in the old rite, have been a taste of eternal bliss in comparison.
These are among the many issues grappled with in my book Close the Workshop: Why the Old Mass Isn’t Broken and the New Mass Can’t Be Fixed (Angelico, 2025):
Priestly Ordinations and a First Mass
But enough of that. Let’s have some good news.
On the Vigil of the Ascension, five deacons were ordained priests for the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, generously handing their lives over to God as He transformed them into living instruments of Christ the Eternal High Priest. Five new priests dedicated exclusively to the traditional rites of the Church. What a joy it was to see this day for which they have been assiduously preparing for seven years of seminary—but for which the Lord had prepared them from all eternity. In your charity, please say a prayer for them.
Fr. Matthew Jagas, FSSP
Fr. Ronald McCann, FSSP
Fr. Steve Kalinowski, FSSP
Fr. Michael Caughey, FSSP
Fr. John-Francis Sulzen, FSSP
I was present at the pontifical Mass. It was truly glorious in every way. A couple of photos:
The following day, for the feast of the Ascension (yes, 40 days after Easter — not “Ascension Sunday”), I had the privilege of singing in the schola for the first Holy Mass of Fr. Michael Caughey, FSSP. Of Ron Lawson's hundreds of photos, I often like to pick interesting moments of the ceremony that might otherwise escape notice.
Every detail is full of meaning, reverence, and love.
(To see each photo at proper size and resolution, head over to my Substack online — you can do so simply by clicking on the title of this article — and there you can click on an image to enlarge it.)
The little boy holding the hymnal with a lamp over it is an altar boy on choir duty, singing the “Veni Creator Spiritus” at the beginning of a priest’s First Mass (you can see, off in the distance, the priest, coped assistant priest, deacon, and subdeacon in the sanctuary). In our parish, we have so many altar boys that some of them are assigned to sing with the schola when they aren’t needed downstairs. That way, they get exposure to both “sides” of the liturgy: the ceremonies and the music.
“I go away, and I come unto you”
A little detail about the feast of the Ascension in the classical Roman Rite is worth a comment. At Mass that day, up in the choir loft with my Canon camera, I was able to capture the wonderful moment after the chanting of the Gospel, when, giving symbolic force to the words of St. Mark (“And the Lord Jesus, after He had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven...”), an acolyte extinguishes the Paschal candle, indicating that Jesus is no longer visibly present with us, and now we begin the period of nine days of waiting until the Holy Ghost descends to impart the Spirit of Jesus, followed by the unfolding of the whole sacramental-liturgical life of the Church.
You can see that moment around 1’45:
This little video clip also displays well the solemnity with which the Gospel is chanted in the old rite, flanked by candles, and surrounded in a cloud of incense—a distant echo of Moses on the mountain with God, accompanied by lightning and hidden behind clouds. The deacon chants facing northward, to represent preaching the good news to the world of unbelief.
The very fact that the Word of God is both in a sacral language and chanted sets it apart from and above mere spoken vernacular. While there may be a barrier to instant communication (which, of course, can be easily overcome as far as comprehension goes, simply by having a handout, a hand missal, or a priest who reads the lessons before his homily), there is also, crucially, an irreplaceable formation in the awe of divinely-inspired utterances, the veneration of God's revelation of Himself.
Martha and Mary
Dominic V. Cassella, “What Cannot Be Taken Away: Cassian, Prayer, and the Presence of Christ”:
Theology—or the life of a monk—is no different than any other science. At root, the goal is to discover the principles and causes of a life of holiness, and this ultimately finds its source in the Godhead. The principles and causes, then, are understood in terms of the dual command of Christ: to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. We are told that these two commands were exemplified by the characters of Martha and Mary in Luke’s Gospel.
Yet Christ rebukes Martha and praises Mary. Why? What was the danger that Martha nearly succumbed to? In the answer to that question lies the key to understanding nearly everything that has gone wrong in the Catholic Church since Vatican II. See Cassella’s fine essay for more.
Somehow related in my mind is an accurate and empathetic article on depression that I read: “It’s not a sin to be depressed: What St Philip Neri and St Thomas Aquinas have to say.” This is the kind of Thomistic realism that is needed and helpful.
The (mixed) blessings of Bouyer
This week at New Liturgical Movement, I examine “Why Louis Bouyer Is Delightful and Frustrating to Read.”
One experience I think many of us have had with Liturgical Movement authors who wrote prior to the Council and/or the imposition of the Novus Ordo is that we find in their works so many wonderful insights, mingled with passages of excruciating naivete, baffling optimism about the possibilities of reform-in-continuity, strange flights of reformatory fancy, embarrassingly erroneous theories (such as “the canon of Hippolytus” and “early Christian clergy celebrated versus populum”), and the like. It can feel a bit schizophrenic to go from a glowing paragraph on the glories of tradition to another paragraph about how this and that have to be rethought and reworked. One suffers from intellectual whiplash....
The whiplash author par excellence must surely be Louis Bouyer—a theologian who, let’s say on page 35, was capable of dismissing as buffoons the squadrons of tinkering liturgists, and then on page 37 of declaring that Baroque excrescences had to be purged from the liturgy (presumably, by specialists like himself). His soaring lyricism about traditional aspects of the liturgy is matched only by his acerbic criticism of just about everything to do with the concrete liturgical life of the preconciliar era.
Today at NLM, I ask what we can still learn from Bouyer’s seminal 1963 work Rite and Man, in spite of its litnik weaknesses. (I don’t know if anyone else uses the term, but a dear friend of mine refers to the liturgist-enthusiasts of the mid-20th-century as “litniks,” on the model of “beatniks.”)
Just Say No to Quickie Canonizations
Sebastian Morello has written a magnificent article at The Catholic Thing, “Where Is Pope Francis?” Excerpt:
It has not gone unnoticed among many of the Church’s faithful that, of late, canonisations have been co-opted as an instrument in what has for decades been the dominant ecclesiastical regime. Instrumentalising such holy things, besides being sacrilegious, is a very foolish thing to do. Ultimately, it does not serve to strengthen the regime, as intended, but only to undermine that which is instrumentalised. It should not surprise us, then, that many theologians have begun to question the infallibility of canonisations. . . .
The instrumentalization of canonizations has, thus, only weakened devotion to the saints and damaged the credibility of the Church’s judgment in such matters. Increasingly, it is felt among the practising faithful that canonisations have little to do with the Church’s response to an organically emerging devotion to a particular deceased holy person, and everything to do with whatever consolidates the dominant ecclesiastical regime, helping to impose and enforce its ideological commitments.
Head over there and read the whole thing. It’s not to be missed.
I can also recommend Stuart Chessman’s “War and Peace,” about the current situation in the Church.
What is philosophy?
A simple question, you say? Not really — at least, not since first modernity and then academia have poisoned the well. What philosophy is was clear to the ancients, just as it was for the Holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church. For this reason, Robert Lazu Kmita's series on φιλοσοφία is well worth following.
In a similar vein, the conversation between Sebastian Morello, Nicholas Cavazos, and Timothy Flanders on “Platonic Thomism” is now open to the public, and for those with an interest in St. Thomas, highly recommended.
Collapse of one empire, birth of another?
In “The Little Way of Christendom, Part 1,” Theo Howard argues that Catholics cannot accommodate themselves to liberalism anymore; and besides, it is a dying world-order:
To understand this inevitable twilight of Empire, it is helpful to consider that paradigmatic case of imperial collapse – the Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire, from the crisis of the third century through to the deposition of the last emperor in Rome in 476 AD. This complex decline can be summarised thus: fiscal and demographic implosion with chronic currency debasement and large-scale barbarian inflows. The American Empire, and the Occidental nations more broadly, clearly exhibit all four of these major horsemen of civilisational calamity....
For all of these reasons, I believe it is now past time to disabuse ourselves of misplaced optimism and any proposed courses of action which involve trying to work within Liberalism and its structures, to ‘convert it from the inside.’ Catholics have tried this for decades, if not centuries, and it has not worked. Working within the frame of our enemies, Catholics don’t convert the Liberal system, the Liberal system converts us. New ideas and new visions are needed. Spiritually, we should not rue the collapse of such an abominable system but give glory to God for confirming His goodness by punishing the wicked and welcome the opening vistas of new possibilities that are emerging before us.
This past week, in “The Little Way of Christendom, Part 2,” Howard urges Catholics to think more and more “outside the box” — to create their own subculture as much as possible:
I am interested in exploring ways in which Catholic men can avoid being coerced into working for avaricious institutions that despise us, in jobs that contribute to the construction of the panopticon Beast system. Rather, let us look to build parallel institutions in which we invest our time, talent and treasure which would give us greater structures of solidarity and resilience against Regime hostility and the shockwaves from its eventual collapse. We might not be able to defeat the liberal oligarchy, but we might outlast it if we make very different commitments. What we need to do is reconstitute a Catholic social order, re-founded Catholic lay institutions.
Following the ongoing formation of Catholic families, we next need Catholic intermediary institutions: communities, businesses, guilds, commons, craft workshops, sports clubs, almshouses, orders of knighthood and credit unions. The natural and Christian political order, with its institutions and intermediate societies, is the most propitious context for all men to direct their lives towards virtue. New technologies like remote working can be leveraged to gradually transition Catholic families from wage-earning households in Babylonian structures to productive domestic economies and local businesses.
In the article he provides some concrete examples of what he’s talking about. Obviously this is a very long-term, ongoing conversation — but it’s imperative that we think of ways, big or small, to start doing this now, or to continue doing it wherever it’s happening.
Thank you for reading and may God bless you!
You wonder if Bishop Martin is really Catholic. It’s so diabolical and anti-human.
My friend Fr. Steve Kalinowski was priested! He will be a great priest (by God’s grace, of course). So happy for him.