I warmly recommend this piece at Crisis for your reading and your wide sharing with all whom you know.
You may know the facts. The Bishop of Charlotte suppressed the people who had a Traditional Latin Mass in different locations, and then ghettoized them far away in a tacky little fixer-up chapel which he openly said would not be big enough. He told them than can’t take up a collection, which means improvements will be hard, and they must continue – above all – to pay at their territorial parishes. He said he would accompany them. He wasn’t there on Sunday. But there was a sign on the door that said they shouldn’t take photos.
Such loving care.
Read the piece at Crisis.
A few bits…
[…]
But when Bishop Martin shut down the Traditional Latin Mass in all parishes and forced those communities to disband, I felt compelled to join those who were banished to a remote chapel, miles away from the highway, at the end of a series of two-lane roads surrounded by cornfields. If we are supposed to be with those who grieve, then this was the place to find them. In order to express true compassion—from the Latin cum passio—one must suffer with. It requires presence. Despite Bishop Martin’s claim to his sheep that he would “commit to walk with” them, he was noticeably absent.
The holy water font was a simple, wide basin placed on a small circular wooden table just through the main entrance. For those who traveled from ornate churches like St. Ann’s in Charlotte or Our Lady of Grace in Greensboro, this must have felt like being in exile. The overhead lighting was tacky and more appropriate for a stage than a sanctuary. One could easily envision a band in place of the altar.
[…]
It was claimed that having the Traditional Latin Mass at parishes was divisive. So, paradoxically, faithful Catholics were forcibly divided from their parish communities and sent long distances away, that they may not worship in the same spaces as their neighbors.
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Much as I appreciate the beauty of our Catholic Churches (I attend St. Agnes in St. Paul, with which you are familiar) I sometimes think that it will only be when St. Peter’s in the Vatican more closely resembles the very humble edifice being provided for the Charlotte diocese that the Church will attain the height of poor in spirit that it is called to.
I pray that this bishop sees a doctor soon. And a confessor.
“He told them than can’t take up a collection, which means improvements will be hard, and they must continue – above all – to pay at their territorial parishes.”
Given that I think this violates the letter of TC (at a minimum, explicitly providing an undersized chapel on purpose is at issue), I would probably refuse to pay at my parish under these circumstances. And I’d be looking at setting up an external 501(c)(3) to fund those improvements as well as petitioning for FSSP to come in.
[The problem is that the bishop must invite the FSSP or the ICK. Unlike the SSPX, the FSSP can’t just start working in a diocese without the bishop’s approval.]
A good shepherd would be at the door to greet his sheep.
A hireling hides to protect himself.
Well I stopped by that ghetto chapel this past Sunday after I went to Mass at the SSPX chapel and I DID TAKE PICTURES. What I saw was appalling: no stations of the cross, no confessionals, no devotional statue of Our Lady, Our Lord or any other saints. The people inside looked very sad and my heart goes out to them. Now Martin has removed the kneelers at the Charlotte Cathedral. No doubt more destruction is on the way.
I am simply beyond words. The actions of this bishop and many others are unworthy of their office. Liberals are always calling for tolerance when they are in the minority but when they have power, watch out.
Respectfully Reditus, being poor in spirit refers to realizing we are nothing without God, trusting in Him alone instead of ourselves. Deliberately making a church ugly and destitute in design when you have the means to make it beautiful doesn’t make you poor in spirit, it deprives God of the glory he rightly deserves. Pretty churches may please the senses as a secondary effect, but they are primarily an offering to God and a small representation of His infinite glory.
Remember that in John 12:3-8 Judas tried to rebuke Jesus for the same reason; expensive things being used for the glory of God instead of being sold and the money given away. But Christ reaffirmed that it is a good thing to reserve costly things for worship. Don’t be like Judas, trust Jesus!
What that author doesn’t understand is that the bishop is adhering to the instructions from Pope Francis in the letter that accompanied “Traditionis custodes”:
“It is up to you to proceed in such a way as to return to a unitary form of celebration,” and “to return in due time to the Roman Rite promulgated by Saints Paul VI and John Paul II….”
The bishop is doing what he’s supposed to do. The claims of discrimination, persecution, and maliciously inflicted pain result from the assumption that the TLM has a privileged status and should be permitted to be celebrated in perpetuity and in convenient locations instead of reduced in number and ceased in orderly, planned stages. The sole chapel where the TLM is now permitted is a step towards returning “to a unitary form of celebration” in the diocese.
There is nothing wrong — and a lot right — with what the bishop did. He is being unfairly maligned by people who simply don’t want to accept the mandate for the Roman Church to return “to a unitary form of celebration” by eventually celebrating the reformed Roman Rite exclusively.
Godfrey: I am appalled by your attitude in the comment.
Apart from the obvious fact that there is a new Pope, apart from the fact that bishops have great flexibility in how they work in their dioceses, apart from the fact that bishops can ask for continuing stays, your comment is pretty clearly founded on ignorance of how the two rites, Novus and Vetus differ. You are not alone. Most bishops are too.
Godfrey, if “a unitary form of celebration” is so important, then why aren’t other forms of the Roman rite being suppressed such as the Dominican, the Ambrosian etc.? For that matter the 20 odd rites of the Eastern Churches?
There have always been multiple rites in the Church both Eastern and Western. The Traditional Latin rite is only being suppressed because it shows up the many deficiencies in the rite of Paul VI and because it tends to lead people back to traditional Catholic beliefs which the “Spirit of Vatican 2” was trying to move away from and more towards the world’s values.
@JonPatrick – heck, they won’t even suppress the extremely problematic liturgical practices of the Neocatachumenal Way!! That alone gives the lie to the absurd position that there is but “one” way to worship within the Latin Rite.
But I suspect Godfrey is acting the part of a troll. Anyone who actually believes what he says would have the IQ of, well, of the bishop of Charlotte.
My consistent concern in all of this is for more and more Catholics to understand that the current construct of bishops having absolutely unchecked authority within their diocese is untenable. The centralization of money and power has attracted all the wrong sorts of people into the episcopacy, and with the historical checks against their authority being totally absent there appears to be no limit to the absolute destruction one man with will intent can do in a very short time. Bishop Martin could order the cathedral destroyed and the land sold as a parking lot, and it would take Catholics in his diocese generations to undo this one act of malice. He’s already enacted a program to try to do real spiritual harm to the children going to the Catholic schools in his diocese. If we get angry about children being physically abused and insist priests and bishops should be held accountable – shouldn’t we be just as angry when those priests and bishops spiritually abuse the children and jeopardize their immortal souls?
This cannot continue. Catholics, and especially American Catholics, need to find another way.
In an old Off the Menu podcast Charles Coulombe spoke about Catholics sometimes going to civil courts for justice about their bishops. He cited one woman in Canada I think whose bishop excommunicated her for kneeling for Communion. She sued and won, but rather than accept monetary damages she simply was glad to have her excommunication lifted. Coulombe said he would have taken the money, too.
Please forgive this retelling of an anecdote but it does seem incredible that American Catholics have no recourse in the land of religious freedom and lawyers. Forbidding Christians from improving their churches is what all conquering Islam used to do, by the way.
who simply don’t want to accept the mandate for the Roman Church to return “to a unitary form of celebration”
Indeed we do not. We do not because we think the old Rite is both better and more helpful for our spiritual lives; but even that aside (which as any question not settled by dogma is, though I naturally think my own position the right one, a matter that might be debated), liturgy is the prayer of the Church. It is not the prayer of those who, granted, occupy positions of authority within the Church and order the faithful to fall in. No no no.
The Pope has the autority manage and lead the praying of the Church, of course but it is the praying of the Church. See the encyclical Mediator Dei by the Ven. Pope Pius XII: “It follows from this that the Sovereign Pontiff alone enjoys the right to recognize and establish any practice touching the worship of God, to introduce and approve new rites, as also to modify those he judges to require modification.” Curiously lacking from this list is forbidding a rite, imposing a new rite on an unwillig recipient, and modifying a rite against the will of its users for any reason below “requires modification”.
The bishop may be doing what Pope Francis in July 2021 wrote he wanted him to do. That doesn’t mean he’s right; Pope Francis has repented of that now. Indeed there are some signs that he would have rather wished not to have decided that way even in his lifetime and preferred the matter to be dropped while saving face (he did not, obviously, wish it to an extent that would make him sign a withdrawal and lose face).
Coincidentally, I really like my fellow-Catholics who attend the Novus Ordo primarily, and my elective parish which our old-rite apostolate is attached to. Which makes me love the Novus Ordo too. Despite deficiencies I recognize and think are objective ones, they too are the Church, and it is the Church that celebrates here. Now the thing is: Does any of that make TC into “not a big deal”? Not in the slightest. Rather a bigger, I think. If I had been embittered before like the people Pope Francis appears to have meant (he admitted explicitly, by the way, to the injustice of punishing all for the failures of some), I just might have become more embittered. But as I wasn’t, it turned my friends into people favored by a bully-in-authority. Imagine how a young student and lover of basketball must feel when the teacher himself loves basketball and suddenly starts to insinuate that his classmates who prefer volleyball are bad people. – To their credit, they didn’t side with the bully.
The devil is hard at work in the world. No arena is safe: Church, Politics, Culture. Be proudly and loudly Catholic. Pray, go to confession, resist the pressure to stifle your faith .
‘[…]who simply don’t want to accept the mandate for the Roman Church to return “to a unitary form of celebration”’
You can’t return to something that has never been. There have always been other, venerable rites other than the Roman Rite within the Latin rite. Ambrosian, Mozarabic, Dominican, Carthusian, the Rite of the Discalced Carmelites, etc. Recently new “uses” within the Roman Rite have been added, Amazonian and Zairese, that do nothing for a “unitary form of celebration,” to put it mildly. But the Usus Antiquior is a problem? Yeah, right.
The SSPX chapel is closer for most people in this diocese. It is thriving, has all the Traditional Sacraments, Traditional catechesis for children and adults, processions, Holy Day feasts (usually transferred to weekends), an excellent pastor, beautiful music, superb community, no in-fighting, and the community isn’t worried about what the visiting priest might do or say when the pastor is on vacation. Every presiding priest — no matter what — is solidly Catholic.
The pope’s and the bishop’s — yes, Bishop Martin! — portraits are on the walls where they are customarily in any other church, and they are both prayed for at every Mass. This is not a “schismatic” place. This is a welcoming place, full of love and laughter, strength and holiness.
Why don’t the diocesan refugees come there? They would find the community they have been praying for and their families would likely thrive. And they would be welcomed with open arms.
No one understands the struggle of maintaining the Latin Mass like the SSPX. Members can tell you battle stories of having to have secret Masses in private homes, out of the trunks of cars, in attics, in barns.
SSPX priests are not excommunicated — no one in the SSPX is. And “by the letter of the law”, SSPX priests are validly ordained, can licitly hear confessions, perform weddings and baptisms, and you can licitly fulfill your Sunday obligation at an SSPX Mass.
I understand fighting the good fight at the diocesan level. But Martin is not going to relent. Take your babies and your marriage some place stable. Don’t let pride keep you from reaching for something that could set your family and your soul on a path of peace.
Perhaps it’s good for your humility of soul to struggle in a place where the bishop hates you…? Maybe you need that. But with the world in the state it’s in, it seems more beneficial to me to head to the nearest safe harbor.
Dear monstrance,
a good shepherd would be at the door to greet his sheep.
A hireling hides to protect himself.
With all due respect, I think the problem’s deeper. They aren’t persecuting trads because they can’t help it and need to obey orders to keep their own safety intact (orders both unjust from the beginning, and obsolete).
They don’t think they are to weak to fight for the trads. They (apparently) actually think that they are strong, strong enough to fight trads, because in doing so they are doing God’s work. They don’t care (except to find reasonings for things they want to do anyway) for the letter of four-year-old Papal documents anymore than anyone else. They want to get at the trads because that’s what they themselves want to do.
Are they wrong? Of course. But that doesn’t mean they don’t think they are right.
(They may even think they are doing a service to the Catholic religion not to have it, as they would perceive it, defiled by the trads in they eyes of the public. – The hard thing is that there even may a tiny amount of – not justification for injustices are never justified – but triggers actually present in the trad community that they chose to take so much offence at. Not that that wouldn’t be understandable; we only need to look at schoolyards to see that if a group constantly gets bullied whatever they do, they or some among them will develop awkwardnesses and embitterments that makes them, to the semidecent, really stick out as worthy of bullying. Understandable; but that it’s the embitterment is understandable to objective and well-meaning observer doesn’t mean it’s an appealing trait to a possible bully. We have the hard task to be nice nevertheless.)