Opinion: They Want To Cancel More Than Just The TLM, by Chris Jackson

They’re coming for kneeling, for chant, for Latin, for beauty, for tradition in any form.

For decades, Catholics attached to tradition were told to settle down, blend in, and be grateful for the reverent Novus Ordo. “You don’t need the old rite,” they said. “Just find a good parish with chant, Latin, incense, and ad orientem worship. That’s perfectly allowed.”

Now we see the truth: they were buying time. The wrecking ball isn’t stopping at the 1962 Missal. It’s coming for every expression of sacred continuity.

The target now is reverence itself.

Charlotte: Purging the New Mass of the Old Faith

The clearest signal yet that even reverence in the Novus Ordo is no longer welcome came from the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina. On May 23, 2025, Bishop Michael T. Martin issued a sweeping directive implementing Traditionis Custodes. Now Rorate exposed a new leaked letter from Martin to be issued in the future. It embodies a vision of total desacralization.

https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2025/05/rorate-exclusive-anti-traditional-and.html

The document lays out a chilling blueprint for purging even the aesthetic DNA of Catholic tradition from the Church’s public life.

What’s most striking is how the letter anticipates and criminalizes reverence itself.

Martin writes of the need to eliminate “hybrid liturgies,” a term he never defines but clearly means Novus Ordo celebrations that draw from the traditional liturgical treasury. Priests who celebrate Mass facing the altar (ad orientem), use Latin, incorporate Gregorian chant, or wear traditional vestments are now under suspicion. These elements are treated as dangerous contagions from the “extraordinary form,” and must be quarantined.

The directive reads like a liturgical inquisition manual. Martin speaks of the “confusion” and “division” caused when Catholics encounter rites or practices not in step with the mainstream post-Vatican II aesthetic. In other words, it’s not theological dissent or moral scandal that divides. It’s solemnity.

He warns priests not to cause “pastoral problems” by creating distinctions in worship styles. But what does that mean in practice? It means if a priest celebrates Mass reverently, with Latin and chant, he might be rebuked for “creating division”even if his parishioners are edified. The mere visibility of beauty is now the problem.

Martin also devotes paragraphs to training priests and seminarians in the “unity” of the postconciliar liturgy; not its organic development, but its rupture from the past. His tone mirrors that of a bureaucrat enforcing corporate branding. Liturgy must be uniform. Not uniformly reverent, but uniformly banal. Uniformly horizontal.

And the faithful? He suggests that those attached to the old rite often exhibit “rigidity” and “resistance.” His solution is not dialogue, but marginalization. Instead of honoring their sensibilities, Martin demands submission. Reverent practice must be corralled, siloed, and quietly eliminated; not only in the TLM, but anywhere its spirit has survived.

The letter is especially revealing because Charlotte was once seen as a diocese that quietly tolerated traditional expressions. No longer. The new regime is here, and the first to be disciplined are not dissenters or heretics, but the faithful who kneel, chant, and believe.

This is not discipline. It is liturgical re-education.

By targeting even the most orthodox and devout Catholics, (those who attend reverent Novus Ordo liturgies) Martin’s directive lays bare the real agenda: conformity, compliance, and a program of erasure.

And Leo XIV has allowed it without comment.

Continue reading at Hiraeth In Exile

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