The edict from Charlotte’s Catholic bishop came just before Christmas with a benign title: “Pastoral letter on norms for Holy Communion.” Bishop Michael Martin decreed parishioners could no longer use kneelers and altar rails during the sacrament. It was an effort to “foster unity,” Martin’s letter said, and make clear the modern way is standing for Communion.
There was nothing benign about the reaction.
Last month, 31 of the diocese’s 147 active priests sent a remarkable letter to the Vatican questioning if their boss — Martin — had the authority to forbid certain ways of receiving Communion.
“It’s like a vote of no-confidence,” Brian Williams, a traditional Catholic who runs a blog in Charlotte called the Liturgy Guy, told The Washington Post. Such letters — called dubia, Latin for “doubts” — sometimes come from cardinals or bishops. A letter from such a big group of parish priests would have felt unthinkable a few decades ago in the famously hierarchical church.
But today, open criticism of bishops and s have become standard among a small but growing minority of traditional U.S. Catholics who are gaining political and cultural influence. Prominent Catholics, from Vice President JD Vance and podcaster Stephen K. Bannon to Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker have publicly taken church leaders to task on limits to traditional worship, as well as their support for migrants and what conservatives see as a “globalist” agenda.
Far from unifying the nation’s approximately 50 million Catholics, the ascension of the first American to the papacy has provided an opportunity for restive members to test their leaders. And no place is that more visible than the Diocese of Charlotte.
John McGreevy, provost at University of Notre Dame and a historian of Catholicism, said “what seems like a liturgy struggle is really about the future of the church.” Catholics who want to return the church to its past, and who don’t embrace the reforms of the 1960s — called the Second Vatican Council — he said, are “not just live-and-let-live but a move towards fracture.”
The Rev. Patrick Cahill, leader of the huge Charlotte parish St. Matthew, said the letter, which he didn’t sign, has implications far beyond the diocese. The conflict, he said, is a “huge, huge deal, because it comes down to trusting in the Holy Spirit as being with the church. You are either trusting and believing God sends certain leaders or you’re figuring some other way around it.”
New South and old Mass
Disputes over how to pray are not new for Catholicism, including for those who openly rejected the reforms imposed in the 1960s. But a new level of pressure has been growing in the U.S. over the past decade or so because of the growth of more traditional Catholic communities — amplified, like everything else, by social media — and also because institutions of all kinds are no longer considered unassailable. Charlotte’s traditional Catholic community, which features blogs and a YouTube channel with more than 50,000 followers dedicated to coverage and criticism of the diocese, is unusually well developed.
A few decades ago, Charlotte was the country’s smallest diocese. Since then, many Americans have migrated from the Northeast and Midwest and the diocese is in the top 20 percent overall with about 565,000 Catholics.
For more than 20 years, the bishop here was a popular conservative named Peter Jugis. Jugis was enthusiastic in the 2000s when Pope Benedict permitted much wider use of the old-fashioned Mass, which includes more Latin, Gregorian chants and a priest who faces away from — not toward — the congregation.
The Latin Mass community in Charlotte has grown to more than 1,000 today. Nearly a quarter of parishes in the past decade added altar rails, a low wall at the front of the sanctuary that separates the altar from the public seating. Often in more traditional parishes, the rails are paired with kneelers. Traditional Catholics often have the priest put the Communion wafer directly on their tongue, believing its more reverent than touching it with their hand.
In 2021, Pope Francis reversed Benedict’s expansion of the Latin Mass and even added more restrictions, saying its use had often doubled as rejection of the Second Vatican Council. Some conservative leaders called Francis’s action a “declaration of war.”
After Jugis retired in 2024 due to health reasons, Pope Francis replaced him with Martin. Martin, a former basketball coach, is a Franciscan, a community known for an emphasis on simplicity and poverty and seen today by some as more left-leaning because of its focus on social justice.
Last May, Martin ended the Latin Mass at all four parishes where they were held, offering it instead at a single chapel but requiring families who attend to still be part of their regular parish. Then in December came his letter saying Catholics could no longer use altar rails and kneelers while receiving Communion.
Catholics can choose to kneel on the ground if they wish, he wrote, but “pastors should not direct their faithful to do so as something that is ‘better.’” The norm, he wrote, with Catholics walking in procession, then standing to receive Communion, is meant to represent “that the Church journeys forward … as a pilgrim people on their way.”
Young and conservative
Advocates for traditional worship say they are actually the future of the church, not relics of its past.
Younger priests today are far more theologically conservative, they note. A survey by the Catholic Project found that 70 percent of priests ordained before 1975 described themselves as theologically progressive, while among those ordained after 2010, 70 percent said they were conservative or orthodox.
“If you want to know the future of the church, look to younger clergy. They are future priests, bishops, cardinals. That’s simple math,” said Monsignor Patrick Winslow, the diocese’s vicar general, or chief deputy to the bishop.
The survey also found, however, that U.S. priests ranked “access to the Latin Mass” as the last of 15 priorities, lower than creating young adult ministries, caring for the climate and outreach to LGBTQ people. But to the passionate and growing minority of traditional Catholics, such access — and Martin’s decision to limit it — is a matter of spiritual survival.
“I’m lost. And homeless,” said Lynn Hammers, a retired surgeon who came back to the Catholicism of her youth about a decade ago because of the Latin Mass. “It was so sacred, and deep. I saw that that’s God right on the altar.”
She goes to the Latin Mass chapel sometimes but also the more traditional-style regular Mass — with kneelers and altar rails — at her parish, St. Thomas Aquinas. The pastor there, she said, told congregants this month that he would wait for Rome to rule on the issue before making any changes. But she feels angst coming to Mass, not knowing what worship might look like.
“Who knows what will happen next,” she said. “To our parish? To our priests? To our faith?”
For now, the disputes about Communion are largely invisible to most Catholics in Charlotte. But there are other flash points.
In 2024, the Catholic school system decided to leave the mainstream private school accreditation body and seek accreditation from a new Catholic organization that it said would be able to assess better its religious qualities. Thousands of people, who were concerned this would degrade their children’s academic record in the eyes of secular colleges, signed petitions of protest. Some parents worried about a decision to separate boys and girls in a major Catholic middle school and the addition of more Masses to the school week.
Audrey Hood, a former Catholic school teacher, pulled her children from the school and moved because of the accreditation change.
“There is a more conservative, back-to-traditional roles that I think is permeating our entire country, and that’s the root of all this,” Hood said. “Instead of trying to find commonality and listen or understand, there is anger towards the bishop that’s unfounded. I’ve been here more than 15 years, and the Catholic community really changed. I think it’s just tracking with the climate of our country these days.”
In an interview with The Post, Martin said he wasn’t “threatened” by the priests’ challenge, and sees the moment as one of societal questioning. If the Vatican says he went beyond his rights, he would comply.
Still, he worries that the liturgy dispute is divisive and emphasizes individuals over the community.
“My first year in seminary, our director said: ‘Never be holier than Holy Mother Church.’ If the church is teaching us that it’s normative to stand, then that is reverent. We have to listen to the church,” he told The Post. “For me or someone else to say it’s not really reverent — where does it end? What if kneeling isn’t enough?”
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