Posted on 06/04/2025 8:15:45 AM PDT by ebb tide
he leaked Liturgical Norms document from Bishop Michael Martin of the Diocese of Charlotte reads like a parody of 1970s fervor, delivered by a tyrannical hand through a series of ironically rigid dictates. They are poised to cause direct harm to the priests of the diocese and, through their pain, to faithful parishioners.
The man who claims that the liturgy is not the place for “our preferences” has decided to turn it into his playground. While slighting the decisions of individual parishes that reflect pastoral choices, he exercised his own whim with disregard to nuance. He claimed that “there are no particularities that would allow any of us to contravene the magisterium of the Church or the rich tradition that has been handed down to us,” and then he dictated changes that are in violation of the GIRM and which denigrate every traditional practice that he had seen being exercised in the diocese.
An area that hasn’t been considered enough is the effect upon priests who have offered their lives in service to God and who now face what can only be described as abuse. In refusing pastoral discretion and personal acts of piety, a priest is denied the fullness of his vocation and is reduced to a mere executor of another man’s frivolous preferences. His role as alter Christus—another Christ—is denied as he is reduced to a mere liturgical functionary.
Those who love God enough to sacrifice themselves for Him lose the ability to celebrate Mass with the reverence that is due—with symbolic acts that reflect their devotion and love of Christ. The priest participates in the power of consecrating the Body and Blood of Christ, which he exercises in the person of Christ. To interfere in this sacred exercise and reduce every element to a diocesan policy, detached from the universal tradition of the Church, is to dishonor the very nature of Holy Orders. Ironically, it is a hyper-clericalism that denies hierarchy.
Let us be clear: it is not the case that this bishop is merely bringing Vatican II to fruition, as he claims. Rather, his exhortations run contrary to it. Instead, he is bringing the worst of 1970s liturgical abuses to bear. While citing Sacrosanctum Concilium selectively, he demands the removal of all Latin from the liturgy, including as chants and responses, while the very same document that he quotes says the opposite: “The use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites.”
Thus, the commands of the bishop become expressions from outside of the larger body and universal tradition of the Church. They form a diocese that reflects the iron hand of one man’s preferences. The proposed norms are rigid enough to dictate almost every motion by priests, ironically under the guise of openness.
Such dictatorialism denies that a pastor might have well-contemplated reasons for his choices. St. Gregory the Great insisted in Pastoral Rule that the priest must be rooted in what might be called “contemplative dignity,” learning in stillness what he is to proclaim outwardly in his speech and actions. But if his outward decisions cannot reflect that contemplation and personal piety, his dignity is eviscerated by the hollowness of callous decisions made above him.
In attempting to follow their bishop, priests necessarily become the unwilling instrument of pain for their flocks, denying the faithful the reverent Masses that have formed them and in which they find the recognizable sacrifice of Our Lord. Denied even a crucifix on the altar, for the visual representation of Christ is reduced to a “visual impairment,” they are made to stand before their people and perform a gesture that wounds both priest and laity: a liturgy stripped of sacred orientation, emptied of its symbolic transcendence, and recast as a horizontal display. It is a humiliation not only of their priesthood but of their humanity, as they must act against both conscience and formation, offering not what they know to be fitting but what they are told is expedient.
There is a cruelty to a set of commands that target those, clergy and laity, who merely wish to show the utmost respect to God—denying them the spiritual nourishment that can satisfy and then attempting to turn that former source of consolation into an entertainment service. Nobody can be entertained into fullness, but rather, that is the vain temptation of the world. They will be left empty by mandate, grieved at the abuse of their Lord. Under the veneer of accessibility, they are denied access to that which they were made for. After all, reverence is not just due; such acts symbolize reality and help to remind us of our place, of the smallness of our trials, and of His Greatness.
St. Thomas Aquinas taught that in sacraments the signification ought to be expressive because they are signs of something sacred insofar as they sanctify men. Therefore, they ought to signify the effect which they produce.
Our acts of reverence during the Mass ought to be fitting toward what they signify. The rite of the Mass is framed to make present again the Passion of Christ, which justly demands our shared respect, thanks, and grief. When the symbolism is flattened and replaced with banality, there is a failure of our behaviors to reflect the truth of what is being executed. When the focus is migrated from Christ to the laity, it teaches falsely and forms them incorrectly. Under the proposed plans, priests are forced to play a role in this reductionism.
Then there are the young men who answered the call and are now in a seminary program that ballooned under the guidance of the former bishop. As those men attempt to say yes to God with the surrender of their lives, they now do so before a shepherd who appears indifferent to their needs—and who, by blurring the line between laity and clergy, diminishes their sacrifice and questions their utility.
It is not the case that the laity become better fed or formed if there are fewer barriers (visual or otherwise) between us and the sanctuary. Instead, that separation, that exaltation of all things Divine, is what delivers us out of ourselves and centers us appropriately on the Eternal. It is an orientation toward God that causes us to refocus away from the trivial and the frenetic and into the peace of the Transcendent.
The sanctuary is not a stage, and the liturgy is not a conversation. It is an encounter with the Holy, ordered to God’s glory and our transformation. When the boundary between sacred and profane is blurred, the faithful are not elevated—they are flattened. And the priest, caught between fidelity to his bishop and fidelity to the sacred, is coerced into betraying both flock and vocation. Let us not violate God nor His servants.
Ping
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