Any Catholic with a pulse recognizes that something strange is happening in the Diocese of Charlotte. It has taken a volte-face and decided to walk backward.
Strange, for nothing irks Synodal Catholics more than being accused of looking backward. To them, anything in the Catholic Church that preceded 1965 is anachronistic, in fact, a very offense against God. They kneel at the altar of novelty, embracing its controlling dogma of Progress with its central tenet: tomorrow’s ideas are always superior to yesterday’s. An excrescence of Hegel, you may say.
Perhaps. But you must look further back to the French Revolution. Those cretins sought a bloody do-over of history, daring even to create an entirely new calendar. Their remote inspiration was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who declared, with jagged irony, “sometimes you must force men to be free.” Robespierre and his fellow Jacobins followed that counsel with every thump of the guillotine.
The Modern credo dutifully worships at the shrine of the New. They chant always a New Beginning, death to the past, never look back. No surprise that every modern dictator sings out of this songbook. Pol Pot wished to bring Cambodia into the glorious Present by declaring 1974 year one. He then sadistically decimated one quarter of his population to insure that prized liberation. Not too far away, in China, Mao Zedong embraced that deadly dream even if it meant brutally slaughtering millions of his fellow Chinese to make the point.
Only one thing from the “past” do the Moderns cherish: repression, quick and thorough. Echoes of that contradiction can be seen in America today: law-fare, virtue signaling, free-speech repression, organized pillaging, and exacting conformity. Any trace of the Old Ways is met with swift retribution and social shunning. Anyone esteeming the Past earns Hawthorne’s scarlet letter—but with a cruel twist: not for disobeying God’s Law but for obeying it.
Invariably, this metaphysical vacuum eventually spawns dissenters—namely: Orwell, Huxley, Solzhenitsyn. Something in the soul of men eventually stirs. A brave few remember. And what they remember is our noble Past—that Past with its truth, its wisdom, its solidity, its beauty, and its conformity with the soothing truths of human nature. A few quickly turn into an army. No longer do they want to worship the advance of time. They crave the Timeless.
This return to the timeless is appearing in shocking numbers, to the chagrin of the aging gatekeepers of the Dead Past. One intellectual light is John Mac Ghlionn of The Catholic Herald, who recently gave this growing trend explosive expression:
We were told the future would be limitless, utterly empowering. We were told we would be happiest with fewer rules, fewer roles, fewer traditions. Just vibes.
But the experiment failed. We’re lonelier. Sicker. Spiritually starved. In place of meaning, we got algorithms. In place of transcendence, we got TikTok therapy. And beneath the saccharine haze of self-care, many young people feel the gnawing presence of something missing.
If ever there was a punch in the gut of the myth of the Modern, this is it.
Which brings us to the Diocese of Charlotte.
Its new successor to the apostles is one of few remaining devotees of a Dead Past—not the ever-new past of truth, beauty, and goodness but a warrior of a past beginning in 1965. He has drunk deeply at the springs of the Modern Project. For him, every single token of the Church’s Tradition, especially in the Sacred Liturgy, is a noose around the Catholic neck, something to be censured. He looks upon it as an obstacle to that ever-evolving Omega Point. Those in the know tell us that he has mastered transactional techniques so emblematic of the Modern Man. For him, all is process, dialogue, performance. With the Moderns, such leaders abhor finality in being. All must be open to perpetual revision lest the Process be frustrated.
This whole sterile and discredited enterprise is on full display in the bishop’s carefully organized assault on the traditions of the Sacred Liturgy. As with all devoted Moderns, his teeth were set on edge when he arrived in Charlotte a year ago (after the premature and mysterious exit of the esteemed Bishop Jugis) and beheld a diocese returning itself to theological, liturgical, and disciplinary sanity.
It is imperative to understand the world that shaped the bishop’s temperament and perspective: his Franciscan Order. While every religious Order in the Church sealed its compact with Modernity, none did it with as much gusto as the Franciscans (except, of course, the Jesuits). Franciscan formation was (and is) a thorough, unrelenting, and comprehensive program in the abhorrence of the Church’s past—theological, moral, liturgical, and artistic. After years of that steady indoctrination, a priest is launched with the zeal of invading paratroopers. As they mount their offensive, their battle plan is a simple one: take no prisoners.
As with all Moderns, these priests will embrace only one part of the pre-1965 Church: its disciplinary machinery. This works well especially with recalcitrant clergy firmly wedded to the timeless traditions of the Church. Esteeming obedience (to be frank, an unnuanced obedience), they instantly conform. Modern bishops depend upon this knee-jerk conformity.
It must be carefully noted that these Modern priests themselves (and bishops) adhere to a highly selective obedience. In the past twelve years, they shouted obedience to the Holy See, while they have routinely disobeyed the Holy See for all the decades preceding. Aside from this self-serving obedience, they would consider obedience to the Church’s doctrinal, moral, and liturgical tradition to be dangerously retrograde.
Many bishops adhere to this Modern mindset. But none match the ferocity of the new bishop of Charlotte. For a bishop who subscribes to the free-floating, give-and-take, non-committal Synodal Listening, he governs like a medieval bishop—with one glaring difference: medieval bishops wielded the sword against those who lapsed in their Catholic beliefs; the Modern bishops wield it against those who do not. Look at the granular intensity of his liturgical bans. It bespeaks an idée fixe which undermines his celebrated, indiscriminate openness to all things. Not him. My, even Mao ruled, “let a thousand flowers bloom.”
Tsk, tsk, Bishop Martin.
The bishop of Charlotte labors beneath the carapace of a hollow and spent theological past. He does not seem to notice that the young people today have rejected his fondness for a Woodstock hippy past, now embracing a Chartres pilgrimage future.
Let me return again to the rousing prose of Mr. Mac Ghlionn:
Catholicism offers what the modern world cannot: structure. Discipline. Mystery. It doesn’t whisper that you’re perfect just the way you are. It demands transformation. It demands submission—to something older, wiser, and greater than you. To be Catholic is to live inside a story. A two-thousand-year-old, blood-soaked, gold-threaded, world-shaping story. It has martyrs and miracles. Saints and scoundrels. Architecture that makes you weep. A God who became man. A carpenter who suffered for your sins. A virgin mother crowned in heaven. Try fitting that into a 15-second Instagram reel. …
You don’t walk into a traditional Catholic Mass and feel like you have stumbled into a self-help seminar with hymns. You feel the weight of two millennia settle on to your shoulders. There are no mood boards, no fog machines, no pastors in skinny jeans offering life hacks. There is only the priest, the altar, the sacrifice, and the silence. A silence that, for many, is more honest than any sermon. …
In a culture obsessed with identity, Catholicism offers identity through surrender. Not the curated, performative kind, but a cruciform kind—dying to self to live in Christ. It’s everything the modern self recoils at, which is precisely why it is so powerful.
My goodness! Move over Chesterton.
