Michael Thomas Martin

In barely a year, Bishop Martin made the Diocese of Charlotte a byword for the campaign against the old liturgy. The enacted facts are not in dispute: the Traditional Latin Mass, offered at four parishes, was consolidated into a single chapel of some three hundred and fifty seats, far from where many of its eleven hundred weekly worshippers live; and a diocese-wide prohibition of altar rails followed. A flourishing thing was gathered up and confined to one room.

Then there is the matter of the leaked draft. We are careful here, because fairness demands it: the most startling proposals — that celebration toward the Lord is 'not appropriate,' that the use of Latin is 'disturbing,' that a Spanish-speaking people's cry of 'My Lord and my God' is out of place — come from a document the diocese called an early draft and appears to have shelved under pressure. We do not lay enacted policy at his feet that was never enacted. But a man is known by what he reaches for, and what was reached for here was a war not only on the old Mass but on reverence itself, even in the new.

The traditional Catholic cannot read this record as anything but hostile. Charlotte under Bishop Martin pressed the restriction of the ancient rite about as far as a diocese has dared, and signalled a wish to press further. He is, on the evidence, no friend of Tradition — and we pray the wound he has opened in his own flock may yet be healed.