There is a war being waged against reverent Catholic worship. Now is not the time to be fighting each other.
There is a phrase that has circulated in traditional Catholic circles for the better part of a decade, spoken with increasing urgency since Traditionis Custodes landed like a hammer blow in the summer of 2021: Unite the Clans.
It is borrowed imagery — Scottish Highland clans, ancient and proud, who share blood and ancestry and yet feud among themselves while their common enemies grow stronger. The application to traditional Catholicism is uncomfortable precisely because it is accurate. The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter. The Institute of Christ the King. The Society of Saint Pius X. The Institute of the Good Shepherd. The diocesan Latin Mass community. All of them kneeling before the same altar, singing the same chant, offering the same ancient sacrifice — and all of them, to varying degrees, operating in separate and sometimes suspicious isolation from one another.
Unite the Clans is a call to stop that.
But there is an extension of this call that does not get made often enough — one that this article wishes to make directly, clearly, and without apology. The call to unity must extend to our brothers and sisters in the reform-of-the-reform movement: those faithful Catholics who attend the Novus Ordo, who love it, who are working from within it to restore its reverence, its Latin, its sacred orientation, its dignity. They are not our rivals. They are not the enemy. They are, in every meaningful sense, our allies — and we need each other more than most of us have yet admitted.
The Fragmentation Problem
To appreciate why this unity matters, we have to be honest about what fragmentation costs us.
Traditional Catholics did not lose the liturgical battle of the twentieth century because they were outnumbered. They lost, in large part, because they were divided — and because those seeking to dismantle the sacred inheritance of the Roman Rite were not. The progressives who reshaped the liturgy were united around a shared vision, however flawed. They spoke with one voice in commissions, in synods, in chanceries. Their opponents did not.
We are repeating that mistake in the present moment.
After Traditionis Custodes, the evidence is now overwhelming that restricting reverent Catholic worship is a project of coordination and institutional power — and it is not limited to the Traditional Latin Mass. Look at what has been documented in diocese after diocese across the United States and around the world. In Detroit, the Archbishop issued norms in June 2025 prohibiting ad orientem celebration in the Ordinary Form entirely — not just the Old Mass, but any Mass — and mandating the installation of freestanding altars within 180 days. In Charlotte, a pastoral letter directed the removal of altar rails and kneelers used for kneeling reception of Holy Communion. In Seattle, archdiocesan norms require explicit episcopal permission for any ad orientem Mass celebrated with a congregation, and explicitly prohibit what they call “hybrid ritual practices” — meaning any priest who dares introduce the reverence of the ancient form into the modern rite. In Venice, no priest may celebrate a public Mass ad orientem without written permission from the Bishop. In Washington and Chicago and Cincinnati, similar “permission regime” frameworks have been established, quietly placing the burden of proof on the reverent celebrant rather than on the iconoclast.
Read that list again. The targets are not merely those who celebrate the 1962 Missal. They are targets of the orientation of the priest at Mass. Of the posture of the faithful at Communion. Of the language of the liturgy. Of the very altar itself. The project being advanced by the most aggressively progressive dioceses is not a project against the Traditional Latin Mass alone. It is a project against the sacred. Against reverence. Against beauty as a vehicle of divine encounter.
If that is the battlefield, then every Catholic who fights for reverence — whether in the extraordinary or the ordinary form — stands on the same side of it.
What We Have in Common
Let us name it plainly, because it is more than many people realize.
Both the traditional Latin Mass community and the reform-of-the-reform Novus Ordo community believe that:
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass deserves the most beautiful worship the Church can offer. Not merely adequate. Not merely valid. Beautiful — with all the weight that word carries in the Catholic tradition, from the lex orandi of the Roman Rite to the theology of Aquinas to the vision of Benedict XVI, who taught so persistently that beauty is not decoration but revelation, a participation in the splendor of the divine Truth.
Kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament is not a personal quirk — it is an act of theological confession. When a Catholic kneels to receive the Body of Christ on the tongue, or bows in adoration before the altar, that posture is not nostalgia. It is a creed enacted in the body. When a diocese mandates the removal of the kneelers that facilitate that act, it is not making a neutral architectural decision. It is making a theological one. Both traditional and reform-of-the-reform Catholics understand this, feel it, and resist it.
Latin belongs in the Roman Rite. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the very document of the Second Vatican Council that authorized liturgical reform, explicitly stated that Latin is to be preserved in the Latin rites, and assigned Gregorian chant “pride of place” in the Roman liturgy. Neither of these things is a traditionalist invention. They are the actual text of Vatican II. Reform-of-the-reform Catholics are often the ones insisting most loudly on this point — that the Council did not, in fact, mandate what happened afterward — and they are right.
The priest facing God at the altar is not a rubrical accident. Ad orientem worship is not a private preference of eccentric clergy. It is the ancient posture of Christian prayer — priest and people together, facing the Lord, offering sacrifice toward the east in anticipation of His return. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal does not prohibit it. A 2000 clarification from the Congregation for Divine Worship confirmed explicitly that GIRM 299 does not exclude ad orientem celebration. The dioceses that ban it or require permission for it are making a policy choice — not enforcing a liturgical mandate. Both traditional and reform-of-the-reform Catholics know this and resist the misrepresentation.
These are not minor overlapping interests. These are the foundations of an entire liturgical vision — one that both communities share, even if they carry it in different vessels.
A Word About Our Differences
Yes — we have differences. Let us not be naive about them.
Those attached to the Traditional Latin Mass believe, with very good reason, that the Usus Antiquior represents the fullest and most organic expression of the Roman Rite’s liturgical tradition. The weight of the saints, the continuity of twenty centuries, the unbroken thread from the apostolic Church — these things matter, and they are not reproduced simply by making the Novus Ordo more reverent. The concern that the Ordinary Form, however beautifully celebrated, represents a rupture in that living tradition is a serious one. It deserves serious engagement, not dismissal.
And yet — this is not that article. Not because the question is unimportant, but because there is a more urgent one before us now: will there be any space at all for reverent worship in the Church of the coming decades? That question cannot wait for the other one to be settled. Indeed, the answer to the other question depends, in part, on the answer to this one. A Church that has been stripped of altar rails, silenced in Latin, and forced to a mandatory architectural posture of horizontality is not a Church well-positioned to rediscover the depth of her ancient tradition.
Those differences are real. Those debates are worth having. But they are not today’s battle. Today’s battle is for the preservation of the sacred in any form — and on that battlefield, we are not opponents.
An Argument for Traditionalists
To those who love the Traditional Latin Mass: I understand the temptation to hold the reform-of-the-reform movement at arm’s length. You may believe — with justification — that a well-celebrated Novus Ordo, however beautiful, does not fully address the theological problems of the post-conciliar period. That may be true. But consider what you lose by treating reform-of-the-reform Catholics as irrelevant or even adversarial.
These are people who are fighting, from within the parish structures of ordinary Catholic life, for exactly the things you value — Latin, chant, kneeling, ad orientem, reverence, the transcendent. They are doing it at personal cost, in many cases against the resistance of their own pastors and diocesan offices. They are building communities of genuine liturgical renewal. They are raising children who know Gregorian chant and kneel at Communion and understand that the Mass is a sacrifice, not a gathering.
And when the Archbishop of Detroit bans ad orientem in the Ordinary Form, or the Bishop of Charlotte removes the altar rails, these communities are being persecuted alongside you. Their fight is your fight. Their loss is your loss. A Catholic world in which the reform-of-the-reform has been suppressed and driven out is a Catholic world in which the conditions for any liturgical renewal — including a full return to tradition — are far worse than they are today.
You do not have to agree with their liturgical judgment to recognize that they are your allies. You do not have to pretend the differences do not exist to cooperate in defending what you both hold dear. Unite the clans — yes, even this clan. They are not your enemies. They are your flank.
An Argument for Reform-of-the-Reform Catholics
To those who love a beautifully celebrated Ordinary Form: you may feel a certain distance from the world of the Traditional Latin Mass. Perhaps it feels culturally foreign, or overly political, or associated with attitudes you find uncomfortable. Perhaps you simply prefer the reformed rite, celebrated with the dignity it deserves. That is entirely legitimate.
But consider this: the Traditional Latin Mass community has been fighting this battle far longer than you have, and they have learned things about how it goes that are directly relevant to your situation. They have seen the playbook — the “permission regimes,” the rhetorical framing of reverence as rupture, the treatment of kneeling as disobedience and Latin as division. What is being done to TLM communities today is the template for what will be done to reform-of-the-reform communities tomorrow. In some dioceses, it is already happening.
More than that: the Traditional Latin Mass is not a competing vision of Catholicism. It is the deep root from which your own liturgical aspirations grow. Your love of chant is the love of the Graduale Romanum. Your love of ad orientem is the love of a posture that the ancient rite never abandoned. Your love of kneeling at Communion is the love of a discipline that the Church held universally until very recently. You are not in conflict with tradition — you are reaching toward it. The TLM community is not your adversary in that reaching. They are, in a very real sense, the living witness to where you are trying to go.
Stand with them. Defend them when they are targeted. And let them stand with you.
What Unity Actually Looks Like
No one is asking for a merger of institutions, or a pretense that all disagreements have been resolved. The FSSP and the SSPX will continue to have their canonical differences. The question of the Council and its proper interpretation will continue to be debated by serious Catholics. That is fine. None of that prevents the following:
Mutual respect in speech and writing — refusing to caricature those who share your love of the sacred even when you disagree on specifics. Active solidarity when any community is targeted by restrictive diocesan policies — showing up, speaking out, signing petitions, attending each other’s Masses as a gesture of communion. Joint witness wherever possible — shared processions, shared devotions, shared voices speaking to bishops and to the broader Church about the rights of the faithful to reverent worship. The simple recognition that we are all, in the end, kneeling before the same Lord, and that our common desire to worship Him in the beauty of holiness is more fundamental than the rites that carry that desire forward.
The clans need not merge. They need only stop treating each other as strangers.
The Stakes
Look again at the list of dioceses. Detroit. Charlotte. Seattle. Venice. Washington. Cincinnati. Chicago. In each of them, bishops have moved — with varying degrees of restriction — against the very features that define reverent, traditional Catholic worship within the Ordinary Form itself. This is not a TLM-only crisis. This is a crisis of the sacred.
In a Church that has jettisoned altar rails and banned the ancient posture of priestly prayer and treated kneeling as a sign of liturgical disorder, the question of whether TLM Catholics and reform-of-the-reform Catholics can find common cause is not an academic one. It is, in a very practical sense, the question of whether the sacred will survive to the next generation.
“Unite the Clans” has always been an urgent call. In the present moment, it is more urgent than ever — and its scope must be wider than we have yet allowed. Every Catholic who desires to worship God in the beauty of holiness, whether in the ancient rite or the reformed one, belongs inside that circle.
The sacred is not divisible by rite. And neither, in the end, are we.
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