Dozens of Charlotte Priests Appeal to Vatican Over Liturgical Restrictions

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Dozens of Charlotte Priests Appeal to Vatican Over Liturgical Restrictions

gloria.tv | January 6, 2026

31 priests of the Diocese of Charlotte have formally challenged recent liturgical directives issued by Bishop Michael Martin, submitting Dubia to of all places the Vatican.

The Substack.com account The Pillar reports that the priests’ letter to the Dicastery for Legislative Texts was sent on January 5. It questions whether the bishop has the authority to mandate the removal and prohibition of kneelers for Communion.

This a policy was announced in a “pastoral” letter by Bishop Martin on December 17. Temporary kneeling fixtures are required to be removed by Jan. 16.

Thirty-one priests are about a quarter of the diocesan presbyterate. They argue that kneeling for Communion is explicitly permitted by the General Instruction of the Roman Missal and part of the traditional liturgical practice of the Church.

Furthermore, the Dubia question Bishop Martin’s authority to prohibit certain vestments, liturgical prayers, gestures, and elements associated with the Mass of the Roman rite but referenced or permitted in universal Church law.

The priests state that Bishop Martin’s policies have caused widespread concern among both clergy and laity in the diocese since he assumed leadership in May 2024.

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Excerpt from Chris Jackson's Hiraeth in Exile post for January 6, 2026 [emphasis mine]:


The Charlotte dubia: “Remove the kneelers,” and call it pastoral

The Diocese of Charlotte has reached a point where priests are writing Rome to ask whether a bishop can forbid altar rails and kneelers for Communion, and even order existing fixtures removed on a deadline. That fact alone tells you what the liturgical war has become. It is no longer framed as a theological dispute over the nature of the Mass. It is enforced as interior design.

According to reporting on the priests’ letter, the questions address the removal of altar rails and prie-dieus, the prohibition of kneelers used by communicants who choose to kneel, and the wider issue of whether a diocesan bishop can suppress traditional gestures and ornaments simply because they look “preconciliar.” The priests cite the General Instruction’s own language about respecting “traditional practice” and avoiding arbitrary choice, then ask the obvious: if the Roman rite has long marked off the sanctuary and long received Holy Communion kneeling, who granted a local ordinary the authority to criminalize those customs by fiat.

Here is the deeper scandal. The dubia exist because the postconciliar system has turned obedience into a weapon against piety. A kneeler becomes “a problem” because it produces a posture the system has spent sixty years trying to extinguish: adoration. The rail is hated for the same reason. It draws a line, not merely between nave and sanctuary, also between the Catholic faith and the modern therapeutic religion that wants no boundaries anywhere. A rail says the sanctuary is not a multipurpose platform. A rail says Communion is not a handshake line. A rail says the priest is not a facilitator. A rail says the Eucharist is not a symbol. A rail says God is here.

The Charlotte story also reveals another truth. When priests try to resist within the official channels, they end up begging the very apparatus that enabled the destruction to protect them from a local enforcer. The Dicastery for Legislative Texts is asked to rescue Catholics from liturgical vandalism carried out under the banner of “unity.” The system creates the crisis, the system offers the appeal process, the system delays, the system issues a clarification with enough ambiguity to keep the managers in charge.

The result is predictable. Reverence survives on sufferance. One bishop allows it, the next bishop bans it, and a generation learns that the “rules” of worship are not derived from Tradition and doctrine, they are derived from personality and paperwork.