The War on Reverence: Kneeling Is Now Considered Rebellion

In Charlotte, North Carolina, the faithful have just learned that Bishop Michael Martin has decreed the removal of altar rails across his diocese beginning November 30, the first Sunday of Advent. Parishes with temporary kneelers must remove them. The justification? Allegiance to the “norms” of the U.S. bishops’ conference.

The irony is breathtaking. Three out of every four Charlotte seminarians come from parishes with altar rails. Those rails, physical and spiritual, have formed the very men now preparing for priesthood. The gesture of kneeling to receive the Body of Christ has not diminished vocations; it has nourished them. Yet the bishop’s solution to a vocations boom appears to be: remove what made it possible.

This is not the governance of a father protecting reverence but the administration of a functionary protecting uniformity. When the act of kneeling becomes “inconsistent with national norms,” the bureaucracy has already devoured the Faith.

My X exchange with Fr. Peter Totleben, O.P., revealed something larger than a disagreement over canon law. It exposed the chasm between two religions now occupying the same Church. Totleben insists that Martin’s decree is “lawful,” and that obedience consists in doing what one is told, even when the order erases a practice older than the bishop’s own office. He calls the assertion of a “right to disobey” “literally big modernism.”

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