Charlotte Priests Beg Rome for Mercy as Abp. Hicks’ Vicar General Attends Gay “Wedding”

Charlotte priests revolt over Communion rails as Joliet’s vicar general is linked to a same sex ceremony and his boss heads for the biggest promotion in America

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.

Joliet and the “wedding” photo: the chancery as a moral crime scene

Photo courtesy of Complicit Clergy

While Charlotte argues over whether the faithful may kneel, Joliet is dealing with a different category of collapse: the chancery’s public normalization of grave sin.

Complicit Clergy reports that the diocesan chancellor, David Salvato, was “married” to a man in December, and that Fr. Richard Smith, the vicar general, attended the ceremony, with multiple sources claiming he appears in event photos. The piece frames this as public scandal requiring immediate removal of the vicar general if attendance is confirmed, along with transparency about any other diocesan employees present.

The chancellor is not a random parish staffer. The chancellor is embedded in the bishop’s governance. The vicar general is the bishop’s principal deputy. If a diocese can drift into a state where senior officials can attend a faux-marriage ceremony without apparent fear, the problem is not one man’s weakness. The problem is an environment. The environment has been catechized for decades to treat sexual morality as negotiable, scandal as survivable, and Church discipline as an embarrassment.

Now add the next fact. Bishop Ronald Hicks of Joliet has been appointed to succeed Cardinal Dolan in New York, with installation reported for early February 2026. The timing is ghastly. An episcopal career advances while the diocesan house burns. This is how the postconciliar regime signals priorities. Orthodoxy and discipline create “division.” Administrative competence and the correct public posture create promotion.

The grotesque irony is almost theological. The modern apparatus claims the authority to forbid a kneeler in Charlotte while tolerating public moral rot in the chancery culture that kneelers once helped form. The system still loves authority when authority humiliates Tradition. It loses interest in authority when authority would punish vice.

The proposed “traditional ordinariate”: an ecclesiastical reservation dressed as peace

Diane Montagna reports that Fr. Louis-Marie de Blignières has sent cardinals a proposal to create a dedicated jurisdiction for the old Roman rite, modeled in principle on military ordinariates, offering a stable framework for the vetus ordo communities. The proposal is presented as constructive, pragmatic, and aimed at easing a conflict that has grown sterile since Traditionis Custodes.

Call it what it is. It is a plea for legal asylum.

The traditionalist instinct behind the letter is understandable: diocesan structures have become unreliable, bishops have become liturgical regulators, and the faithful attached to the old Mass are treated as a tolerated nuisance until the next crackdown. A personal jurisdiction promises stability.

The admission is the real headline. A separate jurisdiction makes sense only when the “ordinary” structure is either hostile or incapable. The proposal implicitly concedes that the postconciliar rite and the postconciliar episcopate have produced an ongoing persecution of the old liturgy, not a pastoral integration. It also concedes something else: the claim of “one Roman rite in two forms” cannot survive the lived reality of suppression and contempt. Fr. Raffray even describes the internal contradiction between Benedict’s framing and Francis’s insistence on a single form, then points toward a practical recognition of two distinct Latin rites as the way forward.

Traditionalists will argue over whether an ordinariate is a trap, a ghetto, a providential lifeboat, or the next stage of containment. That debate is real. The devilish twist is this: the same Rome that would govern such an ordinariate is the Rome that authorized the crackdown. Any structure it erects can be revised, narrowed, staffed with enemies, or slowly suffocated. The reservation can be fenced in from the inside.

Still, the proposal functions as a confession. The center of gravity has shifted. The diocese no longer protects Tradition. Tradition seeks protection from the diocese.

Saturn in the Vatican paper: the aesthetic tells on the religion

Tradition in Action claims that the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, ran an image of Saturn on the January 2, 2026 issue, presented oddly and without clear connection to an article, with a caption referencing Saturday while the paper was dated Friday, then draws attention to the figure’s sexually ambiguous depiction and the possible symbolic resonance with modern sexual ideology.

Even if one rejects the site’s insinuations, the instinct behind them is understandable. When an official Catholic organ normalizes the aesthetic language of paganism, ambiguity, and eroticized symbolism, Catholics are trained to read it as messaging. The postconciliar establishment has made symbolism into policy. Pachamama taught everyone that “it is only a statue” functions as a lie told after the fact.

This also connects to the liturgical war. The same regime that strips sanctuaries of rails and crucifixes in the name of “noble simplicity” has no consistent allergy to images that flirt with the demonic imagination. It has one consistent allergy: anything that looks like Catholicism.

Women deacons: the report says no, the rhetoric says “not closed”

The Tablet reports Irish archbishops reacting with surprise and disappointment over the unanimity of a Vatican study group on women deacons, while emphasizing that Leo XIV has said the question remains open and that broader issues of women’s leadership and decision making remain “pressing.” Reuters similarly notes that the commission concluded women could not be ordained as deacons, while also conveying that the question remains open in the synodal process.

This is the postconciliar two step.

First, an expert group concludes the Church lacks grounds to do what activists want. Second, bishops respond by widening the frame from ordination to “leadership,” “co-responsibility,” “baptismal diaconia,” and decision making. Third, the press repeats the phrase “remains open” until the faithful internalize a sense of inevitability. Fourth, the next synodal phase produces some new “ministry” that functions like the thing that was denied, accompanied by claims that nothing doctrinal changed.

A Church with living faith speaks plainly about Holy Orders. A Church in revolution speaks in process language, then tests boundaries through practice. The endgame is not a female diaconate defined cleanly as sacramental ordination. The endgame is a feminized governance structure, a permanent lay and female managerial layer, a sacramental life treated as the priest’s narrow specialty, and the visible Church reimagined as a network of committees.

One does not need to believe the revolution will achieve every demand to see its trajectory. Even a “no” becomes fuel when the machine uses it to justify the next workaround.

Kwanzaa in the Octave: unity as a substitute gospel

On December 26, the USCCB’s daily reflection video for the feast of St. Stephen explicitly paired the martyr’s witness with the beginning of Kwanzaa, anchoring the meditation in “Umoja,” the principle of unity, then concluded with an appeal to “embrace the diversity within our faith.”

St. Stephen is not an icon of managed unity. He is the public refutation of a false religious peace. His unity is unity in Christ, unity purchased by confession, unity sealed by blood. When a bishops’ conference links Stephen to Kwanzaa as “faith and culture speaking together,” it reveals the postconciliar reflex: replace the supernatural with the sociological.

The defenders will say Kwanzaa is merely cultural, a harmless nod, a gesture of inclusion. The problem is catechetical. The USCCB placed it beside a martyr in the Church’s calendar rhythm, within the Octave, where the liturgy forms instincts. That is formation through association.

Then there is the awkward fact pattern about Kwanzaa’s origin. The Federalist describes the holiday as a 1966 invention of Maulana Karenga, outlines his political milieu, and highlights his criminal conviction related to torture allegations from the 1970s. Kwanzaa is not an ancient inheritance baptized by time. It is modern, ideological, and contested.

A Catholic episcopate serious about guarding the faithful would ask a simple question. What does this have to do with the feast of the first martyr? Why does the Church’s public teaching voice feel the need to borrow a secular unity narrative during the Octave of Christmas?

Here the answer is not complicated. The postconciliar religion prefers themes that require no dogma and provoke no conversion. Unity, justice, diversity, community, healing. These are safe. Martyrdom becomes an illustration for activism. Sanctity becomes a metaphor for social cohesion.

The map drawn in one week

Charlotte shows liturgy reduced to policies. Joliet shows discipline evaporated at the top while careers climb. Rome shows traditionalists negotiating for an administrative carveout because diocesan life has become a hostile environment. The Vatican paper shows the symbolic world sliding into pagan ambiguity. The synodal women-deacons saga shows the machine’s ability to keep revolutionary pressure alive through process language. The USCCB reflection shows the hierarchy’s comfort with grafting modern ideological holidays onto the liturgical year for the sake of messaging.

This is one religion. It is not Catholicism.

Catholics who still have the faith of their fathers are learning a hard lesson. The crisis is not localized. It is not merely a few bad bishops. It is not merely a few scandals. It is a system that punishes reverence, tolerates vice, markets ambiguity, and baptizes modern narratives to keep the faithful calm.

A rail in Charlotte becomes a threat. A chancery “wedding” photo in Joliet becomes a managerial headache. A personal jurisdiction for the old Mass becomes a proposed compromise. A pagan god in the Vatican paper becomes a talking point. A commission report becomes a pathway. A martyr becomes a lesson about diversity.

The map is drawn. The only open question is whether Catholics will keep pretending they do not see it.

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