Leo’s Knoxville Bishop Kills the Latin Mass; Leo Says it Doesn’t Foster Communion With Others, Can Numb Our Hearts

As dioceses shutter the Latin Mass and Leo XIV preaches against “forms of worship” that “do not foster communion,” Rome’s interfaith machine celebrates Diwali and Nostra Aetate.

The Silence of the Lamps

In Knoxville, Tennessee, the last candle of tradition is being snuffed out. The diocese has announced that all Traditional Latin Masses will cease by the end of 2025. The letter handed out at Holy Ghost parish was polite, measured, and devastating. It thanked the faithful for their patience as the Extraordinary Form “transitions to the Ordinary Form.” The priest promised the rail would stay, the Latin would remain, and the chant would linger, but only as decorative relics draped over the Novus Ordo.

This, we are told, is obedience to Traditionis Custodes. In practice it is the mutilation of living tradition under the guise of “unity.” The faithful who uprooted their lives to live near a functioning TLM parish are now told to be patient and “trust.” The pattern is unmistakable: from Charlotte to Detroit to now Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Johnson City, bishops are preemptively enacting the will of Rome even before Leo XIV lifts a finger.

And he will lift one soon enough.

Chattanooga: “I Too Am a Man Under Authority”

If Knoxville was the bureaucratic prelude, Chattanooga was the pastoral execution.

At the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, the Latin Mass faithful gathered on October 12 expecting another of their Sunday celebrations. Instead, they were met with what the Charlotte Latin Mass Community called a “deeply offensive sermon;” a final spiritual blow delivered under the banner of “unity.”

The homily by Fr. J. David Carter, titled “Treasures New and Old: Unity in Faith Post-Traditionis Custodes,” reads like a case study in clerical gaslighting. The text, handed out after Mass, is a portrait of a man pleading submission while crushing those who had already submitted.

Fr. Carter begins by recounting the parish’s faithful observance of the 1962 Missal since 2014, only to pivot: “Since 2021 we have been living on borrowed time,” he writes. “We are not the masters of the liturgy; we are its servants.” The faithful, he insists, must embrace the “path of unity,” which in this case means total surrender.

He quotes the centurion of Luke’s Gospel; “I am a man under authority;” applying it not to Christ but to Bishop Mark Beckman, whom he praises for his “manly authority.” Then comes the refrain he orders his flock to adopt: “Domine non sum dignus… I too am a man under authority.”

Authority, yes. But truth? Not a word. The faithful are told their attachment to the old rite is sentimental. They are assured that “no one is being deprived of the sacraments.” They are told that “to remain Catholic is to remain united with the successor of St. Peter.”

And they are warned, explicitly, not to seek refuge with the Society of St. Pius X, which he accuses of “rebellion and schism.” He quotes a 1997 Vatican document asserting that attending SSPX chapels could be “a wound to the unity Christ desires.”¹

(See footnote for commentary on that and other TLM options in the area)

The sermon culminates in a chilling inversion of meaning: “We are not losing the Mass,” Fr. Carter declares. “We are gaining unity.”

To the faithful who had just lost the only diocesan traditional Latin Mass in their city, this was not unity. It was the clerical smile of a shepherd turning off the lamp and telling his flock the dark is good for them.

The Charlotte Latin Mass Community called it what it was: “spiritual abuse.”

The diocese calls it “synodality in action.”

The Anathema of Trent Meets the Tenderness of Leo

At the Jubilee of Marian Spirituality on October 12, Leo XIV declared that “some forms of worship do not foster communion with others and can numb our hearts.”

The context was pious; the implication was profane. Spoken just days after another diocese suppressed the Latin Mass, this line is an indictment. When a pontiff says certain “forms of worship” numb the heart, he is suggesting that the form sanctified by the saints, codified by Trent, and canonized by Quo Primum is somehow spiritually defective, even dangerous.

This is sacrilege. To claim that the ancient Roman Rite, the very form of the Mass in which countless saints were sanctified, “does not foster communion” is to call evil good and good evil. It is to invert the very purpose of worship, making fraternity the measure of truth rather than truth the foundation of fraternity.

Trent anathematized those who claim the traditional rites “may be despised or omitted.” Leo’s words bring that curse upon himself.

The Media Pope and His New Prophets

If there is one thing the post-conciliar Vatican excels at, it is moral projection. On October 12, Leo XIV stood before a hall of journalists and solemnly warned against the dangers of “false information.” Quoting Hannah Arendt, he lamented that totalitarianism begins when “the distinction between fact and fiction, and the distinction between true and false, no longer exist.”

The irony is not subtle, it’s radioactive.

This is the same Vatican that hides financial scandals behind “synodal confidentiality,” that buries abuse reports, that manipulates papal translations to soften heresy, and that bans the only form of worship immune to ideological distortion. Leo’s plea for “free, rigorous, and objective information” is the bureaucratic self-portrait of the modernist machine pretending to be persecuted truth-tellers.

Rich Raho dutifully amplified the line, posting the quote with reverence as though it were a new Magna Carta for Catholic media. But the real takeaway was captured by my own reply: “The ultimate gaslight.” Catholic media, and now Trad Inc., hide the truth about Leo and the Bergoglian Church every day while parroting calls for “rigorous journalism.” They are not watchdogs; they are handlers.

It is not “fake news” that endangers the Church, it’s the curated half-truths of those who know exactly where the rot lies and choose silence for access. The Catholic press has become what the secular press already is: a protection racket for power disguised as professionalism.

When Leo calls for journalists to be “a barrier against those who divide through lies,” he is really warning against the few who still name the division his own revolution created. Those who refuse to pretend that apostasy is development are the ones the Vatican now calls “extremists.”

This is why new platforms have emerged. The Catholic press no longer reports, it translates and apologizes. The task of telling the truth has passed, as I wrote, to those outside the clerical information cartel: writers, independent outlets, and laity who no longer confuse credentialed restraint with moral clarity.

The gaslight works only if you let it.

The Festival of False Light

While Knoxville’s Catholics mourned their final High Mass, the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue sent cheerful greetings to Hindus celebrating Diwali. The letter, citing Nostra Aetate, praised the “victory of light over darkness” and invited Christians to join hands with Hindus “in both small and great ways to nurture peace.”

The same Church that refuses to permit the Mass of the Ages in a parish church now urges Catholics to participate in a pagan feast honoring Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity. The same hierarchy that treats the faithful’s love for the old rite as “rigid” speaks of “building bridges through dialogue and encounter.”

It is a grim poetry: as the true Light of the world is exiled from His own altars, Rome genuflects before false lights from the East.

The Nostra Aetate Church

The Diwali message commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, calling it “a global project… generously supported and championed by people of diverse beliefs and non-beliefs alike.” It is difficult to imagine a more damning sentence.

The religion of Nostra Aetate is not Catholicism; it is humanism baptized in sentimentality. It reduces salvation to social peace, replacing conversion with “dialogue,” and truth with “reciprocal understanding.” Its “peace” is not Christ’s but Babel’s: unity without faith, tolerance without truth, light without grace.

Leo XIV is not merely continuing this revolution; he is its perfection. Under Francis, the Church flirted with syncretism. Under Leo, she celebrates it.

Trad Inc. and the Great Accommodation

The most disheartening spectacle is not Leo’s apostasy, it is the submission of those who once fought against it. The same commentators who thundered against Francis now plead for calm. The same outlets that decried Pachamama now call for “prudence” and “charity.” They rationalize every outrage as a test of patience, every betrayal as a misunderstanding.

Eric Sammons, once proud to call Francis an abusive father, now calls Leo a misunderstood one. He tells us anger is unbecoming, that we must be “slow to speak, slow to anger.” This is not spirituality, but sedation. The crisis is not that Catholics are too angry but that they have been taught to feel guilty for righteous anger.

Sammons’s sanctimony would be laughable if it weren’t so emblematic of the rot. He postures as the voice of reason urging Catholics to be “slow to anger” toward Leo, but the record shows that he had already gone soft on Francis long before Leo ever appeared. In October 2024, while the Bergoglian regime was still bulldozing the Faith, Sammons publicly announced that he would “no longer criticize Pope Francis for the remainder of his pontificate.” The man who once claimed righteous anger at abuse decided to retire mid-fight.

Then, with Leo’s election, he re-emerged to scold those who refused to join him in ecclesial Stockholm Syndrome. His later essay “Slow to Anger” is the coping mechanism of a man desperate to stay respectable inside a collapsing institution. He surrendered first, and now calls surrender a virtue.

The post-conciliar church doesn’t demand faith but docility. It wants calm sheep for slaughter, not soldiers for Christ.

The Real Numbness

Leo warns that some forms of worship “numb our hearts.” But it is the new worship, the liturgy of ambiguity, the ritual of perpetual dialogue, that has anesthetized the soul of the Church.

The Novus Ordo numbs because it desacralizes. The endless ecumenism numbs because it dissolves truth in politeness. The journalists and bishops who excuse it numb because they fear to feel the sharpness of reality. The heart of modern Catholicism is indeed numb, but not from the Latin Mass. It is numb because the Mystical Body has been sedated by half a century of tranquilizing compromise.

Conclusion: Let the Lamps Burn

In Knoxville, the faithful gathered for their final TLM will light candles in sorrow. But those flames will burn longer than any bureaucratic decree. They will burn in garages, basements, chapels, and barns. They will burn wherever the true Faith is still whispered and the true Mass is still said.

The revolution of Nostra Aetate can celebrate its 60th anniversary. It can flatter Diwali, praise journalists, and condemn the old Mass as “numbing.” But as long as there remains one priest who dares to say Introibo ad altare Dei with clean hands and pure intention, the lamps of tradition will never go out.

1. For the record, Trad Inc.’s two supposed champions of Tradition, Cardinals Burke and Muller, wrongly agree with this priest and believe the SSPX to be in schism. They would leave these faithful with no possibility of a Traditional Mass. However, the faithful can clearly fulfill their Sunday obligation in an SSPX Chapel or any Latin Mass according to the 1983 Code of Canon Law. I encourage Catholics of Knoxville and Chattanooga, Charlotte and Detroit to read this primer, and locate a non-diocesan Latin Mass, if needed, to attend in your area. You don’t need permission to be Catholic.