Day: December 23, 2025

CNA Staff, Dec 23, 2025 / 16:55 pm (CNA).

Priests as well as the lay faithful are voicing criticisms after Bishop Michael Martin of the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, issued a pastoral letter last week prohibiting the use of altar rails and kneelers in the reception of Communion in the diocese.

In the Dec. 17 letter, Martin said that by Jan. 16, 2026, the use of altar rails, kneelers, and prie-dieus (movable kneelers) will no longer be permitted in the diocese, and any “temporary or movable fixtures used for kneeling for the reception of Communion” must be removed.

In the letter, Martin said while an “individual member of the faithful” is free to kneel to receive and should not be denied Communion, the “normative posture for all the faithful in the United States is standing,” per guidelines from the U.S. bishops.

In May, a leaked draft of a letter detailed Martin’s intended reforms of traditional practices in the diocese. In the letter, the bishop said that because “there is no mention in the conciliar documents, the reform of the liturgy, or current liturgical documents concerning the use of altar rails or kneelers for the distribution of holy Communion, they are not to be employed in the Diocese of Charlotte.”

Also in the May letter, Martin said it was “simply absurd” to suggest that “kneeling is more reverent than standing.”

Martin said in his Dec.17 letter that it is his “intention to continue to facilitate ‘peace and unity’ in our liturgies.”

A Charlotte priest who spoke to CNA on the condition of anonymity said of Martin’s “heavy-handed” approach to reform: “Everybody’s had it.”

“If the priests of the diocese were asked for a vote of no confidence, a vast majority would vote that way,” he said. 

“Unfortunately, Bishop Martin’s style of leadership has been a source of division for the diocese since his arrival and there does not seem to be any course correction after many appeals. It has been painful for many across the diocese,” he continued.

“Why is kneeling a problem? Why go to such lengths to force these changes?” he asked. Receiving communion is “the most intimate moment of the week for people, who are receiving their God. Why go through all this bad PR? I don’t understand it.”

“It’s going to be a train wreck,” he continued, speaking of the continued opposition to the bishop’s reforms. 

He told CNA he is hopeful the matter will be addressed at the upcoming consistory of cardinals in Rome.

A letter by an anonymous canon lawyer also began circulating last week throughout the Charlotte Diocese in response to Martin’s Dec. 17 letter.

In the anonymous letter, Martin is accused of ignoring the role of synodality in his decision-making. He is also accused of ignoring the feedback of his presbyteral council. 

Writing to Martin, the letter-writer told him that the “decision to prohibit altar rails and aids to kneeling relies on your own preference rather than the law or the tradition of the Church.”

Matthew Hazell, a British liturgy scholar, told the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, in May that Martin’s perspective was consistent with what Pope Benedict XVI famously described as a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.” 

“Rather than allow the novus ordo to be celebrated in a manner in keeping with its own rubrics and with the Church’s tradition, Bishop Martin seems to see it as an entirely new creation that cannot even be seen to have anything in common with what came before,” Hazell told the Register.

Parishes that kneel reportedly provide lion’s share of vocations

According to Brian Williams, an advocate for Charlotte’s Traditional Latin Mass community, of the diocese’s 44 seminarians, “at least 75% are from parishes where kneeling has been the practice to receive holy Communion.”

Williams said his small parish, where kneeling is the norm, has produced seven seminarians recently. 

He told CNA that the ”mega parishes that have embraced these liturgical changes” have provided “maybe two of the 44 seminarians even though they account for tens of thousands of families.” 

One of the largest Catholic parishes in the country, St. Matthew Catholic Church, does not have altar rails. Willliams said there is “one seminarian from there right now, and not more than six men ordained from there in its entire history.” 

“They do a lot of great things, but they’re not providing vocations,” Williams said.

In September, despite a great deal of pushback, Martin canceled the Traditional Latin Mass in all but one small chapel that is not large enough to house the diocese’s burgeoning Latin Mass community. 

He initially tried to cancel the Mass several months earlier than the timeline set by his predecessor, Bishop Peter Jugis, but decided in the summer to allow the Mass to continue.

“It falls to every member of the body of Christ to facilitate unity in our celebrations. These norms for our diocese move us together toward the Church’s vision for the fuller and more active participation of the faithful, especially emphasized by our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, at the beginning of his Petrine ministry,” Martin wrote in the December letter.

In the May letter, Martin described how priestly vestments with too much lace or decoration would be prohibited in the diocese. That letter also decried the use of Latin in any Masses other than ones in which most of the attendees understand Latin, such as “a specific gathering of scholars, clergy, or those trained in classical music.”

Martin said pastors who incorporate Latin into their Masses are not being “pastorally sensitive,” writing that “the faithful’s full, conscious, and active participation is hindered wherever Latin is employed.” 

“Most of our faithful do not understand and will never comprehend the Latin language, especially those on the periphery. It is fallacious to think that if we employ Latin more frequently, the faithful will get used to it and finally understand it,” he claimed. 

When Martin concelebrated the Mass with several other bishops this summer at a parish that traditionally kneels at an altar rail to receive, per his direction, Communion was distributed in front of the altar rail to discourage parishioners from kneeling. 

Nevertheless, a video showed parishioners kneeling anyway, many of them elderly women who needed assistance standing up after receiving.

The Diocese of Charlotte declined multiple requests for comment.

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ACI Prensa Staff, Dec 23, 2025 / 16:25 pm (CNA).

The European Commission has decided to withdraw funding from the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe (FAFCE), an organization founded in 1997 to promote and defend the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, before European institutions.

The decision comes at a time when the European Union has recently given the green light to initiatives that promote so-called abortion tourism financed by European funds and the imposition of the recognition of homosexual unions on all member states.

In contrast, funding is being denied to this Brussels-based Catholic federation, which brings together 33 associations from 20 European countries and is currently active with EU institutions, the Council of Europe, and the U.N.

At the end of November, the EU froze the funds allocated to projects submitted by FAFCE without providing an explanation, even though several of them were aimed at protecting minors from pornography or promoting digital security, areas that the union itself considers priorities.

The president of FAFCE, Vincenzo Bassi, said the European Union’s rejection is based on the federation’s alleged shortcomings related to its approach to gender and equality, criteria promoted by the EU itself. 

In a statement to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Bassi noted that his organization is subject to systematic discrimination, since it seems that “the family experience is not compatible with the values ​​of the European Union.”

This rejection, Bassi emphasized, “is not due to technical issues but to an explicit ideological prejudice,” because the European Union does not conceive of the family “as a relevant social actor.”

Furthermore, he warned of a broader process of ideological imposition and encroachment on sovereign nations’ own laws in areas such as abortion, family, and identity. The EU’s objective, he explained, is to “transform policy decisions into legal decisions in order to impose them on member states.”

As the FAFCE president explained, through so-called soft law — nonbinding resolutions that create legal consensus — the EU is encroaching on sovereign nations’ own laws that the treaties reserve exclusively for the states, especially in matters such as family or abortion. This would allow, for example, pressure to be exerted on countries with more restrictive legislation, alleging violations of the “rule of law.”

Bassi said this shift represents an abandonment of the original spirit of the EU’s founding fathers, who “envisioned European integration based on social cohesion and the strengthening of families.”

Instead, the Italian leader criticized that today a “bureaucratic model” prevails, one that “wants to teach my grandmother how to cook pasta” instead of providing the means for a better life.

Despite the seriousness of the financial situation — since, as he pointed out “without the Catholic community, we run the risk of not being able to continue” — Bassi remains optimistic. He said he believes that Europe’s demographic winter and internal contradictions are creating a favorable environment “for a serious debate about the family.” His goal, he noted, is not to confront the European Union but to propose an alternative truly emerging from the people, faithful to Europe’s roots and vocation.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

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Rome Newsroom, Dec 23, 2025 / 15:55 pm (CNA).

Fifty million people are currently being trafficked around the world, according to the 2023 Global Slavery Index, driving over $236 billion into the hands of criminals, with numbers continuing to rise.

The 2024 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report documented that between 2019 and 2022 the number of identified trafficking victims increased by 25%, forced labor rose by 47%, and the number of child victims rose by 31%, with a dominating 38% increase in girls. 

Earlier this month, the Sovereign Order of Malta, Praeveni Global, the Santa Marta Group, and the Institute of Anthropology of the Pontifical Gregorian University organized an international conference in Rome to discuss prevention efforts, strengthen collaboration, and promote comprehensive action plans. 

Conference panelists included law enforcement, activists, United Nations rapporteurs, and human rights experts as well as appearances from Cardinal Fabio Baggio, the undersecretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and Pam Bondi, attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice.

Survivor testimony

Among those participating in the conference was Karla De la Cuesta, who was rescued alongside other girls from the hands of her traffickers in Mexico.

“We were victims of human trafficking in different ways,” De la Cuesta told EWTN News, explaining that their forms of exploitation included “abuse, sexual exploitation, labor slavery, torture, unlawful deprivation of liberty, forced marriages, forced abortions — multiple crimes committed against us.”

It was thanks to the intervention of Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization) that De la Cuesta’s alleged perpetrators were caught and the girls were able to return home. 

After becoming a lawyer and an activist, De la Cuesta studied her own case file in great depth. More than 10 victims had testified before authorities in her case, but those authorities did not act in accordance with the law or open proper investigations into their cases. This led De la Cuesta to write a book: “All in the Light: The Criminal Case that Mexico Left in the Darkness.”

“I [wrote] about all of this analysis I carried out as a lawyer and activist, hand-in-hand with other experts, where I specifically laid out all of these … omissions on the part of the authorities.”

The publications of De la Cuesta’s findings didn’t come without repercussions. “The Mexican state brought against me great retaliation, brutal attacks,” she said. “Which is why in less than six months after the publication of my book, I had to leave my country and now I live in Spain seeking international protection.”

De la Cuesta highlighted that the existence of safeguarding laws is not enough — the laws need to be enforced.

“In my country, we have a wonderful law, but in reality, it does not end up addressing the actual needs,” she stated. “There is no proper prevention, no proper prosecution, and no proper protection for the victims.”

De la Cuesta said no one should ever have to endure what survivors of human trafficking have lived through. While the harm cannot be undone, she emphasized that resilience is still possible, even in the face of pain that often lasts a lifetime. 

“We can indeed make flowers grow from these wounds,” she said.

Trafficking and pornography go together

The trafficking of children is increasing globally. Not only is it an issue across borders but also in places where children should feel their safest — at home. 

A member of the conference panel, Reem Alsalem, U.N. special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, spoke about how human trafficking and pornography are often interconnected.

“Pornography is a system of online prostitution,” Alsalem said. “So by definition it is exploitative, abusive, and preys on women and girls. Some of the violence and abuse that they’re exposed to happens also through trafficking. They are trafficked for the purpose of being sexually exploited in pornography.”

Alsalem refuted the widely used argument that consuming consensual pornography is the better option.

“Many digital platforms and businesses involved in pornography, first of all, use nonconsensual material; second, many of the women and children that appear in these images and material have been coerced, have been forced, have been threatened and again, as we said, especially the adults have not consented to this, even after they have requested that this material be removed many of these platforms have refused to do so,” she said.

‘Written into the Gospel’

Another panelist at the conference was pyschologist and theologian Father Hans Zollner, director of the Institute of Anthropology at the Pontifical Gregorian University. The Jesuit priest is known for his work in the field of safeguarding against sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

“What we need to do … is to understand that child protection or the safeguarding of all people is something that is written into the Gospel,” he told conference participants. He said he believes the Church has made a lot of progress in the last 12 years in terms of supporting victims, especially those who have been subject to clergy abuse.

“If we understood it better and if it was integrated better and more wholeheartedly, that would also come with an openness to listening to stories of victims who want to share with us their life experience,” he said.

Zollner continued to say that evil has been in the world since the beginning of humanity and that there is no salvation from crime and sins except in the perspective of our future in heaven.

“Jesus Christ himself has been a victim of violence,” Zollner said. “And he suffered death because he was unjustly treated.”

“So we believe that he has risen, and that gives us hope that with all the evil that is happening today we still have some hope, some perspective — that this is not the end of it, that the violence and harm we do to each other as human beings is not the last word.”

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