My application requires querying the Mathematica kernel from the command line. I am able to type

/Applications/Mathematica.app/Contents/MacOS/wolframscript 

or

/Applications/Mathematica.app/Contents/MacOS/WolframKernel 

from a UNIX shell and reach the text-based interface. However, my application requires invoking Mathematica from a running program. When my program executes the equivalent of one of the commands above, Mathematica dies with the error

dlopen(/Applications/Mathematica.app/SystemFiles, 1): image not found

This worked with older versions of Mathematica so why does it now fail?