This interview with Dr. Scott Hahn, posted on YouTube on January 6, 2023, features a thoughtful conversation about the Latin Mass and the wider life of the Church.

Host Matt Fradd asks Dr. Hahn about his personal experience attending the Traditional Latin Mass, how it has shaped his prayer life, and why many young Catholics are rediscovering it today.

Dr. Hahn shares reflections on reverence, liturgical history, and the challenges and hopes within modern Catholic worship.

This discussion offers an honest and balanced look at the beauty of the Mass—both in the Latin tradition and in the Novus Ordo.

Matt Fradd:
Dennis Vu says, “Dr. Hahn, hi, I’m one of your former students.”

Scott Hahn:
Hello to Dennis! We text almost every week.

Matt Fradd:
Oh really? He says: “Can you comment on what attending the Latin Mass has done for you? I attend daily. How has this changed your prayer life and perspective of the Sacred Liturgy?”

Scott Hahn:
All right. First of all: every valid Mass is heaven on earth. It’s inexhaustible. Every valid Mass—Novus Ordo or the Tridentine, the Traditional Latin Mass.

I am more at home in the Novus Ordo because for so many years that’s all I knew; that’s all my parishes did. But I must admit that going to the Traditional Latin Mass at our parish at noon on Sunday has been transformative.

And I have a preferential option for that which has been around for more than 1,500 years. You know, we’re doing something that is a valid experiment: concocting Eucharistic prayers in the 60s, canonizing them in the 70s. But I can’t help but wonder about lex orandi, lex credendi: the law of prayer, the law of worship is the basis for the law of belief. But also lex vivendi: the law of life.

If you can just tinker with this and change it, you’re going to set in motion expectations that will conclude: “Well, we can change the doctrine; we can change the morals as well.”

And so I would say: we’ve got to affirm the validity of the Novus Ordo Mass and recognize it is inexhaustible. I think we can also recognize the objective superiority of the Latin Mass without becoming mad trads. Most of the rad trads I’ve known over the years are angry.

I describe myself as a glad trad, as a Trentecostal, as a Stradismatic. I’m a Catholic.

Matt Fradd:
Are you going to write a new book with all these puns?

Scott Hahn:
Well, it’s all of the above. We don’t have to give in to the sectarian impulse to say that this one movement is going to save the Church. No—the Mass will save the Church, however it’s celebrated validly: in the Orthodox, in the Eastern rites, in the Dominican Rite…

Matt Fradd:
I wanted to ask you: what do you see as positive in this new movement of young people desiring the heritage that was never given to them? And then, what should we be careful of? And I think you’re already alluding to the danger of becoming angry…

Scott Hahn:
Well, I think they’re rightly saying to the older generation: “Look, you ended up rejecting something—and that is the Traditional Latin Mass and all that went with it.”

We don’t have the choice. In a certain sense, you abandoned something that you felt perhaps was inferior or whatever. Noted. But I think the next generation is coming up and saying: “Give us a chance; let us be exposed to that.”

And when they are, I think all of the fads of the 60s, 70s, 80s, into the 90s—“fad” is just an acronym for for-a-day. And so I think there have been a lot of liturgical fads.

I heard one priest describing a marijuana Mass in ’69 after Woodstock. And we heard about clown Masses and other things, too.

I just feel like: let the experimentation die out, and let the Novus Ordo continue—celebrated reverently.

Scott Hahn:
At our Mass, 10 a.m. at St. Peter’s: it’s beautiful. It’s ad orientem. We have the Latin. And we receive on our knees at the old rail as well.

To me, there really is a glorious convergence that can be done—and should be done.

I think it will take the next generation of priests. I can’t speak for my two seminarians—my two sons—but I get the sense that they and their classmates are open, if not eager, to appropriate both streams and make it one.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, the Three Rivers State—where the Monongahela and the Allegheny become the Ohio River. Now I live alongside the Ohio River. And I feel as though I live where the confluence of the Novus Ordo and the Latin come together in a beautiful, life-giving way.

Matt Fradd:
There’s a lot of people who are “glad trads,” in a sense. There’s an awkwardness in reclaiming a Tradition that was never yours because you weren’t given it. It’s almost like going to an antique store and buying something beautiful—but it’s not really yours; it’s somebody else’s.

So I think that awkwardness we’re seeing among younger Catholics—myself included—who are super excited about Tradition is just that. It’s going to be nice to see when it becomes second nature.

Because growing up, I wish I had it. I wish somebody had exposed me to the Rosary, to the incense. I wish they didn’t try to be… and I know I’m not making a false dichotomy here. I’m not saying you can either have a sloppy Novus Ordo or a beautiful Tridentine Mass—of course you can have both of each.

But I wish somebody had exposed that to me. Everywhere else I see irreverence—it would be nice to see deep reverence in the liturgy.

Scott Hahn:
Here’s a question we can never answer: What would it have been like if all these rad trads had grown up only with the Latin, and only with the family rosary? Would they have gone through an adolescent phase where they, too, would have preferred the fads of whatever decade they were raised in?

I don’t think the blame game is something either side will win. What we have to do is say “yes and yes and yes.” Both-and is the Catholic phrase.

Matt Fradd:
Here’s another question for you. I think there are a lot of people—and I was one of these—who felt like a bit of a refugee. I lived in Atlanta, and many of the parishes around me—the Holy Mass wasn’t celebrated with a great deal of reverence.

So I ended up going to a Byzantine church, because it was there that I found reverence. But I think maybe there’s a danger there too. I’m not sure. I wonder if natural piety should lead us to want to be part of our own heritage and not too quickly set it aside and adopt some sort of Ruthenian traditions or something like that.

Do you have any concerns about that, or not really?

Scott Hahn:
Who’s the Australian saint again?

Matt Fradd:
That is Saint Mary MacKillop.

Scott Hahn:
And you were telling me before we started—how was her relationship with the bishop?

My understanding—though I have to look this up to get all the details right, so I apologize if I’m getting it wrong—is that Saint Mary MacKillop was excommunicated by the bishop of Adelaide, who may himself have been an alcoholic.

She never spoke up or criticized him, and eventually she was brought back into the Church.

I think there’s something profoundly Catholic about that—especially if we want to become saints.

It’s not like a cover-up, a Watergate; but it is like Shem and Japheth walking in backwards to cover the nakedness of Noah, as Saint Josemaría points out.

Scott Hahn:
And I must admit: Opus Dei has been my tribe in Israel. And when they do the Novus Ordo—because I’ve never seen them do the Traditional Latin Mass—it is so beautiful, so sacred, so reverent and transcendent.

But on the other hand, I must admit that when I was in Milwaukee becoming a Catholic, you could go and it was ring-around-the-altar. I remember in the chapel of Saint Joan of Arc, we were commanded by the priest to stand around the altar. I quietly slipped out.

I remember those few awkward moments of “Let’s just wing it.”

I have been in many liturgies in the 80s where all of the experimentation was still going on. And I’m thinking: If you had to give up your career for this, I don’t think you would feel so comfortable just dabbling.

I don’t want to judge their hearts, but at the same time the objective reality of the Mass—when it’s celebrated according to the rubrics with reverence—is amazing.

Scott Hahn:
One last thought. I was talking to a dear friend, a former student, who’s been celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass for the last two years.

He described the first time. He went back into the sacristy after celebrating it for some Carmelites, and the Mother Superior came back. And he said:

“This is the single most joyful day of my life.
Because I have never been at Mass where I disappeared.
Where I was joined with all of you sisters, and I was able to worship our Lord.
It wasn’t my personality; it wasn’t my accent; it wasn’t anything that was me.
I disappeared.
And this is the single most joyful day of my life.”

Matt Fradd:
Do you have any advice for a Catholic who might say: “I just want to go to a Byzantine Catholic church and abandon the Western heritage”?

Scott Hahn:
The quick advice is what was given to me when I was thinking about going Byzantine Catholic. My priest friend said:

“Look—you are a Westerner. German and English. And so is Kimberly. It’s not fair for you to impose that on her.”

And he pointed out: “To shop around—to do church-shopping—is a vestige of your Protestantism. To find the most exotic blend of coffee is understandable. But to find the most exotic blend of liturgy—that’s the subjectivism of your background, your Protestantism.”

You bloom where you’re planted. You are who you are. If you’re in America, you’re part of the West, for better or worse. And the Occidental is not inferior to the Oriental, no matter what you hear.

Source: Matt Fradd. (2023, January 6). Scott Hahn on the Latin Mass [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/WKVMIpH77Hc

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The post Scott Hahn’s Healthy Perspective on the Two Latin Rites first appeared on EPISTLES.