In this episode of The David Hahn Show, David Hahn opens with the week's starkest story from the traditionalist fringe, the illicit episcopal consecration of Father Michael Mary, founder of the Transalpine Redemptorists, and the excommunication that followed within days. He traces the community's path from its 1990s split with the SSPX, through reconciliation with Rome in 2008, to its break during the Covid lockdowns and its declaration that the modern Church is incompatible with the true faith. Hahn walks through Bishop Hugh Gilbert of Aberdeen's canonical verdict, guilty of schism, excommunicated and barred from the sacraments, and sets it against the recent dissolution of the Marian Friars of the Immaculate in Portsmouth diocese and fresh research from the University of Fribourg showing that while a third of French monasteries have closed since 2007, communities celebrating exclusively in Latin have grown.
Turning to Rome, Hahn covers Pope Leo's reshaping of the Curia, centred on the elevation of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone to the Apostolic Signatura, the Church's highest court. He details Cordileone's canon law training under Cardinal Burke, his record as a champion of the Traditional Latin Mass and liturgical reverence in San Francisco and his refusal of communion to Nancy Pelosi, a stand later undercut when she received communion at a Mass in Rome. Hahn reads the promotion, made alongside other canon-law-credentialed appointments to key curial offices, as a deliberate move by Pope Leo to reward canonical seriousness over proximity to power.
Hahn then reviews JD Vance's new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to the Faith, praising its account of habit and faith, prestige and desire, and its Chesterton-inflected critique of a GDP that erases the unpaid love parents give their children. He weighs its warm reception from Michael Knowles and Bishop Robert Barron against a sharply negative review by Matthew Walter, editor of The Lamp, whom Hahn accuses of pettiness for comparing Vance's reflections to Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices and for downplaying, without acknowledgment, that much of the book's material had already appeared in an earlier essay.
The episode closes with Hahn's report from the We Believe festival at Saint Mary's Seminary, Oscott, where more than 2,700 Catholics gathered from 24 to 27 July, filling the event to capacity and turning hundreds away. He describes a programme spanning charismatic praise and worship, nightly Latin Compline and a solemn High Mass in the chapel where Saint John Henry Newman preached his Second Spring sermon, alongside testimonies from young converts and a contemplative nun of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star. Drawing on his own memories of the Steubenville youth conferences growing up in Ohio, Hahn argues the festival's sold-out demand, rather than the hollowed-out parishes he expected to find in Europe, is the truer picture of Catholic England.
Across the episode, Hahn draws a single thread through the week's stories, tradition's proven staying power against instability, whether in a schismatic order's self-destruction, a curial appointment that rewards seriousness over favour, a vice president's public wrestling with faith and prestige, or thousands of young Catholics filling a seminary field beyond capacity.
