The Michael Knowles Show - Why Young People Flood The Traditional Latin Mass: Archduke Eduard Habsburg

Episode Date: July 26, 2026

Why are so many young people suddenly returning to the Traditional Latin Mass? Michael Knowles sits down with Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen to discuss the surprising resurgence of the Traditional Latin Mass among younger generations. From beauty, reverence, and tradition to modern dissatisfaction with secular culture, the two explore why ancient forms of worship are attracting new audiences in the modern world. Is this simply nostalgia—or a deeper spiritual hunger emerging among young people today? And what does the revival of traditional Christianity say about the future of the West? Expect historical insight, theological discussion, and a candid conversation about faith, culture, and identity in the modern age. 👇 Comment below: Why do you think young people are returning to tradition? - - - DailyWire+ 🎆 🇺🇸 Our America 250 SALE is still available! Get 3-Months of DailyWire+ for just $17.76 📜 Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. We brought our children for the first time. We don't tell you anything. Just let's go there and tell us afterwards your experience. My two eldest daughters said lots of good-looking young man in the church. Latin Mass is very attractive to young men. Because the new mass is girly.

It's effeminate, it feels trivial, and it feels weak. Is that too harsh? An Austrian and an American walk into a studio, and all we want to talk about is Latin. I am joined today by my friend, his imperial and royal highness, Edward of Austria, who you've met before when we had Edward Habsburg on to talk about his previous book, The Hapsburg Way. And now he is on to talk about, dare I say, an even more exciting subject, the traditional Latin Mass. Edward, thank you for being here. Thank you for hosting me.

So I tell the audience a lot about how much I love the Latin Mass. You obviously are quite a devotee of the Latin Mass. had some real firsthand experience around the Holy See as the Hungarian ambassador to the Holy See. Congratulations on your retirement after 10 years of service. The question that I get from the people who are a little curious, they say, why would I want to go to church in Latin? Why is it so important that I go hear the mass in Latin? Why do you weird trads care so much about this dead language. What say you? Well, that's a long, a long story. But the short version is, because this is the liturgy that all our ancestors, all the great saints of the church from

Gregory the Great, via St. Teresa of Avila, via all the great saints celebrated liturgy in this form. And I have to say, I understand the sentiment. Why should I go to a Latin Mass? I don't even understand what the priest says. Because I for 50 years just went to our normal mass today and I grew up in this. I loved today's mass. It shaped me. It made me the Catholic I am today. And twice I stumbled into a Latin mass and that was both times rather catastrophic because I went in there without preparation, without explanation, and without an idea what was I'm going to experience. And I came out afterwards that this is the weirdest, I'm not going to say the word, that I'd ever experienced in a church never again.

Because it's funny you say that. A lot of people, myself included, will say we're raised in the modern liturgy, sometimes it has acoustic guitars and all kinds of craziness. And but then when we found the Latin Mass, I said, this is it. This is it. I'm home. It clicked instantly. I loved it. You walk in and you say, actually, you know what, this is totally nuts and I have no use for it. Yes. I think that the majority of people, at least in Western Europe where I live, would react my way. But I hear stories of people walking into one of these things and being blown away and saying that's it. I never experienced it that way. For me, I tried it twice, and I said, never again. Because it's very alien. It presses different buttons on your senses and your senses and your

ears, in your eyes, the priest looks away from you. You see mostly his back. He moves in a very ritualized way, like on rails. He has no choice, no improvisation. He never turns to you and says, the Lord, be with you. Right. But it's all in Latin and away from you. So it's alien. In a way, a friend once said, it's like if you have your walk in a park, and then somebody takes you and puts you on the surface of the moon and says, have you walk here? So it can be very alien. And today's mass has sort of programmed us to expect a certain set of impressions, experiences, sounds and smells when you go to liturgy.

And in the Latin Mass, some of these things are very different. So there is a lot of silence. There is a lot of silence. In fact, when I finally found my way to the Latin Mass while I was in Rome as ambassador, and kicking and screaming because my wife said, let's check that out. And I said, oh, no, no, no, no. You won't drag me to those crazy treads. No way, no more trouble.

I don't want that. And so I still went. And I remember I was in my first Latin Mass, desperately trying to read along in the little brochure I had with a text and not understanding which part of the mass I was in. And then came the Holy Holy, the Sanctus. And then suddenly there was a... silence. And the silence endured and endured. It was like an oasis of total silence. And I saw the

priest was doing something on the altar. He was working. There was a book. He was silence, silence. You're not used to silence in today's mass. Because once you've experienced the Latin Mass and you go back to today's Mass, which I regularly still go to today's Mass too, you notice how well-filled it is between answering and singing and reacting and you're busy all the time. In the Latin Mars, there is long stretches where the silence almost presses on your ears.

And then in the middle of that oasis of silence, there was the consecration, and it was very devout, and it was very beautiful. And then the silence continued. It was... That was one of those moments where I said, what is this? And then I was curious

and then a priest offered me to serve as an altar boy at his Latin Mass in the morning at 6.30 at a side altar. And I said, I can handle that. I've been an altar boy on my life. Boy was that a humiliating experience because, you know, serving as an altar boy in today's mass is you do three things. You stand around. Then you bring water and wine. Then you ring bells. and then you walk out again.

Latin Mass altar boy is very complex. You have to know a whole set of prayers, you have to know a set of moves, you have to know on which side of the altar to stand. But doing that, I understood the liturgy better. And then we brought our children for the first time. And it was very interesting. We said, we don't tell you anything, all of them.

They were all of them in Rome, said, just let's go there and, And tell us afterwards your experience. What did you think of it? The young one said, it's in Latin, it's very long, it's very reverent, different things. My two eldest daughters said, lots of good-looking young men in the church. You laugh. But we are used to young men out of the church after communion or latest after confirmation.

Latin Mass is very attractive to young men. Yes. I still haven't figured out why, but it is. Because the new mass, not intrinsically perhaps, but as it is practiced at many parishes, is girly. It's effeminate, it's saccharine, it's sappy, it feels trivial and it feels weak. Now, I'm not saying it has to be that way,

but there have been deformations in the implementation to the liturgical reform that have, I think, been unfortunate for the whole lay faithful, but which have been particularly rough on men, and it has helped to drive men out of the church. Is that too harsh? No, I think it's harsh. I'm a diplomat.

I would say things differently. But I suppose these temptations exist. But what you feel is that if young people go to the church today, or as we know, a lot of them find the way back into the Catholic Church, there is a whole number of baptisms, confirmations, these years, then they will find their way to a more traditional liturgy. It doesn't have to be traditional Latin Mass. Can be reverent new mass, but young people today look for something real and reverent, and some of them find it. I mean, as we're speaking in these days, is going to be the Charter Pilgrimage. This year,

it's 200,000 young people walking from Paris to Chartre to have a Latin Mass, 200,000 young people walking. It gives you an idea that it's going to play a role in the future of the church. But yeah, that was my experience. I was really surprised by it. Even down to just the way the priest is facing, because we think from the perspective of new liturgy after the Vatican Council and after the liturgical reform, we say, well, the priest faces us. Exactly. And then at the old mass, he's facing away from us. You say, well, what if we are not the center point of the mass? Yes. You know, in the old liturgy, the priest didn't think of himself as facing away from the people. He thought of himself as facing toward the altar.

That is to say, facing God, who's really truly present. And I think for, especially for the young men who are a little less emotional sometimes or a little less swayed by emotion, we want to be grounded in objective realities. I think there's this. I think there's this. recognition that in the seriousness of the old liturgy where the priest is at work, you know, he really, and the altar boys are at work, that it feels as though we're really doing something here together, that this is real. Whereas even when you just have the priest facing you, it feels as though you are there to be entertained. And if I'm going to be entertained, I watch the Yankees. That's what I watch to be entertained. And the Yankees are great.

They're very entertaining. I'll go listen to music. I'll go watch a movie. I don't, In other words, if I am going to Mass, I want to feel as though we're really doing something. Yes. Rather than just spending time like we do throughout the entire week, which is amusing ourselves. Yes. And Catholic Liturgy can never compete with really great entertainment outside if it's not the real deal. Yeah. And the real deal is attracted.

I think it's one of the only moments where young people have total silence for over an hour in their lives. because you're entertained from the morning to the evening. You switch on your phone before you switch on your light, and you switch off your phone when you switch off the light in the evening. And in between, you're constantly checking. There's always noise, noise, noise. The traditional liturgy is very quiet over long stretches, and you can pray.

It's impressive. So my idea in writing that book, discovering the Latin Mass, was to give people a little travel guide, a little hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, that gives you, opens the door, takes away the prejudice, gives you, explains you what you're going to see there, how to behave, where to find a Latin mass? Because, you know, not everybody publishes announcers

when he says Latin Mars due to certain restrictions over the last years. Yes. So you just have to find one first and then. It's crazy. It feels like the catacomb sometimes. Not to be grandiose about it, but I was traveling, I won't say where,

because I don't want to get them in trouble. But I was asking around for the young people who were attracted to the traditional mass. I said, hey, I'm going to be in town with my family. Where can I get the TLM? Where can I get the goods? They looked around with them. Yeah, I make sure no one's listening.

And I said, well, it's at this church at this time. By the way, it's not on the website. It's not listed. I email the church. I say, hey, I'm going to be in town. Is this? And their responses are so caged. They say, well, yes, the diocese will be celebrating the extraordinary form of this.

You know, as if, you know, heaven forfend, a bishop were to see this. So what's the deal? Why are the bishops, why have some recent popes been so, Francis, really, why have they been so harsh on the traditional liturgy? Well, I think it's a historical problem. I think many of the elderly clerics brought a lot of prejudice against Latin Mass from their youth. And I think with Francis there must have been some sort of bad experiences. And I think many of today's bishops and the people they consecrated,

the founding myth of their youth and their priesthood was that Vatican II is going to be the real beginning. a blooming springtime of the church, a thing of beauty, and therefore, today is the new mass is the greatest thing in the world, and that old thing has finally been put on the dunghill of history, and we can finally march forward and really be relevant in today's world and embrace the world as it is today. And it must be difficult for people who have this frame of mind

to see young people going back to exactly that liturgy that you thought. That was history, ancient history. So there are some, I think, biographical, historical aggressions. And again, I'm trying to overcome these prejudice by writing that book and by speaking about the Latin Mas. Because the other side, I have to say, is influencers on the Internet who sometimes are freshly converted, sometimes have discovered tradition very recently. And the first thing they do is they grab a microphone and speak about it. And the second thing they do, they sometimes speak in a very judgmental and loud way,

also probably in order to prove that they're really Catholic. Yeah, yeah. And that's not helpful. No. And that shapes the image of how traditional people are because you just need a dead and a webcam, and you can do a lot of great things and also a lot of damage. Yes. And the Catholic Church is a very sensitive field where you have to cage your words

and have lots of respects for different, if you're a cradle Catholic like me, me, you know that the church goes from here to here. We're all Catholic. Even if I don't agree with someone on, we're Catholic. And I think that's the problem. So the impression that people get about the Latin Mass is not from the families with children who, we're full of fidelity, go every week and now have to travel sometimes four or five hours to get to a Latin Mass because masses have been shut down in a diocese. Yeah. But their impression is those loud people on the internet. I'm not talking about you, of course. No, never me. I would never be loud on the internet. But I think you're totally right,

which is when you go to the Latin Mass, the median age is about eight, because everyone has a ton of children. And even of the adults, the median age is probably 32 or something. It's very, very young. There are some people there, though, who have held firm, even during the restrictions, who were elderly, who were, you know, dedicated the whole time. But the PR that the traditional Latin mass gets is in no small part a handful of schizos on the internet who converted 37 seconds ago and that's not helpful so so then for the people who say all right I'm speaking to a serious person who's charitable there was a lot of experience with this who was persuaded of the Latin mass who didn't like it originally first objection why

does it have to be in Latin why can't you do why can't you have the reverence and the you know the praised facing the Walter in the silence. Why doesn't have to be in Latin? Why can't you just do that in English? Because in the traditional Latin mass, the language and the entire structure are deeply intertwined, and this was the way it was done for the last 1,500 years. It shaped all our ancestors. I always like to say that when Charlemagne followed the mass in the year 800, Latin was already an alien language for us. We have this idea that everybody spoke colloquial Latin up until the 1960s. But in reality,

Charlemagne followed along and he tried to read along and tried to understand the Latin. The idea is not, this must be immediately accessible. The idea is I brought an aunt for the first time to a Latin Mass, and she was furious. And she said, but I don't understand what he's saying. I can't follow the mass. And I said to her, look at my daughters. Do you have the impression that they can't follow the mask? They had their book open.

They read along. They prayed. They knell. They knew exactly where you were. And I believe your soul is being shaped by the liturgy and by the language. And if you follow the Latin Mass from your childhood, you will understand it. It takes a while, but it's natural. It goes into your bones.

You know, one key experience for me was I live in Vienna. There is a fantastic art museum, Kunst Historicis. and there is one painting in one of the rooms where you see a church in the Netherlands in the 1600s. And it's a typical interior of a church. You see people standing in the foreground talking, you see the whole perspective of the church. In the background, as an altar, it's about that big.

A priest is saying mass, very far in the background. from where he's standing, you know, exactly at what part of the mass you are. I asked my children, which part of the mass? And they said, he is at the preparation of bread and wine at that time of the mass, and he's doing that gesture. That small. So what I say is the gestures and the language of the Latin Mass will get into your body and into your cells and it will shape you.

My advice to people who say, but I don't understand it, but this is different. But why is it like this? It's like, perhaps God invites you to learn something new. Yeah. Something that shaped all the great saints of church history. Perhaps God invites you to open yourself up and to bow your head under tradition and not just say, does it please me? If it pleases me, it's good. But it's like, perhaps I can learn something. Perhaps God wants to find a new way to my heart.

That's what I would say. It strikes me that so many of the objections to the old mass are actually. really actually objections to the new mass. They're actually defenses of the old mass. As you're describing this, that you can identify exactly where the mass was, in this painting just from the stance of the priest. I think the whole idea was we need to make the mass more accessible.

Yes. So first of all, as you say, even Charlemagne in the year 800, he didn't speak ecclesiastical Latin as his normal tongue. So same is true for us today. We're in the same position. Good to be in the same position as Charlemagne. But furthermore,

I was in the Santa, Santa Maria Maggiore, the papal basilic in Rome. Take my family there. We were Rome for one night, and we go to Mass. And the mass was in Italian, to be accessible to the people. How many people there actually spoke Italian? This is Rome. This is a city full of tourists. I happen to speak Italian.

No one else in my family does. And so the kids are all sitting there. My wife sitting there nicely, but they couldn't understand a thing that's going on. Now, the irony is, had the irony is, Had the priest been speaking Latin, had the liturgy been the old Latin Mass, no one would have spoken Latin as their daily language, and every person from everywhere on earth would have known exactly what was going on. And I think, you know, in the creed, we say, including many Protestants say,

that we believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic church. And some Protestants have redefinitions of the word Catholic to try to make that fit. But we say, okay, one holy Catholic and apostolic church. The first mark of the church is unity. Yes. And the irony is that the result of the making the mass supposedly more acceptable is that you've totally destroyed liturgical unity. You could drop down into the middle of Papua New Guinea, perhaps, before the reform.

And you would have understood the mass. It would have been almost the same as the mass in your hometown. Yes. And it's even more, when you begin to go to the Latin Mass, you will consult your bravery, your missile, your missile, quite a lot. The longer you go, the less you will need it. Because all the rhythms and all the words will get closer to you. And again, I profoundly believe that this liturgy shapes us.

It transforms us into what God wants us to be. And that is sometimes new and painful for people. And it's what God wants you to grow. God wants you to get in deeper. And again, I would. will at no point criticize the new mask because I regularly go to the new mask too. And I encounter Christ there. I did it all my life. But this was like an old dog that learned a very new trick. And I have learned everything from Manchagorea via Opus Day friends, via

Dominican friends, via I was for 10 years of charismatic. I lifted my arms and I spoke in tongues. So I'm not your typical trad. Yeah. And then I was totally surprised and overwhelmed by a new experience. And that's for my entire family. So I can only suggest to people to try it out. But before you try it out, read the little booklet. The great thing is that Sophia Press is going to publish it for free. You just pay for the postage because I want many people to be able to read it.

and it's a very easy light introduction. It's not this big breakover book. It's a little booklet that tells you what you need to know to try it out. And all the rest you will learn on your own then. So that's the idea of discovering the letter. You know my very favorite kind of book is a free book. And in fact, my reversion to Christianity came about in part playing on my cheapness and my desire for free books because I was on campus in college and a Protestant missionary type guy was giving away books. Some books that I didn't care about, but C.S. Lewis, too. I said, maybe I should read that. I love a good free book. And I took it. It really helped to transform my life. So this is very good. You can get it just for postage. Unbelievable, you have to get it. It's discovering the Latin Mass.

Before I let you go, Edward, you've just retired as the ambassador to the Holy See. the previous pope put some restrictions on the Latin Mass. This pope, I was very excited about this pontificate. In fact, I called the name. I was hoping for the name Leo the 14th. Wow, yes. Now, as we were talking about the schizophrenics with Twitter accounts who decide to speak for the Catholic Church. All sorts of people are babbling and making all sorts of claims about this pontificate.

With your expert view, how do you see the early days of Pope Leo's pontificate unfolded? Well, I have the privilege to have spoken with him alone for four minutes when I left and had a few very short encounters with him before. So I think I have an idea a bit what kind of man he is. The word I heard most around the Holy See about him from people who work there is he's a just man. He's a very just man. He's someone who is not rash, who doesn't. He doesn't shoot from the hip. He's someone who listens, who thinks.

He's a man of prayer. He has a great devotion to Our Lady. I know that he has a great devotion to Our Lady of Pompeii. As you probably saw a few days ago, he went to Pompeii, and he led the prayers in the sanctuary of Pompeii. I think we're in good hands in the Catholic Church. I think he's a balanced man. He has his political opinions, I think.

We know he has siblings with other political opinions perhaps. That's true. But he's very nice. He's a reserve man. With Pope Francis, when you threw him a joke, he threw it back better. With Pope Leo, when you throw him a joke, he smiles and shakes your hand. There is a reserve in him, and he doesn't want to be your body. But I think the church is in extremely good hands.

And as for the Latin Mass, I don't expect him to be rash on that. He's going to listen to many sides. He's going to speak to many sides. He's meeting with many different sides. And I'm full of hope for the church. Very good. A good place to leave it. You need to go get your book. I thought I was going to tell you to spend money and buy a book.

And it would be worth spending the money, too. I already pre-ordered the book on Amazon. But you can even get it for free and just pay postage. That is how important it is for you to avail yourself of this wonderful opportunity to rediscover the Latin Mass in a book by Archduke Edward Habsburg. Edward, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me.