By Scott Dunn

1. Tell us a little about yourself. Where did you grow up, and what was your level of exposure to Catholicism as a child and as a young adult?

I was born in 1966 and raised in a Methodist family in northern New Jersey. My mother is from Houston, Texas and a long line of Methodists. One of the largest Methodist churches in Houston was founded in my great-grandparents’ living room. I grew up always going to church on Sunday, since my family and I were very involved in the church choir. I can say that the influence of the church I grew up in and my extended Methodist family was almost all positive in leading me in the right direction.

My exposure to Catholicism growing up was largely a result of the town I lived in, which was almost entirely Catholic. My family and I had to drive to a neighboring town to go to the Methodist church. I was in my teens before I learned that there were more Protestants in America than Catholics—almost all my classmates were Catholics.

My impression of Catholics growing up was unfortunately not very positive. Many of my classmates would talk about going to Mass or being altar boys and then during the week at school seemed to act in the opposite way of what I saw as Christian, including bullying me. This gave me the impression of Catholics as people who seemed to go through the motions of religion on Sunday without the Church having any impact on their behavior. Despite not having a great experience with the Catholics I knew in my childhood, I was a reader of history from a young age, and even as a child I was coming to the conclusion that the Catholic Church was the Church of history that went back to Christ.

As I moved into my high school and college years I became progressively disillusioned by the liberal direction of the Methodist Church and came to see the Catholic Church as the one place that had a firm foundation. While I was still a Methodist I went to law school at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. I would often go on my own between classes to the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception on campus and pray at the various Marian chapels. I started to pray the rosary on my own. Interestingly, the Écône consecrations occurred in the summer before I started law school in 1988 and somehow I became aware of them. Given my limited background, I had hardly any understanding at the time of the issues involved, but I remember cutting out a picture of Archbishop Lefebvre and the new Bishops from a magazine and keeping it in my desk. Somehow I had a sense that this was something important, and that the Archbishop and these new Bishops were men standing up for the truth.

As I moved into my adult years I left the Methodist Church and went to a series of more conservative Protestant churches. What held me back from converting to Catholicism for a long time was concern my parents may be hurt because I would be moving away from the tradition I had been raised in. Finally I converted to Catholicism in the early 2000s after I married my wife, who was born and raised a Catholic.

2. What experience first piqued your interest in Tradition?

For the first number of years as a Catholic it never occurred to me that there were any major issues with the Novus Ordo. I knew there had been changes after Vatican II, but I did not have any appreciation of the extent of the changes because I had never been to a Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). I was exposed to many different Novus Ordo liturgies—I have a daughter who traveled with a softball team, and I would attend Mass at whatever local church I could find where her tournament was being held. In those travels I saw some Masses that I would describe as very reverent and others that were not good at all. I accepted the often banal forms of liturgy as I did not know anything else.

Around 2018 I became progressively despondent over what was happening in the Church and things that were being said in Rome. I called a Novus Ordo priest whom I have great respect for and whom my family has known for many years. This priest has also said the TLM for a number of years. When I called him and asked for guidance on how to deal with what had been going on in the Church, his advice was to start going to the TLM. Soon thereafter my family and I started going to a diocesan TLM. When we started going to this TLM I could not believe how much different it was from the Masses I had been going to for over 10 years. Until we attended, I had not even been exposed to a pre-Novus Ordo missal. Once we went, I determined that the TLM was critical to my faith and salvation and that of my family. For some time, we also would go to a Novus Ordo Mass nearer to our home because my family, including and especially my children, had many friends at our old parish and it was difficult to ask them to leave. However, as time went on, this became more difficult. It was hard to witness the lack of respect for the Eucharist.

We were still going through this balancing act into 2020 when, after the COVID lockdown time, the parishes were getting ready to re-open. I watched a video put out by the Archdiocese where they said everyone should take the Eucharist on the hand. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back that had been under strain for a long time.

3. What issues did you wrestle with during your conversion to Tradition, and how have you found resolutions to those concerns?

Soon after I saw the video from the Archdiocese I searched online for the Society of St. Pius X. While I had been aware of the SSPX since 1988, after becoming a Catholic the only things I had heard were that they were “schismatic” and other negative opinions. However, in the spring of 2020, I looked at the SSPX as perhaps the only place where I knew the TLM was safe. I located St. Isidore the Farmer east of Denver. St. Isidore’s is about an hour’s drive from my home. I went to Mass at St. Isidore’s early one Sunday morning by myself, not knowing what to expect. As I drove up, I was still not sure I was going to go in. I went to the Mass and was literally overwhelmed by the reverence. However, I needed to be able to understand the background of the SSPX before I was comfortable in trusting my family with them. Being a reader, I ordered a bunch of books from Angelus Press. I needed to resolve for myself whether the negative things I had heard about the SSPX had any basis in truth. Over the next weeks and months, I read through Michael Davies’ series on the Liturgical Revolution along with other books including Archbishop Lefebvre and the Vatican. In learning about the changes to the Mass, including the parallels with the changes that had occurred in the 1500s in England, it became clear to me that many Novus Ordo changes were designed to make the liturgy more palatable to Protestants and changed the theology of the Mass. As I read through the correspondence between Archbishop Lefebvre and the Vatican, it was apparent that truth and appeal to the traditions of the Church was on one side and appeals to power were on the other. What had been true for hundreds and hundreds of years could not become false in the late 1960s. It was clear to me that the SSPX was holding on to the truth.

4. Why did you settle on the SSPX as opposed to some other TLM community?

As we moved past COVID, I recognized that the SSPX was the place that would be there for my family. We had discussions as a family and also with the priest who had originally recommended our going to the TLM. When I told him we were now going to a SSPX church, he encouraged us to go to an FSSP Mass or diocesan TLM Mass. Beyond the loyalty I already felt to the SSPX for being there for my family and me when we needed them, I told him that I feared that Pope Francis or some future Pope would overturn Summorum Pontificum and, depending on the wishes of the local Bishop, the TLM could be taken away everywhere else but an SSPX church. Once I saw that the SSPX was not “schismatic” and clearly part of the Catholic Church, I determined that we needed to support the place we know will always be there. When reaching this conclusion in 2020, little did I know the changes of Traditionis Custodes would come so fast in 2021. The TLM and other traditional sacraments are my family’s birthright and I sleep at night knowing that we do not need to fear some order from Rome that can take away the TLM and other traditional sacraments. The SSPX has shown for more than 50 years that they will not allow that to happen.

5. Now that you are a traditional Catholic, what are the greatest challenges that you face?

With our SSPX chapel close to an hour’s drive from our home, it is difficult for our family to be as involved as we would like.

6. Do you have any advice for the reader who may be considering, but not yet committed to, Tradition?

My advice is: just to go to a TLM. If there is an SSPX Church anywhere near where you live, go there. Don’t worry if you do not know what to do; neither did my family and we were always welcomed and never judged. One of the wonderful things about the TLM is you have room to experience the Mass in different ways. If you want to follow along in the missal you can do that. If you would rather just listen to the priest and pray you can do that too. If you have questions on the background of the SSPX, take the time to read some of the books on the subject and learn for yourself what happened and why Archbishop Lefebvre made the decisions he did. Take comfort that, in this era where everything seems uncertain, including from the highest reaches of the Church, you are not alone and there are priests who have dedicated their lives to preserving the eternal truths of the Church.