Albert Bahhuth
Albert Matta Bahhuth was born in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 6, 1956, the youngest of seven children, and was baptized in the Greek Catholic Church. Civil war sent him abroad as a young man: he came to the United States to study chemical engineering, earning degrees at the University of Missouri and a doctorate from the University of Mississippi in 1983. He taught at the University of Wyoming, then moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and bought two franchise businesses. In those uprooted years his faith deepened, and a vocation he had not planned began to press on him.
He entered St. John's Seminary in Camarillo in 1991, transferring to the Latin Church in 1993, and was ordained a priest of Los Angeles on June 1, 1996. Parish ministry followed at St. Gregory the Great in Whittier, then eleven years as pastor of St. Finbar in Burbank, then St. Kateri Tekakwitha in Santa Clarita. In 2015 Archbishop Jose Gomez named him vicar general and moderator of the curia, the archdiocese's chief administrator, a post he held until 2020, when he returned to parish life as pastor of Holy Family in South Pasadena.
Pope Francis named him an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles on July 18, 2023, and he was consecrated on September 26, 2023, taking the San Fernando Pastoral Region as episcopal vicar. The engineer turned pastor brings an organizer's mind to a region of valleys and suburbs, and a late vocation's gratitude for a Church that found him far from home. On the old Mass he has said and done nothing of his own on the public record, and this dossier does not pretend otherwise.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Bahhuth has no record of his own. No decree in his name, no dispensation sought, no homily or public word for or against the old rite has surfaced. He was consecrated in September 2023, two years after Traditionis Custodes, and his years as vicar general ended in 2020, before the motu proprio; nothing in his public ministry touches the 1962 Missal at all.
What exists in Los Angeles belongs to his archbishop. Archbishop Gomez welcomed the motu proprio in July 2021 and urged care in implementing it, and no detailed public decree of his has surfaced; the archdiocese's roughly seven older-rite locations of 2021 were consolidated over time, the sources neither dating that consolidation nor tying it to a decree of his, while the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter's St. Vitus in the San Fernando Valley - Bahhuth's own region - continues. That is Gomez's provision, not Bahhuth's, and this panel keeps the distinction.
The honest verdict is therefore a plain one: an auxiliary with an administrator's past and a pastor's heart, on whom the old Mass has left no mark either way. To credit him with his archbishop's permissive continuation, or to blame him for its quiet consolidation, would be to invent a record he does not have.