For the first time in his more than 11 years of pontificate, Pope Francis has named five new auxiliary bishops for a single archdiocese, in this case in the United States.
On several occasions, Pope Francis has appointed three auxiliary bishops in some dioceses, as happened in June of this year in his native Buenos Aires (Argentina) and even four, as in the case of Los Angeles (USA) in July 2023. , but this is the first time that he names five prelates together for a single jurisdiction of the Catholic Church.
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The Holy Father has named priests Timothy O’Malley, Lawrence J. Sullivan, José Maria Garcia Maldonado, Robert Fedek, and John S. Siemianowski as new auxiliary bishops of the Archdiocese of Chicago.
The episcopal consecration of these five new auxiliary bishops will take place at the Holy Name Cathedral, at the beginning of 2025 on a date that will be announced later, according to reports a note of the archdiocese.
The United States Episcopate (USCCB) informa in a statement that Bishop-elect O’Malley is a priest from Chicago and currently pastor of Holy Trinity Parish in Waukegan. Bishop-elect Sullivan is a Chicago priest and interim Episcopal vicar of Vicariate VI, interim priest director of Catholic Cemeteries, and pastor of Christ the King Parish.
Bishop-elect Maldonado, originally from Jalisco (Mexico), serves in Chicago as pastor of the parish of San José Sánchez del Río. Bishop-elect Fedek serves as assistant to the Archbishop of Chicago. Bishop-elect Siemianowski, also of Chicago, is pastor of St. Juliana Parish.
With these appointments, Chicago will have a total eight active auxiliary bishopssince there are five other retired prelates in the archdiocese. The other three are Mark Andrew Bartosic, Robert Gerald Casey and Robert Joseph Lombardo, who serve under the authority of the current archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich.
“We are grateful to the Holy Father for the gift of these new auxiliary bishops,” the cardinal indicated in the note from his archdiocese.
“These excellent archdiocesan priests reflect the people of this particular Church and the many talents of our local presbytery. However, each of them has a solid and notable record of pastoral service rooted in their shared fidelity to the Gospel and their generosity in using their unique gifts for the good of the Church and society,” he highlighted.
The Archdiocese of Chicago has an area of 3,654 square kilometers, is located in the state of Illinois and has a population of 5,939,000 people, of which 2,079,000 are Catholic, according to the USCCB.
Walter Sánchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.