Pope Francis appointed Fr. Alan Campeau, until now pastor of St Joseph Parish in Dryden, Ontario, as the new Bishop of Thunder Bay in Canada.
This was reported today by bishops of canada and the Press Office of the Vatican. The Diocese of Thunder Bay, the Canadian prelates point out, is made up of 43 parishes and missions, has 31 diocesan priests, 5 religious priests, 28 permanent deacons and almost 74,000 lay people.
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The bishop-elect was born on August 1, 1959, is 55 years old, and is the third of the eight children of Leo and Betty Campeau. In 1983 he entered Saint Peter’s Seminary in London, Ontario. He was ordained a priest on April 28, 1990.
He earned a BA in Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Western Ontario – King’s College in 1986, and then completed a Master of Divinity in 1990 at Saint Peter’s Seminary.
He has held, among others, the following positions: chaplain at the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Windsor, associate pastor at St. Gregory the Great parish in St. Clair Beach (1990-1991) and at St. Pius X parish in London (1991- 1995).
In 1995, the Diocese of London transferred the now bishop-elect Campeau to the Diocese of Thunder Bay, where he assumed various functions: parish priest at Holy Family parish and St. Benedict Chapel (1995-1997), and then at Corpus Christi parish (1997-1999).
From 1999 to 2005 he was pastor of Notre Dame Parish in Kenora, Sacred Heart Parish in Sioux Narrows and Our Lady of the Lake in Nestor Falls. He has also served on several missions such as Reditt, Grassy Narrows First Nation Reserve and White Dog First Nation Reserve.
In 2008 he was pastor of St. Joseph parishes in Dryden, Our Lady of Fatima in Vermilion Bay and Immaculate Conception in Ignace, while also serving on the Wabigoon and Eagle Lake First Nations reserves until 2024.
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.