Andres Cantoria Ligot
Andres Cantoria Ligot was born November 30, 1965, in Laoag City, Philippines, to Ismael Ligot and Eulalia Cantoria, and baptized in January 1966 at St. Andrew Church in Bacarra. He attended St. Mary's Seminary in Laoag for high school and earned a philosophy degree from San Pablo College Seminary in Baguio in 1986. After teaching philosophy in Manila, he studied theology at the Ateneo de Manila and the Bidasoa International Seminary in Pamplona, Spain, earning sacred theology degrees and a canon-law doctorate from the University of Navarra in 1999.
He was ordained a priest on June 14, 1992, by Pope John Paul II at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, for the Diocese of Laoag, where he was parochial vicar and directed the diocese's Christian education commission and the national office for Asia's Catholic School of Evangelization. He was national coordinator for Evangelization 2000 from 1992 to 1995. In 1999 he received permission to minister in California, as chaplain at the San Francisco Veterans Medical Center and the Church of the Nativity in Menlo Park, before his incardination into the Diocese of San Jose on March 30, 2004.
In San Jose he was diocesan tribunal defender of the bond and judge, parochial vicar at St. John Vianney, pastor of St. Lawrence the Martyr in Santa Clara, and judicial vicar from 2008 to 2021. He has been pastor of St. Elizabeth of Portugal in Milpitas since 2021, and vicar general and chancellor since 2023. Pope Leo XIV appointed him auxiliary bishop of San Jose on August 29, 2025, and he was consecrated on November 3, 2025, at Our Lady of La Vang in San Jose, with Bishop Oscar Cantu as principal consecrator.
Bishop Ligot is an auxiliary bishop, not the diocesan ordinary, so the power to authorize, restrict, or relocate celebration of the 1962 Missal in the Diocese of San Jose belongs to Bishop Oscar Cantu, not to him. No statement, decree, permission, or restriction by Ligot himself concerning the older liturgy was found in the sources searched for this dossier, and none is claimed for him.
The diocesan context is older than Ligot's episcopate. In December 2013 Bishop Patrick McGrath erected the Oratory of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and entrusted it to the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, and Cantu later assured the oratory it should continue with his blessing. A 2026 parish letter describes the Traditional Latin Mass continuing at the oratory under the Institute. None of that is Ligot's act, and the oratory is carried here in prose only, not entered as his site count.
Ligot's own record in the period searched is canon law and diocesan administration: judicial vicar, vicar general and chancellor, and pastor of St. Elizabeth of Portugal in Milpitas. His auxiliary tenure is under a year old at the as-of date, and continuation without a governing act of his own is no_record under the sprint rules.