Andrew E. Bellisario
Andrew Eugene Bellisario was born December 19, 1956, in Alhambra, California, in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He entered the Congregation of the Mission (the Vincentians, C.M.) in 1975, studied at St. Mary's of the Barrens in Perryville, Missouri, and earned a Master of Divinity from the De Andreis Institute of Theology in Illinois. He was ordained a priest on June 16, 1984, at St. Vincent de Paul Church in Los Angeles.
As a Vincentian he served parishes in California, directed an evangelization center, served as provincial superior of the Vincentians' Western Province, and directed Vincentian International Missions — work that first brought him to Alaska. In May 2016 he became pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the Archdiocese of Anchorage.
Pope Francis appointed Bellisario the sixth Bishop of Juneau on July 11, 2017 (ordained bishop October 10, 2017, with Archbishop Paul Etienne as principal consecrator). Named apostolic administrator of Anchorage in 2019, he became — after Pope Francis merged the Archdiocese of Anchorage and the Diocese of Juneau on May 19, 2020 — the first Metropolitan Archbishop of the new Archdiocese of Anchorage-Juneau, installed September 17, 2020. He also administered the Diocese of Fairbanks (2022–2023) and remains Archbishop of Anchorage-Juneau as of mid-2026.
Alaska has one of the smallest traditional-liturgy footprints in the United States, and Archbishop Bellisario's public record on the Traditional Latin Mass is correspondingly thin. He has never issued a public statement, permission, or decree regarding Traditionis Custodes, and the archdiocese does not appear in trackers of dioceses' responses to the 2021 motu proprio. There is no documented instance of him providing for, expanding, or publicly welcoming the 1962 Roman Rite — but neither is there a verified act of suppression.
The most visible ancient-Latin liturgy in the archdiocese is not a Bellisario initiative and is not, strictly, the 1962 Roman Rite governed by Traditionis Custodes: the Dominican Rite Mass celebrated by friars of the Western Dominican Province at Holy Family Old Cathedral in Anchorage, offered Sunday afternoons. That Order's own venerable rite predates and sits outside the Roman-Rite restrictions, and its survival reflects the Dominican friars' proper liturgical law rather than any policy of favor from the archbishop.
The one negative datapoint of the Traditionis-Custodes era — a report that a pastor was told to treat an unanswered request to Rome as a suppression and close a Sunday TLM — rests on a single secondary source and is unconfirmed by any primary document, so it cannot fairly anchor a verdict. On the deeds actually on record, Bellisario has neither helped nor demonstrably harmed the traditional Mass; his pastoral emphasis has been on unity, civility, and holding together a fragile Alaskan church, not the liturgy question. The honest verdict is that his record is simply too thin to judge — with the caveat that traditional Catholics in Alaska currently have no documented protection to rely on.