Barry Christopher Knestout
Barry Christopher Knestout was born June 11, 1962, in Cheverly, Maryland, one of nine children of Thomas Knestout, a permanent deacon and NSA cryptologist, and his wife Caroline. He earned a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Maryland in 1984 before entering Mount St. Mary's Seminary, where he received a Master of Divinity in 1988 and a Master of Theology in moral theology in 1989. Cardinal James Hickey ordained him a priest for the Archdiocese of Washington on June 24, 1989.
His career unfolded almost entirely within the Washington chancery. He served as priest-secretary to Cardinal Hickey from 1994 to 2004, and for roughly six months in 2003-2004 also as priest-secretary to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. He later became archdiocesan secretary for pastoral life and, in 2007, vicar general and moderator of the curia. On November 18, 2008, Benedict XVI named him titular bishop of Leavenworth and an auxiliary bishop of Washington; he was consecrated December 29, 2008.
Pope Francis appointed him the 13th Bishop of Richmond on December 5, 2017, and he was installed at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart on January 12, 2018. He remains Bishop of Richmond as of mid-2026. His tenure has been marked by the state's clergy-abuse reckoning, a bruising public conflict with an outspoken priest, a nationally noted defense of traditional Catholics against an FBI memo, and a cautious, indult-by-indult implementation of Traditionis Custodes across a diocese that held multiple Traditional Latin Mass sites.
Bishop Knestout is a genuinely mixed figure on the Traditional Latin Mass, and his record must be judged by deeds across several years. When Pope Francis issued Traditionis Custodes on July 16, 2021, Knestout's initial posture was accommodating: he told the priests then celebrating the older rite that they could continue after personally requesting his permission, and he did not move to shut anything down. In June 2022 he formally requested that Rome permit several parishes to keep the TLM; after a July 6, 2022 reply from the Dicastery for Divine Worship he issued a diocesan decree dated October 25, 2022, under a two-year indult that preserved the existing Masses.
The hard restriction came when that indult lapsed. On July 5, 2024, obeying the motu proprio's rule that the 1962 Missal not be used in 'parochial churches,' Knestout ended the Traditional Latin Mass at the three diocesan parishes that offered it: Holy Comforter in Charlottesville, St. Joseph in Petersburg, and All Saints in Floyd. This is a diocese where TC's restrictions were actually applied, and Knestout applied them. Notably, however, he did not treat suppression as the goal: in a June 21, 2024 letter he signaled he would again seek a dispensation, and effective January 2025 he secured an extension of the indult running until November 2026, under which Holy Comforter and All Saints resumed their Latin Masses. Throughout, the FSSP apostolate at St. Joseph parish in North Chesterfield continued to offer the older rite, as ex-Ecclesia Dei institutes were not swept up in the parochial-church ban.
Cutting the other way, and strongly, is his February 2023 statement after a leaked FBI Richmond field-office memo profiled 'radical traditionalist Catholics' as potential extremists. Knestout publicly condemned the memo as a threat to religious liberty, explicitly defended Catholics who prefer traditional worship, and praised the FSSP by name for its devoted service. That was a real deed of protection when it counted. The honest verdict is neither friend nor foe: Knestout is an obedient implementer of Rome's restrictive policy who nonetheless repeatedly worked to preserve the older Mass by indult, kept an FSSP presence, and defended traditional Catholics in public. The looming expiration of the indult in November 2026 is the next test of which instinct governs.