Bernard Hebda
Bernard Anthony Hebda was born September 3, 1959, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Before the priesthood he pursued a secular legal career — a bachelor's degree from Harvard (1980) and a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School (1983) — was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar, and worked as an associate at a Pittsburgh law firm before entering seminary in 1984.
He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Pittsburgh on July 1, 1989, by then-Bishop Donald Wuerl. A trained canonist, he completed a licentiate in canon law at the Gregorian and from 1996 to 2009 served in the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, rising to under-secretary in 2003. His formation and career are heavily canonical and institutional.
Pope Benedict XVI named him Bishop of Gaylord, Michigan, in 2009; in 2013 he became Coadjutor Archbishop of Newark. Amid the Twin Cities abuse crisis he was made apostolic administrator of Saint Paul and Minneapolis in June 2015, and Pope Francis appointed him its Archbishop on March 24, 2016 (installed May 13, 2016). He remains the sitting archbishop as of mid-2026.
Archbishop Hebda's record on the Traditional Latin Mass is, by the standards of the post-2021 American episcopate, one of the more gracious — but it is not the record of a champion. When Traditionis Custodes landed in July 2021 he did not suppress a single Mass. He publicly said he was 'happy to grant the necessary faculties' to priests already offering the older rite, and directed that it continue at all seven locations where it was then celebrated, including the FSSP personal parish of All Saints in northeast Minneapolis — a canonical personal parish since 2017, still fully operational with FSSP priests as of 2026.
That preservation is real and deserves credit; many bishops used the same document as license to shutter chapels and evict communities. Hebda did not. But the framing matters. He is a Roman canonist by formation and temperament, and he implemented the letter as written: a task force to study the norms, a temporary 'status quo,' a ban on any new public celebration of the older form without his written permission, and a requirement that existing celebrants petition him for authorization. Nothing in the record shows him affirmatively defending, expanding, or praising the traditional liturgy — only refraining from cutting it.
The honest verdict is mixed, leaning favorable. Traditional Catholics in the Twin Cities have kept their Masses and their FSSP parish under Hebda, which is more than can be said in many dioceses. Yet the same canonical caution that spared them also fenced them in — no growth, no new apostolates, and a future left explicitly provisional. He is a careful custodian who preserved what he found, not an advocate who fought for it.