Bernard Shlesinger
Bernard Edward Shlesinger III, known as Ned, was born on December 17, 1960, in Washington, D.C., the youngest of six children, and was raised in northern Virginia. He graduated from Mount Vernon High School in Alexandria and earned an agricultural engineering degree from Virginia Tech in 1983. Commissioned in the United States Air Force, he flew the C-130E Hercules from Pope Air Force Base in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and retired in 1990 with the rank of captain, leaving a pilot's career for the priesthood.
He studied philosophy at Theological College at The Catholic University of America, then entered the Pontifical North American College in Rome, earning a sacred theology degree from the Pontifical Gregorian University in 1995. As a seminarian he spent four years in the Legion of Mary, walking Rome's piazzas and offering passers-by a Miraculous Medal, work he later credited with loosening a natural introversion. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Raleigh on June 22, 1996, in Wilmington, North Carolina.
In Raleigh, Shlesinger was parochial vicar at St. Mary in Wilmington, pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Newton Grove from 1998 to 2007, director of vocations and seminarian formation from 2007 to 2013, and director of spiritual formation at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Pennsylvania from 2013. Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of Atlanta on May 15, 2017, and he was ordained on July 19, 2017, with the motto Christum oportet crescere, Christ must grow. In Atlanta he has served as director of priest personnel.
Bishop Shlesinger serves in a diocese whose 1962 provision was fixed above him. Archbishop Hartmayer's September 8, 2021 memo on Traditionis custodes kept the 1962 Missal at the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter's personal parish of St. Francis de Sales in Mableton and at one weekly Mass at St. Monica in Duluth, and barred any other priest from publicly celebrating Mass or offering a sacrament in that way. That is the ordinary's preserved arrangement for Atlanta, and an auxiliary's presence inside it does not make it his act.
No decree, letter, permission, dispensation request, or appointment by Shlesinger himself concerning the 1962 Missal was found in searches of the Georgia Bulletin, the archdiocese's bishop pages, and TC-era reporting for 2021 to 2026. One single-sourced report, on an advocacy community site, says he offered a Pontifical Mass and traditional confirmations at the Atlanta Latin Mass parish on June 4, 2022; it could not be corroborated from the parish, the archdiocese, or any non-advocacy source in this pass, so it is not asserted in this dossier, and in any case a celebration, even if proved, is not one of the governing acts that move posture under the batch rules.
The verdict is therefore no_record at medium confidence, the medium reflecting only that one uncorroborated celebration report, not any governing act found. No site count is asserted for his tenure; the two diocesan locations are accounted for in the inherited paragraph, and the Atlanta board row, which reflects the ordinary's arrangement, is not evidence about this auxiliary. A corroborated Shlesinger-signed permission, decree, or sustaining appointment would reopen the file; a proved celebration alone would not change the posture.