Brian Nunes
Brian Alan Nunes was born in Inglewood, California, on October 26, 1964, the oldest of four children of immigrant parents from Hong Kong. He attended St. Joseph School in Placentia and Servite High School in Anaheim, then earned a bachelor's degree in communications from Loyola Marymount University in 1986. For years he worked in print journalism, including twelve years at Business Wire, telling other people's stories for a living before he heard a call to tell the Church's story from inside it.
He entered St. John's Seminary in Camarillo in 2002 and was ordained a priest of Los Angeles by Cardinal Roger Mahony on May 31, 2008. His priesthood moved quickly toward the archbishop's side: associate pastor and then administrator of Mary Star of the Sea in San Pedro, administrator of St. Gregory the Great in Whittier, priest secretary to Archbishop Gomez from 2015 to 2019, vice chancellor from 2018 to 2020, and vicar general and moderator of the curia from 2020 - the archdiocese's chief administrator through the pandemic years and beyond.
Pope Francis named him an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles on July 18, 2023, and he was consecrated on September 26, 2023, taking the San Gabriel Pastoral Region as episcopal vicar, with the motto 'Preach the gospel to the whole world.' The journalist turned curial chief is the insider of the four bishops consecrated that day, the man who already ran the machine. On the old Mass he has no act in his own name on record, and acts of the administration he ran belong to Gomez, not to him.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Nunes has no record of his own. No decree in his name, no dispensation sought, no homily or public word for or against the old rite has surfaced. The one caveat matters and must be stated plainly: he has been vicar general since 2020, so he administered the archdiocese through the whole Traditionis Custodes period - but administration is not authorship, and no liturgical act in his own name has surfaced. What the curia did in those years, it did in Archbishop Gomez's name.
What exists in Los Angeles belongs to that archbishop. Gomez welcomed the motu proprio in July 2021 and urged care in implementing it, and no detailed public decree of his has surfaced; the archdiocese's roughly seven older-rite locations of 2021 were consolidated over time, the sources neither dating that consolidation nor tying it to a decree of his, while the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter's St. Vitus in the San Fernando Valley continues. That is Gomez's provision, not Nunes's, and this panel keeps the distinction even where Nunes ran the office that carried it out.
The honest verdict is therefore a plain one: the curial insider of the Los Angeles auxiliaries, on whom the old Mass has left no personal mark either way. To read his vicar-general years as a liturgical position would be to confuse the hand that administered a policy with the hand that made it.