Carl A. Kemme
Carl Alan Kemme was born August 14, 1960, in Effingham, Illinois. He studied at Immaculate Conception Seminary in Springfield, Cardinal Glennon College in St. Louis, and Kenrick Seminary, and was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois on May 10, 1986. His episcopal motto, HUMILITAS, is taken from the arms of St. Charles Borromeo.
In Springfield he served as pastor across several parishes, then as chancellor, vicar general, and moderator of the curia, and as diocesan administrator during the 2009-2010 vacancy. Pope Francis appointed him the 11th Bishop of Wichita on February 20, 2014, and he was ordained and installed at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita on May 1, 2014.
Kemme leads a diocese famous for its stewardship model and strong priestly vocations. His public program as bishop has been strongly reverence-oriented within the reformed liturgy: a 2023 pastoral letter urging parishes to sing the Church's proper antiphons instead of hymns, encouragement of ad orientem worship and Communion rails at some parishes, and repeated emphasis on the Real Presence. As of mid-2026 he remains the sitting Bishop of Wichita (age 65).
The crux question is how Bishop Kemme treated the old Mass under Traditionis Custodes, and here his deed is favorable: in late July 2021 he was one of only a handful of US bishops to grant priests a canonical dispensation from Article 3 sec. 2 of the motu proprio, which meant the Traditional Latin Mass could keep being celebrated in parish churches instead of being exiled from them. He did not suppress, cap, or eliminate the TLM. As of the mid-2020s the diocese still had public Sunday Vetus Ordo Masses celebrated with his approval, principally at St. Joseph's in Wichita.
But the fuller picture is more restrictive than that one act suggests. Two years before Traditionis Custodes, effective September 1, 2019, Kemme had already dissolved the diocese's long-standing Latin Mass Community, suppressed its name, withdrew its dedicated chaplains, ended the Vetus Ordo at St. Anthony's, and reduced it to a supplementary Mass said by a parish's parochial vicar at St. Joseph's. That consolidation stripped the traditional community of its own identity and clergy, and it prompted public lament in traditional media. Wichita has never invited the FSSP or ICKSP, so the only self-standing traditional apostolate in the city is the SSPX chapel, which is not in his gift and not in regular canonical standing.
On the broader liturgy Kemme is genuinely reverence-minded and, by the standards of the reformed rite, ambitious: a 2023 pastoral letter pressing parishes to chant the Church's proper antiphons rather than pick hymns, open encouragement of ad orientem worship, altar rails and kneeling for Communion at willing parishes, and steady Eucharistic teaching on the Real Presence. That makes him a friend of traditional worship in a broad sense. On the narrow axis that matters for this dossier, the verdict is mixed: he preserved the TLM when Rome pressed bishops to curtail it, yet he had earlier downgraded the traditional community and has kept the old Mass on a short institutional leash with no dedicated apostolate.