Edward J. Burns
Edward J. Burns was born in 1957 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and ordained a priest of the Diocese of Pittsburgh in 1983. He served as rector of St. Paul Seminary and, from 1999 to 2008, as Executive Director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations, where he rewrote the Program of Priestly Formation. Benedict XVI named him Bishop of Juneau, Alaska, in 2009.
Pope Francis appointed him the eighth Bishop of Dallas in December 2016; he was installed in February 2017. He has chaired the U.S. bishops' Committee on the Protection of Children and Young People, and his Dallas years have been marked by a hard line on clergy abuse — publicly removing and reporting an accused pastor, releasing the diocese's list of credibly accused clergy, and a sharp public clash with police over a 2019 raid on the chancery.
Bishop Burns is the harder kind of case to judge — not a persecutor, but not a champion either; a shepherd who was once warm to the old Mass and then fell quiet when it counted. The first chapter is genuinely to his credit. Long before Traditionis Custodes, he let the Traditional Latin Mass into his Cathedral, presided over the growth of the FSSP's Mater Dei community, and even saw a diocesan-priest TLM begin at St. Elizabeth of Hungary in 2020. The local traditional community thanked him by name. That is more than many bishops gave.
The second chapter is cooler. When the 2021 motu proprio came, Burns spent no public capital defending the rite he had welcomed. The diocese issued no statement of esteem; the pre-2021 momentum did not survive into the new regime; and Mater Dei's continuation owes more to Rome's exemption of the FSSP than to any fight of his own. By one traditionalist account he later closed the door on a new Latin Mass foundation — a claim we report honestly as unverified, but which fits the silence around it.
So the fair verdict is a mixed one. He suppressed no existing parish, and the one large TLM community in Dallas still stands. But asked to spend himself protecting or growing the old Mass under pressure, the available evidence says he declined. A friend who fell silent is not an enemy — but neither is he the defender the faithful had reason to hope for.