Edward Weisenburger
Edward Joseph Weisenburger was born in 1960 in Alton, Illinois, raised in Lawton, Oklahoma, and ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City in 1987. A canon lawyer who served as a chaplain after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, he was named Bishop of Salina in 2012 and Bishop of Tucson in 2017, where his diocese spanned the entire Arizona–Mexico border.
On February 11, 2025, Pope Francis named him the sixth Archbishop of Detroit, succeeding Allen Vigneron; he was installed March 18, 2025. He is an outspoken critic of immigration enforcement and, within weeks of arriving in Detroit, moved to end the Traditional Latin Mass in the archdiocese's parish churches.
Archbishop Weisenburger had scarcely been installed in Detroit before he turned to the Traditional Latin Mass — and turned it out of the parishes. Citing a 2023 Vatican clarification that reserved to Rome the power to permit the old rite in a parish church, he chose not to seek that permission, and ordered the parish Latin Masses of the archdiocese to cease by July 1, 2025. At least ten parishes had offered the ancient Mass every Sunday; in their place he designated just four non-parish 'regional sites.' The older rite was not abolished, but it was evicted from those parishes where it had taken root — turned out of the ordinary life of the archdiocese and pushed to the edges of the map.
It must be said clearly where the responsibility lies. The restrictive framework was begun by his predecessor, Archbishop Vigneron, under Traditionis Custodes; but the decisive act of 2025 — the refusal to renew, the removal of the Mass from the parishes, the consolidation to four sites — is Weisenburger's own. He could have sought to keep the Mass in the parishes. He did not.
A bishop is free to spend his energies as he judges best. That a new archbishop, in his first season, would make the curtailing of the ancient Mass an early order of business tells the traditional Catholic what he needs to know. Four sites are better than none, and we say so. But this is the record of a shepherd narrowing the door to the Mass of Ages, not widening it — and on that question he is no friend.