Eusebio L. Elizondo Almaguer
Eusebio L. Elizondo Almaguer was born on August 8, 1954, at Victoria, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. He entered the novitiate of the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit in Mexico City in 1972, studied philosophy in Guadalajara, and then studied theology and canon law at the Gregorian University in Rome. He was ordained a priest of the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit on August 18, 1984, in Mexico City, and his congregation's work of spiritual direction for priests and religious has remained the background of his ministry.
After assignments that included the novitiate at Queretaro in Mexico and work as rector of theology in California, he became pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in Oxnard, California, in 1998. In 2000, at the request of Archbishop Alex Brunett, he was assigned to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish in Bothell, Washington, to minister to the growing Hispanic community of western Washington, the community that has defined his episcopal work ever since.
Pope Benedict XVI appointed him an auxiliary bishop of Seattle on May 12, 2005, and Archbishop Brunett ordained him a bishop on June 6, 2005, making him the first Hispanic bishop in Seattle. He has served as vicar general and as vicar for Hispanic ministries and for vocations, and later as regional bishop for the northern deaneries of the archdiocese, while also serving nationally, including as chairman of the United States bishops' Committee on Migration. He remains in office as Seattle's senior auxiliary bishop.
Bishop Elizondo has been a Seattle auxiliary since June 2005, so he was already in office, and already vicar general, when Archbishop Etienne issued the archdiocese's Traditionis Custodes decree on September 8, 2021. That decree allowed the 1962 Missal Mass only at North American Martyrs in Edmonds and St. Joseph in Tacoma, both staffed by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, and withdrew the faculty from other archdiocesan priests. It is Etienne's decree, signed by Etienne, and no act of Elizondo's own on the 1962 Missal was found alongside it.
Elizondo's public record in the years since is dominated by the work he was appointed for: Hispanic ministry, vocations, and the northern region of the archdiocese, with regular writing in Northwest Catholic on the life of faith. None of that writing, and none of his appointments, touches the governance of the old Mass, and none of it is counted here as evidence for or against a posture, because only a governing act of his own could supply one.
No site count is asserted for Elizondo's own record. The archdiocesan provision stands at the two FSSP parishes named in Etienne's decree, and that figure belongs to the archbishop's decree, not to the auxiliary. On the evidence available Elizondo's record on the old Mass is blank, which is no_record.