Felipe Pulido
Felipe Pulido was born on January 13, 1970, in Dos Aguas, Michoacan, Mexico, and attended minor seminary in Uruapan. In 1988 his family left Mexico for the Yakima Valley in Washington State, where he finished high school, worked as a teenager picking fruit and vegetables, and later worked as a teaching assistant at the Epic Migrant Head Start program in Yakima. For about five months he helped care for Father Jerry Corrigan, a priest of his parish who was dying of cancer, and during their conversations Father Corrigan invited him to consider entering the priesthood.
In 1994 he began priestly formation at Mount Angel Seminary in Oregon, graduating in 1998 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, then studied in Rome, earning a baccalaureate in sacred theology with high honors from the Angelicum in 2000. He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Yakima on June 28, 2002, and served at Holy Family in Yakima, Our Lady of Fatima in Moses Lake, Our Lady of the Snows in Leavenworth, Our Lady of Fatima with Queen of All Saints in Warden, and St. Joseph in Yakima from 2012 to 2020.
From 2011 he also served the Diocese of Yakima as vicar for clergy and director of vocations, and from 2020 he was pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Kennewick. Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of San Diego on June 6, 2023, and Cardinal Robert McElroy ordained him bishop on September 28, 2023. He was the first priest of the Yakima Diocese named a bishop since 1951, and in May 2025 he ordained seven men to the permanent diaconate for San Diego.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Pulido has no record of his own on file: no decree in his name, no homily, no public word for or against the old rite has been recovered. He is an auxiliary bishop, and the liturgical decisions of the Diocese of San Diego belong to its ordinary. To credit or blame Pulido for them would be to invent a record he does not have, and the decisive San Diego decisions predate his consecration by two years.
What then-Bishop Robert McElroy did is on the record. On August 2, 2021, McElroy ruled that because St. Margaret and St. Mary are territorial parish churches, Mass using pre-conciliar texts could not continue there under Traditionis Custodes. The diocesan board row records that the communities were relocated out of parish churches to a single North County site, with the FSSP parish of St. Anne exempt. The relocation site's name and any current count are not verified here from a diocesan source, and no site count is asserted.
Pulido arrived in San Diego in 2023 as a Yakima priest formed in vocations work and parish ministry, not as the author of that settlement. The honest verdict is the plain one: no record of his own, and no inference drawn from serving under an ordinary who had already restricted the old Mass before he arrived.