Frank Joseph Dewane
Frank Joseph Dewane was born March 9, 1950, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, into a dairy-farming family. Before the priesthood he took degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and American University and worked for NBC in Moscow and for a PepsiCo subsidiary in New York. He studied at Notre Dame, the Pontifical North American College in Rome, the Gregorian, and the Angelicum, and was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Green Bay on July 16, 1988.
Dewane spent most of his priesthood in Vatican diplomatic and curial service: the Holy See's UN Observer Mission, the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, and as Undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (2001-2006). Pope Benedict XVI named him Coadjutor Bishop of Venice in Florida on April 25, 2006; he was consecrated July 25, 2006, and succeeded as diocesan bishop on January 19, 2007, taking the motto Iustitia Pax Gaudium.
He governed Venice for nineteen years and chaired the USCCB Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development. Having reached the retirement age of 75, his resignation was accepted by Pope Leo XIV on May 13, 2026, when he was 76, making him Bishop Emeritus of Venice. He served as Apostolic Administrator until the ordination of his successor, the Capuchin Franciscan Emilio Biosca Aguero, on July 11, 2026.
On the Traditional Latin Mass itself, Dewane's deeds place him among the more accommodating American bishops of his generation. Long before Traditionis Custodes he welcomed the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter into the diocese: Christ the King in Sarasota became a full FSSP Latin Mass parish (founded 2009), and in 2017 the FSSP Corpus Christi Chapel mission was established to serve the Naples-Fort Myers region with a building project of its own. That is a durable, institutional home for Tradition, not a grudging toleration.
When Pope Francis issued Traditionis Custodes on July 16, 2021, Dewane responded by extending faculties to priests already celebrating the 1962 Missal, letting the existing Masses continue at their scheduled times and places. The FSSP publicly thanked him, reporting he reassured them that Christ the King and Corpus Christi would remain the spiritual home of the diocese's Latin Mass faithful. Against the wave of suppressions elsewhere, this was a friendly outcome for the old rite.
The countervailing mark is his January 2022 letter forbidding the ordinary-form Mass ad orientem without his written permission, framing eastward worship as an illegitimate private choice. Reverent, tradition-minded celebration of the new Mass was thus curtailed even as the TLM was left standing. A bishop genuinely formed by the liturgical tradition does not treat facing the tabernacle as an abuse. Combined with a documented reputation for authoritarian governance, the honest verdict is a mixed record: a real friend to the FSSP and the 1962 Missal, but hostile to traditional worship within the reformed rite. He is now Bishop Emeritus of Venice.