Frank R. Schuster
Frank Raymond Schuster was born on May 20, 1971, in Mount Vernon, Washington, the second of three children of John and Virginia Schuster. When he was six the family moved to Maple Valley, along the Cedar River, and he attended Kennedy Catholic High School in Burien, where his father was principal for more than twenty years. At the University of Washington he earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and spent most of his time at the Newman Center in peer ministry, then studied at Mundelein Seminary in Illinois, where he received a Bachelor of Sacred Theology and a Master of Divinity.
He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Seattle on June 12, 1999. His early assignments were in Bellingham, as parochial vicar, pastor, and chaplain to the Catholic campus ministry at Western Washington University, and from 2007 to 2021 he was pastor of St. Teresa of Calcutta Parish in Woodinville, where the parish raised funds from more than three hundred donors to build a church for a Kenyan orphanage village, completed in December 2019. In 2021 he became pastor of St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Federal Way.
Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of Seattle on March 8, 2022, and he was ordained a bishop on May 3, 2022, at St. James Cathedral, becoming the eighth auxiliary bishop of Seattle. Etienne kept him with his parish community, then made him regional bishop for the southern deaneries and vicar general, and on February 12, 2026, appointed him vicar for multicultural ministry. He also chairs the board of Catholic Community Services of Western Washington and serves nationally as bishop promoter of Stella Maris.
Bishop Schuster was appointed a Seattle auxiliary in March 2022, six months after Archbishop Etienne's September 8, 2021, decree implementing Traditionis Custodes, so he inherited a settlement already made: 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Martyrs in Edmonds and St. Joseph in Tacoma, both staffed by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, with the faculty withdrawn from other archdiocesan priests. No decree, permission, dispensation request, or appointment of Schuster's own on the 1962 Missal was found in the four years since.
His record in those years is pastoral and administrative rather than liturgical-governing: remaining with his Federal Way parish at first, then serving as regional bishop for the southern deaneries, as vicar general, and from February 2026 as vicar for multicultural ministry. Nothing in those appointments governs the old Mass, and his well-known line about his priesthood, that he is happy to be of service, is a statement of pastoral temper, not a liturgical act, and is not counted here.
No site count is asserted for Schuster'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 Schuster's record on the old Mass is blank, which is no_record.