Gary W. Janak
Gary Wayne Janak was born March 22, 1962, in El Campo, Texas, and raised in Palacios, where he graduated from Palacios High School in 1980. He studied at Wharton County Junior College and the University of Texas at Austin, earned a history bachelor's from the College of Santa Fe in 1983, and received a Master of Divinity from the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio in 1988. He later earned a canon-law licentiate from The Catholic University of America and a counseling master's from the University of Houston-Victoria, becoming a licensed counselor in Texas.
He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Victoria on May 14, 1988, and served in parish ministry, as a marriage tribunal judge and advocate, as director of the permanent diaconate program, and as vocations director. He was Victoria's chancellor from 2012, vicar general from 2015, and rector of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Victory from 2013. When Bishop David Fellhauer retired in 2015, Janak was elected diocesan administrator, governing Victoria from April 23 until Bishop Brendan Cahill's ordination and installation on June 29, 2015.
Pope Francis appointed him auxiliary bishop of San Antonio on February 15, 2021, and he was consecrated on April 20, 2021, at St. Mark the Evangelist Church in San Antonio. In San Antonio he was vocations director and director of seminarians from 2021 to 2025, and archdiocesan chancellor. On July 1, 2025, he became rector of Assumption Seminary, the archdiocese's major seminary. A counselor by training, he has long worked with married couples, presenting for Retrouvaille since 2006 and helping found the Emmaus Center, a diocesan counseling and spiritual direction center, in 2016.
Bishop Janak is an auxiliary bishop, not the diocesan ordinary, so the power to authorize, restrict, or relocate celebration of the 1962 Missal in the Archdiocese of San Antonio belongs to Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller, not to him. No statement, decree, permission, or restriction by Janak himself concerning the older liturgy was found in the sources searched for this dossier, and none is claimed for him.
His one tenure in which he actually governed a see, the Victoria administratorship of April to June 2015, predates Traditionis custodes by six years and yields no TC-era evidence at all; it is tenured here because he administered a vacant see, not because it speaks to the older liturgy. His San Antonio auxiliary tenure, by contrast, spans the whole TC era, and its record is in vocations, the chancery, and seminary leadership, not in liturgical governance.
The only recent archdiocesan direction found is Garcia-Siller's July 2026 letter on the SSPX, which steered Catholics wanting the traditional Latin Mass to St. Timothy parish, where the extraordinary form is celebrated each Saturday and Sunday. That direction is the archbishop's, and it is carried in prose only. Until Janak issues a governing act of his own on the 1962 Missal, his posture is no_record.