Gerald Lee Vincke
Gerald Lee 'Jerry' Vincke was born July 9, 1964, in Saginaw, Michigan, the ninth of ten children. He earned a degree in public relations and marketing from Ferris State University, studied philosophy at Thomas More College in Kentucky, and completed theology at the Athenaeum of Ohio and Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Lansing, Michigan, on June 12, 1999.
In the Diocese of Lansing he served as parochial vicar of St. Thomas the Apostle Parish in Ann Arbor, director of a youth retreat center, and diocesan director of seminarians. From 2010 to 2015 he was a spiritual director at the Pontifical North American College in Rome, where he earned a Licentiate in spiritual theology (2015). Pope Benedict XVI named him a Chaplain to His Holiness (carrying the style of Monsignor) in 2012.
Pope Francis appointed him the ninth Bishop of Salina, Kansas, on June 13, 2018. He was ordained and installed at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Salina on August 22, 2018, and remains the sitting Bishop of Salina as of mid-2026, leading a small, heavily rural north-central Kansas diocese.
The deeds-based record here is thin, and honesty requires saying so up front. Bishop Vincke has left almost no public trail on the Traditional Latin Mass. He has issued no decree implementing Traditionis Custodes, no instruction restricting the older rite, and equally no pastoral letter defending or expanding it. Salina is a small, rural diocese that never had a robust traditional footprint -- there is no FSSP, ICKSP, or SSPX apostolate in the diocese, and no diocesan stable-group TLM appears to have survived.
The one concrete, datable deed cuts against Tradition, though its authorship is unclear. Around the Traditionis Custodes period (the directory report dates to roughly 2021-2022), the Traditional Latin Mass formerly listed at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Salina was discontinued. The cathedral office told a Latin Mass Directory volunteer it was simply 'no longer offered,' offered no reason, and had no plans to bring it back. Whether this was a direct suppression by Bishop Vincke or a decision made below the level of the ordinary is not documented in any primary source.
On the evidence available, Vincke is neither a demonstrated champion nor a documented persecutor of the old Mass -- he is a bishop under whose watch a small TLM presence quietly vanished without a public word either way. That is not a friendly record, but neither is there a paper trail of aggressive suppression on which to hang a harsher verdict. We rate the record mixed with the strong caveat that it is sparse; if primary evidence of a formal suppression (or a quiet accommodation) surfaces, this should be revised.