Gregory Parkes
Gregory Lawrence Parkes was born April 2, 1964, in Mineola, New York, and grew up on Long Island. Uniquely among American prelates, his younger brother, Stephen Parkes, is Bishop of Savannah — one of only a handful of sibling-bishop pairs in U.S. Catholic history. Before the priesthood, Parkes earned a finance degree from Florida State University and spent seven years working in banking in Tampa, and has said he first heard the call to the priesthood as a young professional at Christ the King Parish there.
Parkes studied at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary and then at the Pontifical North American College in Rome, taking a Bachelor of Sacred Theology (1998) and a Licentiate in Canon Law (2000) from the Gregorian University. He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Orlando on June 26, 1999. In Orlando he served as founding pastor of Corpus Christi Parish in Celebration and rose to diocesan chancellor and vicar general under then-Bishop Thomas Wenski. His canon-law training would shape a cautious, procedure-minded governance.
Pope Benedict XVI appointed Parkes the fifth Bishop of Pensacola–Tallahassee on March 20, 2012; he was installed June 5, 2012. On November 28, 2016, Pope Francis named him the fifth Bishop of St. Petersburg, covering the Tampa Bay region; he was installed January 4, 2017, and remains the sitting bishop as of mid-2026. (St. Petersburg is a suffragan see of the Archdiocese of Miami — there is no 'Archdiocese of Tampa.') In office he has emphasized a diocesan strategic plan, affordable-housing and mental-health initiatives, hurricane relief, and Eucharistic devotion.
Judged strictly by deeds, Bishop Gregory Parkes has one of the more genuinely favorable Traditionis Custodes records among living U.S. bishops. When Pope Francis issued the 2021 motu proprio, Parkes did not move to extinguish the thriving 1962-Missal community that Father Edwin Palka had built up at Epiphany of Our Lord in Tampa since 2015. The Traditional Latin Mass continued there, and Parkes let it stand while he studied his options — restraint that stands in sharp contrast to bishops who cancelled TLMs outright within weeks of the decree.
His decisive act came in 2025. Rather than let the motu proprio's ban on the old Mass in parish churches slowly strangle the community, Parkes announced that he would canonically raise Epiphany to a diocesan shrine — a category the restrictions do not reach. Effective July 1, 2025, Epiphany of Our Lord Shrine was erected and its pastoral care entrusted to the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, with Canon John O'Connor installed as rector and the Institute's clergy arriving that September. Importing a full traditional institute to serve a diocesan shrine in perpetuity is not the act of a bishop merely tolerating the old rite; it is the act of one deliberately securing its future. He also kept two further indult TLM sites, at Brooksville and Largo, in operation.
The honest caveat is that the shrine device works within the Traditionis Custodes framework rather than against it: the flock keeps its Mass, but the older liturgy is formally recast as an exceptional pilgrimage devotion, and his Vicar General publicly framed it as a papal 'exception.' Even so, a bishop is measured by what he actually does for the faithful in front of him, and Parkes chose the most generous canonically available path — preservation, stability, and a dedicated traditional order — over suppression. On the record, he is a friend of Tradition, and the Epiphany shrine is a model other bishops could have followed and did not.