Gustavo Garcia-Siller
Gustavo García-Siller, M.Sp.S., was born in 1956 in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, the eldest of fifteen children, and entered the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit in 1973. Sent to the United States in 1980 to minister among migrant workers, he was ordained a priest in 1984 and named an auxiliary bishop of Chicago in 2003.
Pope Benedict XVI appointed him Archbishop of San Antonio in 2010. He is among the most publicly outspoken U.S. bishops on immigration and the border, active on social media, and in 2024 drew national notice for suppressing the New Braunfels 'Mission of Divine Mercy' apostolate after it published attacks on Pope Francis.
The diocesan Traditional Latin Mass in San Antonio once had a settled home at St. Pius X parish. Under Archbishop García-Siller, in the wake of Pope Francis's Traditionis Custodes (2021), it was moved out — relocated to the smaller, less central St. Timothy parish and pushed into a Sunday afternoon slot. The community that prays the old rite was, in plain terms, displaced and diminished: shifted from a prominent church to an out-of-the-way one, and from the heart of the Lord's Day to its margins.
In fairness, San Antonio has published no harsh decree of the kind Chicago or Detroit produced, and the archdiocese is thin on the public record — and so the sharper reports (a move to a 1:30 p.m. hour, a restriction of the older form of baptism and other sacraments) we have not been able to confirm against a primary diocesan document, and we will not assert what we cannot source. What is documented is a relocation and a downgrading.
That is enough for the verdict the traditional Catholic must render. A shepherd who finds a flock at peace around the ancient Mass and answers it by sending that Mass to a smaller room at a less convenient hour is not, on this question, its friend. We hold the door open to correction if the archdiocese acts otherwise — but on what is known, his record toward the Mass of Ages is one of restriction, not of welcome.