Italo Dell'Oro
Italo Dell'Oro was born on June 20, 1953, in Malgrate, near Lecco on Lake Como in northern Italy, and grew up in nearby Valmadrera, where as a teenager he was a keen climber. He entered the Somascan Fathers' novitiate and theologate in Rome, made his first profession in 1978 and his solemn profession in 1981, and was ordained a priest in Como on September 11, 1982, having earned a Bachelor of Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Anselm in Rome that same year. The Somascans, founded by St. Jerome Emiliani in the sixteenth century, serve orphans, the poor, and abandoned youth.
He came to the United States in 1985 to work in a Somascan school in New Hampshire, earning a master's degree in counseling and psychotherapy from Rivier University in Nashua in 1988. Transferred to Galveston-Houston in 1992, he served as pastor of Assumption Church in Houston, then as the Somascans' director of vocations in Houston from 2001 and director of formation from 2014, while also directing the archdiocese's ministry to priests from 2005 to 2012. From 2015 he served as vicar for clergy and director of the Secretariat for Clergy Formation and Chaplaincy Services.
Pope Francis named him auxiliary bishop of Galveston-Houston on May 18, 2021, and he was consecrated on July 2, 2021, at the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Houston, with the titular see of Sucarda and the motto 'Abyssus abyssum vocat' - deep calls to deep. Named vicar general earlier in 2021, he serves on the US bishops' conference subcommittee for Asian and Pacific Island affairs and its committee for international justice and peace. He speaks English, Italian, and Spanish.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Dell'Oro has no record of his own, and the honest panel says so. He was consecrated on July 2, 2021, two weeks before Traditionis custodes was issued, and the archdiocese's settlement of the old Mass arrived two months later over another man's signature. Search as one will, there is no decree in Dell'Oro's name, no homily defending or opposing the old rite, no public word for or against it.
The settlement he serves under is a restrictive one. Cardinal DiNardo's September 2021 letter ended the old Mass at Prince of Peace and curtailed three of the four diocesan parishes offering it, leaving the faithful chiefly to the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter's personal parish of Regina Caeli and to Annunciation. That is DiNardo's act, and now Archbishop Vasquez's inheritance; Dell'Oro's long priest-care portfolio - vicar for clergy, director of ministry to priests - put him near the clergy affected by it, but proximity is not authorship.
That is why the verdict here is narrow and exact: no record. Dell'Oro is a Somascan pastor of priests, formed to serve orphans and the poor, who became an auxiliary weeks before the storm broke. A faithful auxiliary of a restriction-era cardinal, with no liturgical heart yet shown of his own, for good or for ill.