James D. Conley
James Douglas Conley was born on March 19, 1955, in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised a Presbyterian, of Wea Native American descent through his paternal grandmother's family. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1977 with a bachelor's degree in English literature. In college, in the university's Integrated Humanities Program under Professor John Senior, he converted to Catholicism on December 6, 1975, with Senior as his godfather. After college he worked on a Kansas farm and traveled in Europe.
He entered the seminary for the Diocese of Wichita in 1980, earned a master's in divinity at Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg in 1985, and was ordained a priest of Wichita on May 18, 1985. He served as an associate pastor, diocesan Respect Life director, and pastor of the Wichita State Newman Center. Sent to Rome in 1989, he earned a licentiate in moral theology from the Accademia Alfonsiana in 1991, then spent 1996 to 2006 as an official of the Vatican Congregation for Bishops. Named a monsignor in 2001, he became a Denver auxiliary bishop in 2008 and Denver's apostolic administrator for ten months in 2011 and 2012.
Pope Benedict XVI appointed him Bishop of Lincoln on September 14, 2012, and he was installed on November 20, 2012, succeeding Fabian Bruskewitz. His motto, borrowed from St. John Henry Newman, is 'Cor ad cor loquitur' - heart speaks to heart. In December 2019 he took a medical leave of absence to treat depression and anxiety, speaking openly about it in hopes of lifting the stigma around mental illness, and returned in November 2020. He still holds the see in October 2026.
- 2021-07-21Five days after Traditionis Custodes, Conley stated that he had spoken to the priests of the Diocese of Lincoln who celebrate Mass according to the 1962 Roman Missal and that he authorized them to continue to do so, adding that he desired the older form to remain present in the diocese. This is a governing act of the ordinary himself, corroborated the same week by the Catholic News Agency tracker. ↗
Lincoln is a preserved diocese, and the preservation is documented in the bishop's own words. On July 21, 2021, five days after Traditionis Custodes, Bishop Conley stated that he had spoken to the priests of the Diocese of Lincoln who celebrate Mass according to the 1962 Roman Missal and that he authorized them to continue to do so, adding that he desired the older form to remain present in the diocese. That is precisely the governing act the preserved verdict requires: an authorization from the ordinary himself, naming the Missal, issued in direct response to the motu proprio. The Catholic News Agency tracker the same week independently recorded Lincoln as a diocese where priests already celebrating the traditional Latin Mass might continue to do so. No TC-era act of Conley's suppressing, reducing, or restricting the old Mass has been found, and the provision he authorized is still visibly in place.
The diocese Conley governs was already the natural home of this verdict. His predecessor Bruskewitz had invited the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter to establish its North American seminary, Our Lady of Guadalupe at Denton, in the diocese in the 1990s, and the seminary still welcomes visitors to a Sunday Solemn High Mass in term time, reporting twelve priestly ordinations in 2025. Conley did not found that house, and this dossier does not credit him with it; it credits him with the July 2021 authorization that kept the diocese's existing traditional provision, seminary and diocesan priests alike, intact under the new regime.
The verdict stops at preserved because nothing in the TC era shows Conley adding to the provision. No new traditional parish, site, or community founded by him in the window has been found, and no diocesan count of 1962-Missal sites, before or now, is published in any source consulted, so both counts stand at null with the accounting given here. What fills out the picture, as context rather than as a TC-era act, is his longstanding liturgical program: ad orientem celebration at the cathedral and encouragement of it elsewhere, and altar rails mandated in new churches and renovations. Lincoln's preservation is a bishop choosing, in writing, to keep what he inherited.