James Patrick Powers
James Patrick Powers was born on February 6, 1953, in Baldwin, Wisconsin, one of seven children of Thomas and Frances Powers, and was raised on the family farm in Hammond. He farmed for seven years after high school before the call to the priesthood took hold. He studied at St. John Vianney Seminary and Saint Paul Seminary in St. Paul, taking a bachelor's degree in theology and a Master of Divinity.
He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Superior on May 20, 1990, by Bishop Raphael Fliss, and spent his priesthood the way Superior priests do: in clusters of small parishes scattered across the north woods - Rice Lake, River Falls, Webster, Solon Springs, Minong, Gordon. A licentiate in canon law from Saint Paul University in Ottawa (1998) made him the diocese's canonist; he served as adjutant judicial vicar from 1998 and vicar general from 2010. When Bishop Peter Christensen was sent to Boise in late 2014, the consultors elected Powers diocesan administrator, and he governed the vacant see for over a year.
Pope Francis then appointed the administrator himself bishop on December 15, 2015, and Powers was ordained and installed on February 18, 2016, at the Cathedral of Christ the King in Superior. He is a home-grown shepherd of a poor, sprawling diocese - sixteen counties, some 65,000 Catholics, parishes mostly clustered. His motto, Deduc me, Domine, luce tua (Lead me, Lord, by your light), is drawn from Psalm 85.
- 2021-07CNA's survey of diocesan responses to Traditionis Custodes (state of responses as of July 30, 2021) listed the Diocese of Superior as N/A - no public statement, decree or announced permission. ↗
On the old Mass, Bishop Powers has left almost no public footprint at all - and in his diocese there is very little footprint to leave. When Traditionis Custodes was promulgated in July 2021, CNA's national survey of diocesan responses recorded Superior as N/A: no statement, no decree, no announced permission or restriction. No later decree or statement by Powers on the 1962 Missal was found in the sources consulted.
Nor could any regularly scheduled Mass according to the 1962 Missal in the diocese's sixteen counties be verified. The diocese is one of the most rural in the country, its parishes clustered and its priests stretched thin; whatever Latin is heard in its churches appears to be the ordinary form in Latin rather than the usus antiquior, though the sources reached do not settle even that. The honest verdict is the one the schema provides for exactly this case: no record - a finding, stated plainly, not a gap dressed up as one.