James T. Schuerman
James Thomas Schuerman was born on April 5, 1957, in Burlington, Wisconsin, and grew up in nearby Lyons, where his family belonged to St. Joseph Parish. He entered Saint Francis de Sales Seminary College in 1976, then studied at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, earning a master's degree in theology, and was ordained a priest on May 17, 1986, by Archbishop Rembert Weakland. His first assignment was as associate pastor at St. Anthony Parish in Milwaukee, the city where his priesthood would largely unfold.
In 1992 he left for the archdiocese's sister parish, La Sagrada Familia in Azua in the Dominican Republic, where he served as a missionary for four years. Returning to the United States, he earned a doctorate in ministry with a specialization in spirituality from Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, then joined the faculty of Saint Francis de Sales Seminary as spiritual director and teacher, serving there from 1997 to 2009. Parish ministry followed in Delavan, Elkhorn and Lake Geneva, and he received the archdiocesan Vatican II Award for Service to the Priesthood in 2012.
Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of Milwaukee on January 25, 2017, and he was consecrated on March 17, 2017, alongside Jeffrey Haines, by Archbishop Jerome Listecki. Since June 2017 he has served as a vicar general of the archdiocese. Fluent in Spanish as well as German, he has been a natural presence in the archdiocese's growing Hispanic communities in its southwestern counties. On the old Mass he has left no record of his own, a fact his panel states plainly rather than inventing one.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Schuerman has no record of his own. Search as one will, there is no decree in his name, no dispensation he sought, no homily and no public word for or against the old rite. He is an auxiliary and a vicar general, and the liturgical decisions of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee belong to its archbishops, not to him. To credit him with the archdiocese's permissive line, or to blame him for any part of it, would be to invent a record he does not have.
What he serves is, in fact, a notably permissive regime. Archbishop Listecki said in July 2021 that Traditionis Custodes would not create much change in Milwaukee, with the 1962 Mass continuing as scheduled at St. Stanislaus, the church administered by the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, and that arrangement has been maintained under Archbishop Grob. Schuerman, who was already vicar general when that statement was issued, is part of the administration that carries it out, but the decision and the signature are Listecki's.
That is the whole of the verdict, and it is an honest one. A faithful curial and pastoral auxiliary of a preservationist archdiocese, with no liturgical heart yet shown of his own, for good or for ill.