Jeffrey M. Monforton
Jeffrey Marc Monforton was born in Detroit, Michigan, on May 5, 1963, the eldest of three sons of Marc Louis and Virginia Rose (Ackerman) Monforton, and grew up in Westland, where his family attended SS. Simon and Jude Parish. He briefly attended Wayne State University before entering Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit in 1986, earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy there and then bachelor's, licentiate, and doctorate degrees in sacred theology in Rome. Cardinal Adam Maida ordained him a priest of Detroit on June 25, 1994.
As a priest he served as associate pastor of the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, then as Cardinal Maida's personal priest secretary from 1998 to 2005 while teaching at Sacred Heart Major Seminary. He was pastor of St. Therese of Lisieux in Shelby Township from 2005, became rector and president of Sacred Heart Major Seminary in August 2006, and was briefly pastor of St. Andrew in Rochester in 2012, the archdiocese's largest parish, before Pope Benedict XVI named him the fifth bishop of Steubenville on July 3, 2012.
He was consecrated and installed at Steubenville on September 10, 2012, and served there eleven years, a tenure marked by his proposed merger of Steubenville with Columbus, put on hold in 2022 after clergy said they had not been consulted, and by his handling of the old Mass after Traditionis custodes, first permitting its continuance and then ending its campus celebration in 2023. On September 28, 2023, Pope Francis named him auxiliary bishop of Detroit, and his ministry there began with a Mass of welcome on November 7, 2023. His motto is 'Faith Comes From Hearing.'
- 2021Monforton provided that priests who had been celebrating the extraordinary form could continue to do so. ↗
- 2023-03Monforton suspended the 1962-Missal Mass in Christ the King Chapel at Franciscan University of Steubenville, effective immediately, following the Holy See's February 21, 2023 rescript; the weekly Mass at St. Peter Church in Steubenville continued. ↗
Bishop Monforton is the one man in this group with a governing record of his own on the old Mass, and it cuts in two directions. At Steubenville, when Traditionis custodes arrived, he first did what many bishops did: he let the priests already celebrating the extraordinary form carry on. That permission, however, did not survive the Holy See's February 2023 rescript. Weeks later he ended the monthly old-Mass celebration at Franciscan University, keeping only the weekly Mass at St. Peter Church in town while seeking Rome's dispensation for it.
The shape of that decision matters. It was not abolition: the Steubenville faithful kept a weekly Mass a short drive from campus, and the university arranged transport. But it was a genuine curtailment imposed by the ordinary himself, against the university president's repeated pleas to keep the campus Mass, and it is the reason this panel records his Steubenville tenure as reduced rather than preserved. A bishop who first permits and then removes a site has a mixed record in the most literal sense.
In Detroit, by contrast, Monforton has no record at all. Since November 2023 he has served as an auxiliary under Archbishops Vigneron and then Weisenburger, whose settlements - first permission by exception, then four designated sites - are theirs, not his. The honest verdict across both tenures is therefore mixed: a reducer in his own see, a bystander in the see he now serves.