Jeffrey Robert Haines
Jeffrey Robert Haines was born on October 6, 1958, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a lifelong priest of the archdiocese of his birth. He earned a bachelor's degree from Marquette University in 1981 and a master of divinity from Saint Francis de Sales Seminary, and was ordained a priest on May 17, 1985, by Archbishop Rembert Weakland. Early assignments took him to Milwaukee and Fox Point, then to St. Frances Cabrini in West Bend, where he was pastor for most of 1996-2011.
In 2002 he went to Washington to study canon law at The Catholic University of America, returning to West Bend the next year. In 2011 Archbishop Jerome Listecki named him rector and pastor of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, an office he held until 2023. He was three times elected moderator of the archdiocesan council of priests and served on the college of consultors. Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of Milwaukee on January 25, 2017, and he was consecrated on March 17, 2017, alongside James Schuerman, by Archbishop Listecki.
As a bishop he has remained, by his own account, a parish priest at heart rather than a spokesman or an academic, his work has been pastoral and curial at once: vicar general since June 2017, and the bishop most often seen at confirmations across its ten counties. He is known for an unpretentious manner, for pilgrimages to watch the Milwaukee Brewers, and for a love of country music and the Grand Ole Opry. 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 Haines 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. Haines, 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.