John Balthasar Brungardt
John Balthasar Brungardt was born on July 10, 1958, in Salina, Kansas, one of six children of Francis Balthasar and Virginia (Burton) Brungardt. Physics came first: a bachelor's degree from Benedictine College in 1980 and a master's from Iowa State University in 1983, then a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from Kansas State University. His first career was the classroom - teaching science and computers at Wichita Collegiate School and Kapaun Mt. Carmel High School in Wichita.
His mother's death in 1990 prompted a spiritual reawakening and vocational discernment under Father Paul Coakley. He entered the Pontifical College Josephinum, earned divinity and moral theology degrees, and was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Wichita on May 23, 1998, at forty. In Wichita he taught and served as chaplain at Bishop Carroll High School, directed the Respect Life and Social Justice office, pastored at Arkansas City, spent five months in Mexico learning Spanish, and from 2005 served as chancellor and moderator of Hispanic ministry.
Pope Benedict XVI appointed him the sixth Bishop of Dodge City on December 15, 2010, succeeding Ronald Gilmore. He was consecrated and installed on February 2, 2011, at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe, taking the motto Filled With Compassion, from the Prodigal Son. He remains Bishop of Dodge City, a vast rural see of twenty-eight counties in southwest Kansas.
- 2009Pre-TC context: a reader report in Rorate Caeli announced a twice-weekly traditional Latin Mass (Low Mass, Sundays 11 a.m. and Mondays 8:30 a.m.) at St. Francis Xavier, Seward, offered by retired Benedictine Father Rene Guesnier, OSB, noting the diocese had previously lacked even a single regular TLM. Whether this Mass survived to 2021 could not be established from any source found. ↗
- 2021-07The CNA / National Catholic Register tracker of diocesan responses to Traditionis Custodes lists the Diocese of Dodge City as N/A. Brungardt himself was on leave at the time; the non-response belongs institutionally to the administratorship (see the separate Vincke tenure file), but no later statement by Brungardt after his March 2022 return has been found either. ↗
Dodge City is the quietest file in Kansas. When Traditionis Custodes was issued on July 16, 2021, Bishop Brungardt was not governing his diocese: he had been on a voluntary leave of absence since February 2021, and the see - still canonically full, sede plena - was being run by Bishop Gerald Vincke of Salina as apostolic administrator. No Dodge City decree, statement or set of permissions implementing the motu proprio has been found from Vincke's administratorship, from the months before Brungardt's leave, or from the years since his return in March 2022. The Catholic News Agency and National Catholic Register tracker of diocesan responses lists Dodge City simply as N/A.
Nor is there much for a decree to have governed. The diocese's only documented regular traditional Latin Mass was a small one reported in 2009 - a Sunday and Monday Low Mass at St. Francis Xavier, Seward, offered by a retired Benedictine, Father Rene Guesnier, in his hometown parish, in a diocese that until then had lacked even a single regular TLM. No source found shows that Mass, or any other, still being offered in the diocese when Traditionis Custodes fell, and no FSSP, ICKSP or other society apostolate has ever been established in the diocese; the Kansas FSSP communities are at Maple Hill and Kansas City, in the neighbouring archdiocese.
So the honest verdict is no record, and it cuts neither way. Brungardt neither restricted a living traditional community nor protected one with a dated act of his own, and nothing was suppressed in Dodge City in the TC era that any source can name. If a surviving Seward Mass or an unpublished diocesan permission surfaces, this assessment should be revisited; on the evidence available, there is simply nothing of his to judge.