John Jairo Gomez
John Jairo Gomez was born on December 15, 1975, in Santa Rosa de Cabal, Colombia, the son of Jose Jairo Gomez and Martha Lucia Cardona, and raised in Cali. After secondary school he completed Colombia's mandatory military service in the National Army, then emigrated to the United States in May 2002 - an immigrant who would become a citizen in 2021. He entered formation for the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, taking a philosophy degree at St. John Vianney Seminary in Miami and graduate degrees in theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, and was ordained a priest of Tyler on May 23, 2009. He later added a licentiate in canon law from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
Tyler made him its canonist and its second-in-command: judicial vicar, review board member, and vicar general and moderator of the curia from 2015 to 2023 and again from 2025, serving Tyler through its own difficult years, alongside parish pastorates in Texas and, earlier, in Pittsburgh. He was ordained and installed on June 30, 2026, taking for his motto Ego elegi vos et posui vos - I chose you and appointed you (John 15:16).
Gomez took possession of Laredo on June 30, 2026, less than four months before this draft's as_of date, inheriting a diocese in which no Traditional Latin Mass provision has ever been found and in which his predecessor never had occasion to act on the old Mass at all. No act of Gomez's own on the 1962 Missal has been found in that short span, and none would be expected: there is no existing celebration for him to preserve, restrict or suppress.
On the old Mass, his record so far is the record he inherited - a blank page, which this dossier records as a finding, not a gap.