John S. Siemianowski
John Steven Siemianowski was born on May 26, 1960, in Chicago, Illinois, to Lydia and Joseph Siemianowski, and grew up in Cicero, attending Our Lady of Charity Grade School and Morton East High School. He earned a bachelor's degree in environmental sciences and a secondary education certificate from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville in 1982, taught at St. Joseph Catholic School for two years before entering Mundelein Seminary in 1984. There he completed a master of divinity and a baccalaureate in sacred theology in 1989.
He was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago on May 20, 1989, and served as associate pastor at St. Francis de Sales in Lake Zurich, St. Mary in Buffalo Grove, and St. Elizabeth Seton in Orland Hills. His defining pastorate followed in Chicago Heights, where he was pastor of St. Agnes from 1996 to 2021, also pastoring St. Paul and St. Kieran, and where he was a mainstay of the parish school. When he left in 2021, parishioners lined up for more than two hours to say farewell, and he moved, by his own choice, to St. Juliana in Chicago's Edison Park neighborhood.
At St. Juliana he continued as pastor while serving as a member and executive secretary of the archdiocese's Priest Placement Board, the body that matches priests to parishes. Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of Chicago on December 20, 2024, with the titular see of Gratianopolis, and Cardinal Cupich consecrated him at Holy Name Cathedral on February 26, 2025. Effective March 1, 2025, he became episcopal vicar of Vicariate II, covering Chicago's north side and near north suburbs, with the motto Make all things new.
On the 1962 Missal, Bishop Siemianowski has no governing act of his own on record. He was a parish priest when Traditionis custodes was issued in July 2021 and when Cardinal Cupich promulgated Chicago's implementing policy in December 2021, and he did not become a bishop until February 2025. No decree, permission, appointment, or public letter of his on the old Mass was found in diocesan releases, the archdiocesan newspaper, or targeted web searching.
What governs Chicago is therefore inherited, not his. Cupich's policy, effective January 25, 2022, removed the 1962 Missal from parish churches to designated locations, barred it on first Sundays and the great feasts, and required written permission from the archbishop for its use. Siemianowski serves inside that regime as episcopal vicar of Vicariate II, but administering a predecessor's policy is not the same as authoring one, and this dossier does not credit him with Cupich's acts.
That distinction is the whole verdict. A search that found nothing is not the same as a record of opposition or of support, and neither may be invented to fill the gap. Until Siemianowski himself authorizes, restricts, or sustains a celebration of the old rite by a governing act, his posture is honestly no_record, at high confidence precisely because the window in which he could have acted as a bishop is so short and so thoroughly documented.