José Cepeda
Jose Arturo Cepeda was born May 15, 1969, in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and moved with his family to the United States at nineteen. He studied philosophy at the minor seminary in San Luis Potosi, earned a bachelor's degree from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico, and completed theological studies at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio. He later earned a licentiate and a doctorate in spiritual theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, defending a dissertation in 2005.
He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of San Antonio on June 1, 1996, at St. Mary Magdalen Church, his home parish, by Archbishop Patricio Flores. He served as parochial vicar at San Fernando Cathedral, then spent a decade teaching and forming seminarians at Assumption Seminary and the Oblate School of Theology, serving as vocations director, vice rector in 2009, and rector of Assumption Seminary in 2010 and 2011. He also hosted a bilingual talk show on Catholic Television of San Antonio.
Pope Benedict XVI appointed him auxiliary bishop of Detroit and titular bishop of Tagase on April 18, 2011, and he was consecrated on May 5, 2011, becoming at forty-one the youngest bishop in the United States. In Detroit he led ministry to Hispanic and Spanish-speaking Catholics, directed evangelization, catechesis, and schools, and chaired national bishops' committees on cultural diversity and Hispanic affairs, helping to direct the Fifth National Encuentro. Pope Leo XIV appointed him auxiliary bishop of San Antonio on August 26, 2025, and he was formally welcomed at San Fernando Cathedral on October 12, 2025; in August 2026 the archdiocese recorded that he had been granted a sabbatical.
Bishop Cepeda is an auxiliary bishop, not the diocesan ordinary, so the power to authorize, restrict, or relocate celebration of the 1962 Missal in the Archdiocese of San Antonio belongs to Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller, not to him. No statement, decree, permission, or restriction by Cepeda himself concerning the older liturgy was found in the sources searched for this dossier, and none is claimed for him.
The same holds for his fourteen years as a Detroit auxiliary. Detroit's older-liturgy provision was governed by Archbishop Vigneron's 2022 norms, which allowed St. Joseph Shrine under the Institute of Christ the King to continue, and by Archbishop Weisenburger's June 2025 move to four regional non-parish sites. Cepeda served Detroit in Hispanic ministry, evangelization, and schools, but no act of his governing that provision was found, and a predecessor's or successor ordinary's act is never his.
In San Antonio the only recent archdiocesan direction found is Garcia-Siller's July 2026 letter on the SSPX, which steered Catholics wanting the traditional Latin Mass to St. Timothy parish, where the extraordinary form is celebrated each Saturday and Sunday. That direction is the archbishop's, and it is carried in prose only. Cepeda's San Antonio tenure is barely a year old at the as-of date, and it includes a sabbatical granted in August 2026; until he issues a governing act of his own, his posture is no_record.