Joseph M. Siegel
Joseph Mark Siegel was born on July 18, 1963, in Joliet, Illinois, the youngest of nine children of Francis and Marie (Wallace) Siegel, and raised on the farm in Lockport Township. After grammar school at Joliet's Cathedral of St. Raymond Nonnatus, he attended St. Charles Borromeo High School Seminary and St. Meinrad Seminary College, then the Pontifical North American College in Rome, studying at the Gregorian and Angelicum. Ordained a priest of the Diocese of Joliet on June 4, 1988, he earned a licentiate in sacred theology at Mundelein while serving his first parish.
His Joliet ministry was parochial and administrative: parishes as associate pastor and pastor, diocesan master of ceremonies at the cathedral, pastor of Visitation Parish in Elmhurst from 2004, and years on the presbyteral council, board of consultors and priest personnel board. Benedict XVI made him an auxiliary bishop of Joliet on October 28, 2009; ordained a bishop on January 19, 2010, he was elected diocesan administrator when Bishop Sartain went to Seattle that December and served as vicar general from 2011.
Pope Francis appointed him the sixth Bishop of Evansville on October 18, 2017, and he was installed at St. Benedict Cathedral on December 15, 2017 - a homecoming for a St. Meinrad alumnus in a twelve-county southwestern Indiana diocese. He still holds the see in October 2026 and serves on the USCCB Committee for Divine Worship.
- 2021-07-16Traditionis Custodes issued. The Catholic News Agency / National Catholic Register diocese-by-diocese tracker of episcopal responses recorded Evansville as N/A - no public response - and no decree, norms, site designations or statement by Bishop Siegel on the motu proprio has been found in any source consulted for this draft, diocesan or otherwise, at any point in the TC era. ↗
- 2024-05-13At Bishop Siegel's invitation, seven sisters of the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles - a cloistered community whose charism, in the diocesan paper's words, is to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass and Divine Office - arrived in Evansville and took up residence in the former Poor Clare monastery on Nurrenbern Road, renamed the Monastery of St. Anne. Father Jeffery Jambon, LC, serves as their resident chaplain. This is a dated act of the bishop's own in the TC era, establishing a new traditional religious foundation in the diocese. ↗
- 2025-07-26Bishop Siegel blessed the renovated chapel at the Monastery of St. Anne on the Feast of St. Anne. The community had grown from seven sisters to twelve in its first year. He said: 'The contemplative presence of Benedictine nuns has already been a great blessing for our Diocese. I am especially grateful for their prayers and sacrifices offered for our priests, and I know that I count on their intercession to assist me in my ministry.' ↗
- 2025-10-02The diocesan paper's first-year report on the Benedictines of Mary at Evansville described pilgrims coming to experience the liturgy at the monastery, and the community's own schedule page heads its liturgical schedule Open to the Public with daily Mass, including Sundays, at 11:00 a.m. and all welcome. The monastery Mass established by Siegel's invitation is publicly accessible, not cloistered-only. ↗
- 2026-06-25Catholic World Report, reporting the end of the only traditional Latin Mass in the neighboring Diocese of Owensboro, named the Diocese of Evansville as one of the places where the closest traditional Latin Mass options remain available - secondary attestation, naming no site, that old-Mass provision in Evansville survived into mid-2026. ↗
Evansville is the diocese that never made news over Traditionis Custodes - because its bishop never made a statement about it. No decree, no norms, no designated-site list from Bishop Siegel has been found in any source consulted, and the Catholic News Agency / National Catholic Register tracker of July 2021 recorded Evansville simply as N/A. What happened instead was continuation elsewhere in the diocese - and, in 2024, one dated act of the bishop's own, taken up in the next paragraph. No fetched source establishes a 1962-Missal site in Evansville from a parish schedule line alone, and this dossier does not pretend otherwise: a bulletin word Latin does not establish the Missal.
What lifts Evansville above mere inertia is a dated act of the bishop's own, in the middle of the TC era. In 2024, while bishops elsewhere were closing traditional chapels, Siegel invited the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles - a cloistered community whose charism, in the diocesan paper's words, is to celebrate the traditional Latin Mass and Divine Office - to take over the vacant Poor Clare monastery in his city. Seven sisters came; a year later there were twelve, a Legionaries of Christ priest was resident as their chaplain, and the bishop came in person to bless their renovated chapel, saying he counted on their intercession in his ministry. A shepherd does not import a traditional religious community by accident.
The limits are real, and they keep this verdict modest. The Benedictines are cloistered contemplatives, not a parish apostolate: their Mass is conventual, however welcome visitors are to join their prayer. Siegel has issued no public defense of the old Missal, designated no sites, and sought no known dispensation from Rome. Judged by deeds rather than words, though, the record is one of welcome, not restriction: nothing in his diocese was cut in the TC era, and its traditional life in 2026 is larger - a monastery fuller - than it was in 2021.