Juan Miguel Betancourt
Juan Miguel Betancourt Torres was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on June 1, 1970, the oldest of three children of Miguel and Gloria Betancourt. He graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, joined the Servants of the Eucharist and Mary on January 1, 1992, made perpetual vows on August 6, 2000, and earned a Master of Divinity from the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico. He was ordained a priest on April 21, 2001, and then earned a Licentiate in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome in 2005.
After teaching scripture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico and at Regina Cleri Major Seminary, he was assigned by his order to the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis in 2006, where he became pastor of St. Francis de Sales in St. Paul and a professor of sacred scripture at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity, teaching there from 2008. At the seminary he rose to vice rector of formation and associate academic dean, and he also served as vicar general of his institute and on the archdiocesan presbyteral council. He is fluent in English, Spanish, and Italian.
Pope Francis appointed him auxiliary bishop of Hartford on September 18, 2018, and he was consecrated on October 18, 2018, by Archbishop Leonard Blair at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Hartford, with the titular see of Curzola and the motto 'Ecce agnus Dei' - behold the Lamb of God. He has served in Hartford under Archbishops Blair and Coyne, as a scripture scholar and a bridge to the archdiocese's Hispanic faithful. On the old Mass he has no record of his own.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Betancourt has no record of his own, and the honest panel says so. Search as one will, there is no decree in his name, no homily defending or opposing the old rite, no public word for or against it. He is an auxiliary bishop and a scripture scholar, and the liturgical decisions of the Archdiocese of Hartford belong to its archbishops, not to him.
The most consequential of those decisions fell late in his tenure as auxiliary. Archbishop Blair concurred in ending the St. Gregory Society's 38-year traditional Mass at St. Stanislaus in New Haven, with the final Mass on January 14, 2024, leaving St. Patrick in Waterbury as the archdiocese's other named old-rite site. Betancourt served through that ending, but the signature on it is Blair's, and to credit or blame the auxiliary for it would be to invent a record he does not have.
That is why the verdict here is narrow and exact: no record. Betancourt's ministry has been scripture teaching, seminary formation, and pastoral care of a diverse archdiocese, not liturgical policymaking. A faithful auxiliary of two archbishops across a restrictive era, with no liturgical heart yet shown of his own, for good or for ill.