Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez
Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez was born on January 15, 1974, in Moca, in the Dominican Republic, and grew up in the orbit of the Salesian schools of St. John Bosco. He entered the Salesians in 1993, made his final profession on September 22, 2002, was ordained a deacon in Rome on June 29, 2003, and was ordained a priest on July 3, 2004, in Santo Domingo. His first assignments were in Salesian schools, directing the John Bosco School (2004–2008) and the Sacred Heart of Jesus School in Santo Domingo (2008–2009).
He came to the Diocese of Brooklyn in 2009 and spent seventeen years in its parishes: St. Michael, Sunset Park; Saints Peter and Paul, Williamsburg, where he was incardinated on June 29, 2012; Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Jamaica, Queens (2014–2020); and Our Lady of Sorrows, Corona (2020–2026), one of Brooklyn's largest and most heavily immigrant parishes. Alongside the pastorates ran a tribunal career — defender of the bond from 2017, then promoter of justice and delegate for penal cases — and two more degrees in canon law, from the Catholic University of America and the University of Navarra. He became a United States citizen in 2018. Pope Leo XIV named him sixth Bishop of Palm Beach on December 19, 2025 — the diocese's first Hispanic bishop — and he was ordained and installed on February 24, 2026.
- 2026-03-01The St. John of the Cross, Vero Beach, bulletin for March 1, 2026, five days after he took possession of the see, lists the Sunday 1:00 p.m. (Latin) Mass on the parish's regular schedule. ↗
- 2026-06-07The Holy Spirit, Lantana, bulletin for June 7, 2026 still lists the Sunday 2:00 p.m. Latin Mass and a Latin Mass sacristan, four months into his episcopate. No decree, statement or restriction touching the 1962 Missal by Bishop Rodriguez has been found through October 23, 2026. ↗
Bishop Rodríguez arrived in Palm Beach on February 24, 2026, with no episcopal record at all: Palm Beach is his first see, and his seventeen Brooklyn years were spent as a parish priest and tribunal canonist. Nothing in the sources consulted for those years touches the Traditional Latin Mass in either direction, and nothing he has said or published since his appointment — a ministry so far defined by immigrants, safeguarding and diocesan reorganization — touches it either. There is, as yet, no act of his own to judge.
What there is, is what he inherited and has left standing. The diocese's two Sunday Masses in the 1962 Missal — Holy Spirit in Lantana at 2 p.m. and St. John of the Cross in Vero Beach at 1 p.m., both older than Traditionis Custodes and both in parish churches — appear on the same parish schedules in the first months of his episcopate as in the last months of his predecessor's: Vero Beach five days after his installation, Lantana four months into his tenure. No decree, no restriction, no expansion. On the old Mass, his record so far is the record he inherited.