Marc Vincent Trudeau
Marc Vincent Trudeau was born in Hollywood, California, on May 20, 1957, a twin, the son of a French-Canadian father and an Illinois mother. He grew up in Burbank, worked more than a decade as a stock clerk and box boy at a Vons grocery store to put himself through school, and graduated from the University of Southern California in 1985 with a degree in biological sciences. He went on to dental school at USC and practiced dentistry for a short time - and survived cancer - before the priesthood claimed him.
He entered St. John's Seminary in Camarillo in 1986 and was ordained a priest of Los Angeles by Cardinal Roger Mahony on August 6, 1991, at St. Vibiana's Cathedral. Parish ministry took him to St. James the Less in La Crescenta, St. Philip the Apostle in Pasadena, where he also served a year as administrator, and St. Pius X in Santa Fe Springs. From 2004 to 2010 he was Cardinal Mahony's priest secretary, then pastor of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in Lomita, before joining the St. John's Seminary faculty as vice rector in 2013 and becoming its rector in 2014.
Pope Francis named him an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles on April 5, 2018, and he was consecrated on June 7, 2018, taking the San Pedro Pastoral Region as episcopal vicar, with the motto 'Put out into deep water.' He is the senior auxiliary of the five, the only one consecrated before Traditionis Custodes, a former dentist and seminary rector who has now spent a full episcopate as a regional bishop. On the old Mass he has no act in his own name on record.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Trudeau has no record of his own. No decree in his name, no dispensation sought, no homily or public word for or against the old rite has surfaced. He is the one Los Angeles auxiliary whose episcopate spans the whole Traditionis Custodes era - consecrated in June 2018, three years before the motu proprio - which makes the absence more telling, not less: eight years a bishop, and nothing on the 1962 Missal in his own name.
What exists in Los Angeles belongs to his archbishop. Archbishop Gomez welcomed the motu proprio in July 2021 and urged care in implementing it, and no detailed public decree of his has surfaced; the archdiocese's roughly seven older-rite locations of 2021 were consolidated over time, the sources neither dating that consolidation nor tying it to a decree of his, while the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter's St. Vitus in the San Fernando Valley continues. That is Gomez's provision, not Trudeau's, and this panel keeps the distinction.
The honest verdict is therefore a plain one: a regional bishop of long standing, formed by parish ministry, secretarial service, and seminary leadership, on whom the old Mass has left no mark either way. His silence is the ordinary silence of an auxiliary who governs a region, not a liturgy.