Mark Andrew Bartosic
Mark Andrew Bartosic was born on June 21, 1961, in Neenah, Wisconsin, and grew up in Ashland, Ohio, one of seven children in a family that went to Mass every Sunday. He studied theater at Ashland University, graduating in 1983, and moved to Chicago that year to act with a Shakespeare company, discovering a far more diverse Church than the single parish of his Ohio hometown. He entered the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, earned a master of divinity and a licentiate in sacred theology, and was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Chicago by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin on May 21, 1994.
His priesthood was spent in parishes and in the jail. After serving as associate pastor of St. Agnes of Bohemia in Chicago, he was pastor of St. Frances of Rome in Cicero from 2001 to 2016, adding Our Lady of Charity in Cicero in 2009, and in 2016 he became pastor of Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Chicago and director and chaplain of Kolbe House, the archdiocese's jail ministry at Cook County Jail, named for St. Maximilian Kolbe. Those assignments kept him close to people on the margins, whether a Cicero parish or a jail cell.
Pope Francis appointed him auxiliary bishop of Chicago and titular bishop of Naratcata on July 3, 2018, and he was consecrated at Holy Name Cathedral on September 17, 2018. He served as episcopal vicar of Vicariate II and moved to Vicariate VI at the February 26, 2025 ordination of five new auxiliaries. His motto is Ego ero ei in patrem, I will be a father to him.
Bartosic serves as an auxiliary under an ordinary who has already settled Chicago's Traditionis custodes question, and that distinction governs this dossier. Cardinal Cupich's policy of December 27, 2021, effective January 25, 2022, requires his written permission for any celebration of the old rite, bars the 1962 Mass from parish churches without his and the Vatican's agreement, and bans it on first Sundays, Christmas, the Triduum, Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday. Within that framework St. John Cantius, served by the Canons Regular, kept its Sunday 1962 Missal Masses except on first Sundays, while the Institute of Christ the King suspended public Masses at its Chicago shrine on August 1, 2022. All of this is Cupich's, not Bartosic's.
A search for any act of Bartosic's own on the old Mass - a diocesan statement, decree, permission, appointment sustaining a 1962 community, or public letter between 2021 and 2026 - found nothing. He was an auxiliary throughout the policy's promulgation and afterwards, first as vicar of Vicariate II and from February 2025 of Vicariate VI, but episcopal vicars administer a region on the archbishop's behalf; the permission to celebrate the old rite is reserved by the policy to the archbishop himself. Vicariate office, attendance at any Mass, and silence in the public record are not governing acts, and none of them is charged as posture here.
The verdict is therefore no_record at medium confidence: absence searched for, not assumed, and bounded by what is public. No archdiocese-wide count of 1962 venues is asserted, because no source fetched enumerates one; sites_before and sites_now are null rather than guessed from a blog's list. The board row for Chicago describes Cupich's suppressed policy, not Bartosic, so there is no contradiction to resolve - only the standing question for a later pass, whether any internal archdiocesan permission bearing Bartosic's name exists outside the public record.