Matthew Elshoff
Matthew Gregory Elshoff was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on September 24, 1955, the oldest of five children, and grew up in the Los Angeles area, attending St. Bede the Venerable Church and school in La Canada Flintridge. After graduating from St. Francis High School in La Canada Flintridge, he entered the Capuchin Franciscan Order in 1973, made his perpetual profession in 1979, and was ordained a priest by Cardinal Timothy Manning on June 18, 1982. The friar's life gave him two lasting loves: the classroom and the poor parish.
As a Capuchin he served as vice master of novices, as definitor from 1999 to 2005, and as provincial minister of the Our Lady of the Angels Province from 2008 to 2014, while also serving as chaplain and then president of his old school, St. Francis High. Later pastorates took him to Old Mission Santa Ines in Solvang, where most parishioners were laborers from Jalisco, and in 2018 to St. Lawrence of Brindisi in Watts, a poor parish where gang violence was a nightly reality. He has spent all but seven years of his priesthood ministering in the Los Angeles archdiocese.
Pope Francis named him an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles on July 18, 2023, and he was consecrated on September 26, 2023, taking the Our Lady of the Angels Pastoral Region as episcopal vicar, with the motto 'Caritas Christi urget nos' - the love of Christ impels us. A friar formed by Francis of Assisi, a schoolman, and a pastor of the peripheries, he is the most pastorally shaped of the four bishops consecrated that day. On the old Mass he has no record of his own.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Elshoff 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 was a Capuchin pastor and provincial, not a curial liturgist, and his consecration in September 2023 came two years after Traditionis Custodes; nothing in his public ministry touches the 1962 Missal at all.
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 Elshoff's, and this panel keeps the distinction.
The honest verdict is therefore a plain one: a friar-bishop formed by the classroom and the poor parish, on whom the old Mass has left no mark either way. His tradition, so far as the public record shows it, is Franciscan simplicity and pastoral closeness, not a position on the 1962 Missal.