Michael Duca
Michael Gerard Duca was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1952, and is a Dallas priest to the bone: St. Thomas Aquinas School and Bishop Lynch High School, then Holy Trinity Seminary in Irving from 1970 to 1978. He was ordained on April 29, 1978, and served as parochial vicar at All Saints and St. Patrick in Dallas and St. Luke in Irving before the diocese made him its vocations director and chaplain at Southern Methodist University in 1985 - the first of the formator's assignments that would define him.
In 1994 he went to Rome and took a licentiate in canon law at the Angelicum, and on his return in 1996 he became rector of Holy Trinity Seminary, forming Dallas's priests for twelve years. Pope Benedict XVI appointed him the second Bishop of Shreveport on April 1, 2008; he was ordained and installed on May 19, 2008, and governed north Louisiana's small diocese for a decade.
Pope Francis translated him to Baton Rouge on June 26, 2018, and he was installed as its sixth bishop on August 24, 2018, succeeding Robert Muench. A canonist and seminary rector by formation, he has governed Louisiana's capital diocese with a lawyer's steadiness, serving also as a trustee of Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans and St. Joseph Seminary College in Covington.
- 2021-07Duca allowed St. Agnes, the diocese's only parish with a scheduled Latin Mass, to continue offering Mass according to the 1962 Missal (CNA's survey of diocesan responses, as of July 30, 2021). ↗
- 2023-07-16St. Agnes's parish bulletin still lists a Sunday 9:15 a.m. Latin Mass and a Tuesday 5:30 p.m. Latin Mass - the 2021 permission still in effect two years on, after the February 2023 rescript; the bulletin says 'Latin' without naming the Missal, and the rescript-era dispensation is not publicly documented. ↗
Baton Rouge's old-Mass story is one parish, and Bishop Duca kept it. St. Agnes, in the Garden District, had rebuilt a traditional life under Fr. Brent Maher - a Solemn High Traditional Latin Mass on May 28, 2021, the first at the parish in decades, weeks before the motu proprio landed. When Traditionis Custodes came, CNA recorded the diocese's answer: St. Agnes, 'the only parish in the diocese with a scheduled Latin Mass, has been allowed by Bishop Michael Duca to continue offering Mass according the 1962 Missal.' That permission is an act of his own, dated to July 2021, and it is why his posture reads preserved rather than no_record.
The continuation is documented, not merely inferred: St. Agnes's bulletin of July 16, 2023 - two years after the permission and months after Rome's rescript tightening parish-church celebrations - still lists a Sunday 9:15 a.m. Latin Mass and a Tuesday 5:30 p.m. Latin Mass at the parish. What is not documented is the rescript-era paperwork: whether a Dicastery dispensation underlies the post-2023 continuation is not in the public record reached, and the dossier flags it as debt rather than assuming it. One site before, one site now, kept by his word: a small, real preservation.