Michael Pham
Michael Cuong Minh Pham was born in 1967 in Da Nang, South Vietnam. At eight he survived a first flight from the advancing North Vietnamese on a rice barge crowded with the dead; in 1980, at thirteen, he escaped by boat for good, passing through a Malaysian refugee camp before an American family sponsored him to Blue Earth, Minnesota, in 1981. The family settled in San Diego in 1985, and Pham studied aeronautical engineering at San Diego State University before turning to the priesthood at St. Patrick's Seminary.
Ordained a priest of San Diego on June 25, 1999, by Bishop Robert Brom, he spent his priesthood in the diocese he would one day lead: pastor, vocations director, vicar for clergy, episcopal vicar for ethnic and intercultural communities in one of America's most diverse dioceses, and vicar general. Pope Francis named him an auxiliary bishop on June 6, 2023, and Cardinal McElroy consecrated him that September. When McElroy was translated to Washington in March 2025, Pham governed San Diego as its diocesan administrator.
On May 22, 2025, Pope Leo XIV named him the seventh Bishop of San Diego - the new pope's first episcopal appointment in the United States, and the first Vietnamese-American to lead an American diocese. Installed on July 17, 2025, he has centered his early ministry on the migrants and refugees whose history he shares, leading an interreligious delegation of clergy to accompany immigrants at their San Diego court hearings. On the old Mass he has so far simply left his predecessor's framework standing.
Bishop Pham is too new, and his public ministry too narrowly focused, to permit a verdict on his treatment of the ancient Mass. Installed only in the summer of 2025, he has said and done nothing yet, on the public record, that touches the Traditional Latin Mass in San Diego. His energies have gone elsewhere — chiefly to immigration and the refugees with whom he shares a history, having himself fled Vietnam as a boy on a boat.
What can be said is the context he inherits. Under his predecessor, Cardinal McElroy, San Diego restricted the older rite early and firmly — ending it at the territorial parishes and confining it to the Fraternity of St. Peter's parish. Pham served in the chancery during those years, though nothing ties him personally to the decisions. Whether he continues that restrictive posture, eases it, or tightens it further, no one yet knows.
We withhold judgment honestly. There is, as yet, no record to weigh. The traditional Catholic of San Diego may hope that a man who knows what it is to be displaced will have sympathy for a displaced flock — but hope is not evidence, and on this question it is simply too early to judge.