Mitchell T. Rozanski
Mitchell Thomas Rozanski was born August 6, 1958, in Baltimore, Maryland, of Polish-American parents. He studied at the Catholic University of America and its Theological College and was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore on November 24, 1984, serving in parishes across Maryland.
On July 3, 2004, Pope John Paul II named Rozanski an auxiliary bishop of Baltimore — at the time described as the youngest bishop in the United States — with the motto 'Serve the Lord with Gladness.' On June 19, 2014, Pope Francis appointed him the ninth Bishop of Springfield in Massachusetts, where he served for six years.
On June 10, 2020, Pope Francis appointed Rozanski the tenth Archbishop of St. Louis, succeeding Archbishop Robert J. Carlson; he was installed August 25, 2020, and remains in office as of mid-2026. His tenure has been dominated by 'All Things New,' the sweeping 2023 archdiocesan reorganization that reduced the number of parishes from roughly 178 to about 134 and drew more than a dozen appeals to Rome.
The verdict on Archbishop Rozanski's traditional-Mass record is genuinely mixed, and the honest reading turns on a distinction between dedicated apostolates and territorial parishes. On the decisive question for the faithful — the survival of St. Louis's two established traditional communities — his record is one of continuity, not destruction. When Traditionis Custodes landed in July 2021, Rozanski issued no public purge decree. He kept the 1962 Mass at the archdiocese's own non-territorial personal parish, the Oratory of Ss. Gregory and Augustine, and left the Institute of Christ the King's St. Francis de Sales Oratory — the ICKSP's flagship American apostolate — untouched. Both remain open and thriving, which is why St. Louis is still one of the strongest traditional centers in the United States.
Against that stands the St. Barnabas affair, and it is not a small thing. St. Barnabas in O'Fallon had been turned into a traditional-Mass parish in 2021 by the archdiocese's own decision, then, once it grew, was dissolved under All Things New with Rozanski expressly citing Traditionis Custodes art. 3 to declare that a territorial parish is 'not suitable' for the older rite. He offered the community no full-time pastor and, in the end, no home of its own, sending the faithful thirty-plus miles to the surviving oratories. That is a bishop willing to use the letter of the restrictive law to eliminate a flourishing traditional community when it sat in an ordinary parish.
The fair conclusion: Rozanski is neither a champion nor a persecutor of the traditional Mass. He protected the institutional structures that already had a canonical foothold — both oratories intact — but he did nothing to expand access, and he was prepared to invoke Traditionis Custodes to close a growing parish-based TLM and fold it into a wider consolidation that itself generated years of appeals to Rome. Judged strictly by deeds, he is a careful administrator applying the policy as written, sparing the dedicated apostolates while giving the wider traditional movement no ground it did not already hold.