Myron Joseph Cotta
Myron Joseph Cotta was born on March 21, 1953, in Dos Palos, California, of Portuguese heritage, and grew up on a dairy farm in Merced County. He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Fresno on September 12, 1987. His early assignments were parish ones — parochial vicar at St. Anthony in Atwater, administrator of the Our Lady of Fatima Shrine in Laton, and pastor of Our Lady of Miracles in Gustine — before he became vicar general and moderator of the curia in Fresno.
When Bishop John Steinbock of Fresno died in 2010, Cotta was chosen diocesan administrator and governed the diocese until Bishop Armando Ochoa assumed leadership on February 1, 2012. Pope Francis named him auxiliary bishop of Sacramento on January 24, 2014, and he was consecrated on March 25, 2014, serving as vicar general and director of ecumenical and inter-religious affairs, with prison ministry. On January 23, 2018, Pope Francis named him the sixth Bishop of Stockton, and he was installed on March 15, 2018, at St. Stanislaus Church in Modesto.
As Bishop of Stockton, Cotta has been a pastor of steady, unshowy administration in a diocese still living with the aftermath of its 2014 bankruptcy, filed under his predecessor Stephen Blaire and settled in 2017 — a history that is not his and is not attributed to him here. His response to Traditionis Custodes was characteristic: while discerning how best to implement the motu proprio, the 1962-Missal Masses existing in the diocese's parishes would continue as scheduled, and pastoral care for the faithful attached to that form would continue to be provided. No expansion, restriction, or personal controversy appears in the record searched.
- 2021-07While he discerned how best to implement the norms of Traditionis Custodes, those Masses according to the 1962 Missal which exist in the diocese's parishes would continue as scheduled, and pastoral care for those attached to that form of the liturgy would continue to be provided in the Diocese of Stockton. This is a primary diocesan statement, so it is rated high. The page as fetched is undated; July 2021 is the tracker promulgation date and is given with that caveat. ↗
Bishop Cotta's response to Traditionis Custodes is the plainest in this group, and the plainest to judge. The Diocese of Stockton published his position in his own diocese's voice: while he discerned how best to implement the motu proprio, the 1962-Missal Masses existing in the diocese's parishes would continue as scheduled, and pastoral care for the faithful attached to that form would continue to be provided. That is a governing act — a bishop telling his parishes, in public, that nothing stops while he discerns — and it is primary-sourced, which is why the dossier rates it high even though the page itself carries no date.
What Cotta did not do is equally plain. He published no count of sites, invited no society, founded no community, and restricted nothing that the record shows. The diocese's older-liturgy provision therefore survives in the dossier as it survives in the sources: real, continuing, and uncounted. Listings exist — Turlock, Ripon, Modesto in a 2024 update, an older Stockton directory entry — but none was verified site by site, so none is counted, and the dossier says so rather than dressing a guess up as a number.
For the traditional Catholic in Stockton, Cotta is the bishop who did not make a drama of the motu proprio. The Masses continued as scheduled. That is preservation in its quietest form, and the dossier's medium overall confidence reflects only the missing site count, not any doubt about the act itself.