Nelson J. Perez
Nelson J. Pérez was born on June 16, 1961, in Miami, Florida, the son of David and Emma Pérez — exiles who had fled Fidel Castro's Cuba. His father worked as a banker, his mother kept the home, and the family settled in West New York, New Jersey, then home to one of the largest Cuban communities outside Miami. He liked to say he was 'made in Cuba, but unpackaged here.' A Spanish-speaking boy of the immigrant working class, he staged mock Masses as a child, pressing a brother into service as altar boy — a foreshadowing of a call he never could date precisely, describing instead 'a whisper that drew me in and never left.'
He attended Memorial High School in West New York and took a degree in psychology from Montclair State University in 1983, taught briefly at a Catholic school in Puerto Rico, and entered St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, earning master's degrees in divinity and theology. Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua ordained him a priest of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia on May 20, 1989. As one of the archdiocese's few Hispanic priests, he poured himself into Hispanic ministry: assistant director of the Office for Hispanic Catholics, and in 1993 the founding director of the Catholic Institute for Evangelization, training clergy and laity to reach North Philadelphia's growing Latino population. He taught psychology and religious studies at La Salle University for fourteen years, pastored in changing immigrant neighborhoods, and was named a Chaplain to His Holiness (Monsignor) in 1998 and a Prelate of Honor in 2009.
Pope Benedict XVI made him an auxiliary bishop of Rockville Centre, New York, in 2012 — months before a tractor-trailer struck his car in a thirty-five-vehicle pileup and rescuers cut him free with the Jaws of Life, a brush with death he said 'refocused me on the fact that the people in my life were most important.' In 2017 Pope Francis named him Bishop of Cleveland, where his warmth and his advocacy for immigrants marked a short tenure, and in 2020 the same pope sent him home to Philadelphia as its archbishop — the first Hispanic archbishop of that historic see, succeeding Charles Chaput. The COVID-19 pandemic descended within weeks of his installation.
By temperament he is the opposite of a prelate on a throne: down-to-earth, quick with a guitar in a parishioner's living room, given to off-the-cuff homilies, a fan of baseball, scuba diving, and Star Trek, who once simply hugged Pope Francis where others bowed. 'What you see is who he is,' a colleague said; asked whether children should address him as 'Your Highness,' he shot back, 'Are you kidding me? I hope they're going to call me Nelson.' That same unpretentious instinct shaped the record that earns him a place here — on the Traditional Latin Mass, where many Francis-era bishops swung the axe, Pérez quietly sheathed it.
Among the bishops Pope Francis raised up, Archbishop Pérez is the pleasant surprise. The trad question — did he protect the old Mass or take the knife to it? — he answered, in deed, on the side of protection. When Traditionis Custodes fell in July 2021 and chanceries across the country began closing chapels and counting sites, Pérez did the opposite: within three days he declared that every Traditional Latin Mass and old-rite sacrament in Philadelphia 'may continue,' and then went beyond the letter of the law to re-grant all his priests the faculty to offer the older books. That faculty re-grant is an affirmative act of generosity, not mere inaction.
And he held the line. The FSSP's quasi-parish at Conshohocken was shielded from the first day and still receiving new priestly assignments in 2024; no Philadelphia site was cut or consolidated as an act of enforcement. Set beside the contractions in Arlington, Washington, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, his archdiocese sits among the most permissive in the country — and that is a fact about his choices, not his geography.
Honesty keeps this from gushing. He inherited the strongest piece — the FSSP parish — from Archbishop Chaput, and his own framing is the loyal-son language of unity and obedience to the Holy Father, not a ringing defense of the ancient rite on its merits. He permits rather than proclaims. But a shepherd is judged by whether the sheep attached to the old Mass were fed or scattered, and in Philadelphia they were fed. On the evidence of his deeds, a friend of Tradition — quiet, but real.