Patrick Neary
Patrick Michael Neary was born on March 6, 1963, in La Porte, Indiana. He studied at the University of Notre Dame, graduating in 1985, and took a master of divinity from the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. A priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, he was ordained on April 6, 1991, and his order sent him where Holy Cross priests go: to campus ministry and a residence hall rectorship at Notre Dame, then to Kenya, where he directed the McCauley House of Formation in Nairobi and served as district superior of East Africa from 2011 to 2018. From 2018 he was pastor of Holy Redeemer in Portland, Oregon.
On December 15, 2022, Pope Francis named him the tenth Bishop of Saint Cloud, and he was ordained and installed on February 14, 2023, at St. Mary's Cathedral - an Indiana religious, formed in East Africa, set over the German and Scandinavian farm parishes of central Minnesota. Mercy, hope and justice, the diocese's own motto, became the stated themes of his ministry. In 2026 he announced the diocese's largest restructuring in its history, gathering its 131 parishes into 48 parish groups amid priest shortages and falling enrollment.
Neary took possession on February 14, 2023, two months after his predecessor's retirement, inheriting a diocese whose old-Mass provision rested on a 2008 designation - Sacred Heart, Flensburg, and St. John Cantius, Saint Cloud - that neither Kettler nor the vacancy had publicly revisited. No decree, permission, restriction or statement of Neary's on the 1962 Missal has been found in the sources searched, and the present status of the two historic sites could not be verified for this draft.
His energies have gone visibly elsewhere - to the pastoral reorganization of a shrinking rural diocese. On the old Mass, his record so far is the record he inherited.