Paul D. Etienne
Paul Dennis Etienne was born June 15, 1959, in Tell City, Indiana, into a family that produced multiple religious vocations: his sister is a Benedictine nun, and two of his brothers are diocesan priests of the Diocese of Evansville. After a business degree from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, he studied for the priesthood at the Pontifical North American College in Rome and was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Evansville on June 27, 1992. He served the Archdiocese of Indianapolis in parish work, as vocations director, and as a seminary vice-rector.
Pope Benedict XVI named him Bishop of Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 2009, where he requested a Vatican investigation into abuse allegations against a former bishop. Pope Francis appointed him Archbishop of Anchorage, Alaska, in 2016, and in April 2019 named him Coadjutor Archbishop of Seattle; he became Archbishop of Seattle on September 3, 2019, succeeding Archbishop J. Peter Sartain. He remains the sitting Archbishop of Seattle as of mid-2026.
As archbishop, Etienne has emphasized evangelization and missionary discipleship, and is best known for launching 'Partners in the Gospel,' a sweeping 2023–2024 reorganization that consolidated the archdiocese's 136 parishes into roughly 60 multi-parish 'families,' citing a shrinking priest pool, declining Mass attendance, and falling revenue — a plan that drew significant lay backlash and Vatican appeals. On the Traditional Latin Mass he acted as a faithful, by-the-letter implementer of Pope Francis's 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes.
Etienne's record on the Traditional Latin Mass is defined by his September 8, 2021 decree implementing Traditionis Custodes, and its bottom line is genuinely restrictive: point 6 bars every priest 'living and/or ministering in the Archdiocese of Seattle' from celebrating the 1962 Missal. That ended the traditional Mass wherever diocesan clergy had offered it in ordinary parishes — the long-running Latin Mass at Our Lady Star of the Sea in Bremerton, for instance, was cancelled. For a diocesan priest or a layman attached to the old rite outside the two designated sites, the answer under Etienne is simply no.
At the same time, Etienne was markedly more accommodating to the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter than the harshest of his brother bishops were to their traditional communities. He kept North American Martyrs in Edmonds — a personal parish whose new church he himself had blessed in November 2019, before Traditionis Custodes — and even granted a dispensation from the motu proprio's ban on parish churches to keep the old Mass at St. Joseph parish church in Tacoma, entrusting both to the FSSP with permission to offer the traditional Mass 'any day of the year.' He formally declared that the FSSP priests 'do not deny the validity and legitimacy of the liturgical reform,' clearing them to continue. Compared with bishops who capped Masses to once a month, banished them to funeral homes, or shuttered them outright, Etienne left the FSSP apostolate substantially intact.
The honest verdict is mixed, and a fair-minded traditionalist should resist both caricatures. Etienne is no ally of a diocesan traditional movement — he executed Rome's restriction to the letter, offered no home for the old Mass among his own priests, and rooted his decree in Francis's expectation that traditional worshippers 'return in due time' to the new rite, with the FSSP parish's survival made conditional on his judgment. Yet he is not among the persecutors: he preserved both existing communities, stretched the rules in the FSSP's favor rather than against it, and has not moved to strangle them since. He is a bishop who will tolerate and even facilitate the FSSP within his diocese, but who will not himself champion or expand access to the traditional Roman Rite.