Robert Fedek
Robert Miroslaw Fedek was born on July 7, 1979, in Bielsko-Biała, Poland, to Józefa Maria and Roman Kazimierz Fedek, and grew up in the local public schools before entering the Archdiocesan Theological Seminary in Kraków in 1998. In 2001 he crossed the Atlantic to continue formation for the Archdiocese of Chicago, first at the Bishop Abramowicz Preparatory Seminary for Polish seminarians and then at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, Mundelein Seminary, where he earned a master of divinity in 2005. He was ordained a priest for Chicago on May 21, 2005, by Cardinal Francis George, an immigrant priest formed on two continents and fluent in Polish and English.
His Chicago ministry moved steadily from parish to the cardinal's side. He was associate pastor of St. Mary of the Annunciation in Mundelein from 2005 to 2010, pastor of Our Lady of Victory in Chicago from 2010 to 2017, and pastor of Immaculate Conception (Talcott) in Chicago from 2017 to 2020, while also serving as assistant vocation director for Vicariate I and coordinator of the Polish Ministry Council. In 2020 Cardinal Blase Cupich appointed him his administrative secretary, a post he held for four years, close to the center of archdiocesan government without holding a vicariate of his own.
Pope Francis appointed him auxiliary bishop of Chicago and titular bishop of Dardano on December 20, 2024, together with four other priests, and he was ordained a bishop at Holy Name Cathedral on February 26, 2025. At that ordination he was assigned as episcopal vicar of Vicariate V, the southern vicariate of the archdiocese. His motto is Duc in altum, put out into the deep.
Fedek entered the episcopate three years after Chicago's Traditionis custodes settlement, and he inherited it whole. Cardinal Cupich's policy of December 27, 2021, effective January 25, 2022, requires the archbishop's written permission for any celebration of the old rite, bars the 1962 Mass from parish churches without his and the Vatican's agreement, and bans it on first Sundays, Christmas, the Triduum, Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday. Within that framework St. John Cantius, served by the Canons Regular, kept its Sunday 1962 Missal Masses except on first Sundays, while the Institute of Christ the King suspended public Masses at its Chicago shrine on August 1, 2022. All of this predates Fedek's appointment and is Cupich's, not Fedek's.
A search for any act of Fedek's own on the old Mass - a statement, decree, permission, appointment sustaining a 1962 community, or public letter since his December 2024 appointment - found nothing. His four years as Cardinal Cupich's administrative secretary, 2020 to 2024, put him near the archbishop's decisions, but proximity is not authorship, and no document bearing his name on the 1962 Missal was located. Since February 2025 he has been episcopal vicar of Vicariate V, but the policy reserves old-rite permission to the archbishop himself, so vicariate office cannot move posture.
The verdict is therefore no_record at medium confidence: absence searched for, not assumed, and bounded by what is public. No archdiocese-wide count of 1962 venues is asserted, because no source fetched enumerates one; sites_before and sites_now are null rather than guessed from a blog's list. The board row for Chicago describes Cupich's suppressed policy, not Fedek, so there is no contradiction to resolve - only the standing question for a later pass, whether any internal archdiocesan permission bearing Fedek's name exists outside the public record.