Robert J. Lombardo
Robert Joseph Lombardo was born on September 4, 1957, in Stamford, Connecticut, to Emil and Christine (Rubino) Lombardo. He earned an accounting degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1979 and worked at Price Waterhouse for a year before entering religious life. He entered the Capuchins in 1980, professed first vows in 1981 and final vows in 1986, did missionary work in Bolivia and Honduras with orphaned street children, ran youth programs on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and directed the Padre Pio Shelter in the Bronx.
In 1987 he co-founded the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in the South Bronx, and he was ordained a priest for that community on May 12, 1990, by Cardinal John O'Connor at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. He directed the St. Anthony Residence and its free clinic in the Bronx and served as the community's vicar general, before Cardinal Francis George asked him in 2005 to bring that ministry to one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. There he founded the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels in West Humboldt Park, with pantries, youth, senior and retreat programs, and in 2010 founded the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago.
Pope Francis appointed him auxiliary bishop of Chicago and titular bishop of Munatiana on September 11, 2020, and he was consecrated at Holy Name Cathedral on November 13, 2020, He has served throughout as episcopal vicar of Vicariate III, the West Side vicariate, and continues to lead the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels. His motto is My God and my all.
Lombardo serves as an auxiliary under an ordinary who has already settled Chicago's Traditionis custodes question, and that distinction governs this dossier. Cardinal Cupich's policy of December 27, 2021, effective January 25, 2022, requires his 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 is Cupich's, not Lombardo's.
A search for any act of Lombardo's own on the old Mass - a diocesan statement, decree, permission, appointment sustaining a 1962 community, or public letter between 2021 and 2026 - found nothing. He was an auxiliary throughout the policy's promulgation and afterwards, as episcopal vicar of Vicariate III, but episcopal vicars administer a region on the archbishop's behalf; the permission to celebrate the old rite is reserved by the policy to the archbishop himself. His Franciscan renewal charism and his poverty ministry are the substance of his public record, and neither is a governing act on the 1962 Missal.
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 Lombardo, so there is no contradiction to resolve - only the standing question for a later pass, whether any internal archdiocesan permission bearing Lombardo's name exists outside the public record.