Robert P. Boxie
Robert Paul Boxie III was born on September 18, 1980, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he grew up in a household and a parish, Sacred Heart of Jesus, in which faith, church, school, and service were givens. He has called that parish more than a church: a center for southwest Louisiana's African American community, whose school gave Black families a top-notch education. That formation in a Black Catholic community he still calls home runs through everything he has done since.
Boxie earned an engineering degree from Vanderbilt in 2002, taught English in France for a year, and took a Harvard law degree in 2007, clerking and practicing law in the Washington area. After discernment he entered seminary for the Archdiocese of Washington in 2010, studied in Rome, and earned a Bachelor of Sacred Theology in 2015 and a Licentiate in 2017 from the Gregorian University. Ordained a priest on June 25, 2016, he served in Derwood and Largo, where Auxiliary Bishop Roy Campbell mentored him, and since 2020 has been chaplain at Howard University, building a chapel and renewing the Sister Thea Bowman Catholic Student Center.
On May 1, 2026, Pope Leo XIV appointed Boxie, with Father Gary Studniewski, an auxiliary bishop of Washington, and Cardinal Robert McElroy ordained the two men on July 7, 2026, at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. At forty-five he became the youngest Catholic bishop in the United States and the first African American appointed to the episcopate in nearly a decade. He now serves as Vicar for Cultural Communities and Synodality. His motto is Domine, da mihi sapientiam: O Lord, give me wisdom.
Bishop Boxie has held his auxiliary tenure for only a few months, from his episcopal ordination on July 7, 2026, to the as_of date, and no governing act of his own on the 1962 Missal has been found in that window. Searches of his name against Traditionis custodes, the Latin Mass, the 1962 Missal, and the extraordinary form returned no decree, authorization, dispensation request, appointment sustaining a 1962 Mass, or public statement of his on the old rite. That absence is recorded as a searched-for absence, not as a judgment about his private views, which this dossier does not presume to know.
What he inherited is the ordinary's regime, and it must not be mistaken for his own record. Cardinal Wilton Gregory's norms, promulgated July 22, 2022, and effective September 21, 2022, designated three non-parochial churches for Sunday Mass according to the 1962 Roman Missal: the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist in Forest Glen, Maryland; the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Washington; and the mission church of St. Dominic in Aquasco, Maryland, with written archiepiscopal permission required for any other 1962 celebration. An archdiocesan statement in January 2024, after an unauthorized Capitol Mass using the 1962 Missal, still described those same three designated churches, and no change to the three-site regime under Cardinal McElroy has been located. The regime is therefore carried as inherited context in this tenure, and its sites are counted at three before and three now, at medium confidence, because a 2026 re-verification of the three sites was not located.
Under the batch rules, attendance, praise, a predecessor's acts, or mere continuation never move posture, and Boxie has no pre-tenure governing act either, having been a priest and campus chaplain, not a bishop, throughout the Traditionis custodes era before July 2026. His posture is accordingly no_record, and the open debts are narrow: whether the three designated sites still operate on the same footing under McElroy, and whether Boxie, as Vicar for Cultural Communities and Synodality, takes any future role in the archdiocese's 1962 provision. Either development would belong in a later pass, not in this one.