Robert W. Marshall
Robert William Marshall Jr. was born on June 17, 1959, in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated in its Catholic schools - St. Michael School, Christian Brothers High School, Christian Brothers University. He took his law degree from Memphis State University and practiced law for twelve years, in St. Louis and in Memphis, before the profession that had trained his mind gave way to the call that reordered his life. He entered Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans and was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Memphis on June 10, 2000, at forty-one.
His priesthood was parish work salted with trust: pastor of several Memphis parishes, master of ceremonies to Bishop J. Terry Steib, member of the presbyteral council and college of consultors, and - a measure of the confidence placed in him - delegate of Archbishop Joseph Kurtz during Kurtz's five months as apostolic administrator of Memphis. Under Bishop David Talley he served as vicar general, and from 2017 he was pastor of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Memphis.
On April 21, 2020, Pope Francis appointed him the thirteenth Bishop of Alexandria, and he was ordained and installed on August 20, 2020, in St. Francis Xavier Cathedral. He leads a small, poor, heavily rural diocese in central Louisiana. In October 2025 the diocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection under the weight of sexual-abuse lawsuits - the defining burden of his tenure so far.
- 2021-07CNA's survey of diocesan responses to Traditionis Custodes (as of July 30, 2021) listed the Diocese of Alexandria as N/A - no public response. ↗
Bishop Marshall had been in Alexandria barely eleven months when Traditionis Custodes arrived, and on the old Mass he has left no public record at all. CNA's July 2021 survey of diocesan responses lists Alexandria as N/A. No decree, statement, permission or restriction of his was found in the sources consulted, then or since.
The diocese's Latin footprint is itself hard to read: parish listings show Masses billed simply as 'Latin' (a Sunday afternoon and a weekday morning Mass at St. Rita in Alexandria among them), but no source reached identifies them as celebrations of the 1962 Missal rather than the ordinary form in Latin, and no traditional community or society presence in the diocese could be verified. Where nothing can be verified, the dossier says so: his posture is no_record, and the form of the diocese's Latin Masses is an open sourcing debt, flagged in the research notes.