Romeo Duetao Convocar
Romeo Duetao Convocar was born on April 13, 1970, in Janiuay, Iloilo, in the Philippines. He took his high school studies and a bachelor of arts in philosophy, with a minor in English, at St. Joseph Seminary in Dumaguete City, and his theological studies at St. Joseph Regional Seminary in Jaro, Iloilo City. He was ordained a priest on September 17, 1996, for the Military Ordinariate of the Philippines and commissioned a chaplain captain in the Armed Forces of the Philippines, serving some ten years at military installations and with the Navy, and five years as spiritual director and procurator of the Domus Josephi Formation House, the Military Ordinariate's seminary. His episcopal motto is Quia non defecerunt miserationes eius - because his mercies have not failed.
In 2006 he moved to civilian pastoral work in Guam and was incardinated into the Archdiocese of Agana on March 15, 2016. He served as parish administrator of St. Joseph in Inalajan, pastor of San Isidro in Malojloj, rector of the Dulce Nombre de Maria Cathedral-Basilica, and pastor of Blessed Diego Luis de San Vitores in Tumon; studied tribunal practice in Sydney; and served as advocate and auditor of the Metropolitan Tribunal and as vicar general to Archbishop Michael Byrnes. When Byrnes resigned for reasons of health on March 28, 2023, Pope Francis named Convocar apostolic administrator of Agana, and he governed the wounded archdiocese - still emerging from the Apuron abuse crisis and bankruptcy - for over a year.
On November 25, 2024, Pope Francis appointed him Bishop of Chalan Kanoa in the Northern Mariana Islands, Agana's suffragan across the water. He was ordained and installed as the diocese's third bishop on March 8, 2025, succeeding Ryan Pagente Jimenez. The public record on him is thin - a military chaplain and administrator's career, documented mainly in appointment releases - and this bio is correspondingly shorter.
No Traditional Latin Mass is documented anywhere in the Diocese of Chalan Kanoa, and none in the Northern Marianas generally: the project's earlier research on his predecessor found the only traceable older-form celebration in the Marianas to be a single sung Mass in Agana, Guam, in November 2012, under a predecessor's permission and nearly a decade before Traditionis Custodes. Diocesan Mass schedules list only the ordinary form. There is no FSSP, ICKSP or SSPX presence.
Convocar has issued no Traditionis Custodes decree, permission or restriction that can be found in the public record. In the diocese he governed as administrator, Agana, and in the diocese he now leads, there was no standing community of the older form for such an act to govern.
On the old Mass, his record so far is the record he inherited.