Simon Peter Engurait
Simon Peter Engurait was born in 1971 in Ngora, Uganda, one of fourteen children. His road to the priesthood ran by way of a first career in government and business in Uganda. He came to the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux in 2007 as a seminarian, completed formation at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, and was ordained a deacon at St. Bernadette Church in Houma in 2012 and a priest at the Cathedral of St. Francis de Sales on May 25, 2013, by Bishop Sam Jacobs. Within six months, he jokes, he knew the bayou country better than many native seminarians.
He rose as the diocese's own: pastor of St. Bridget Parish in Schriever from 2017, vicar general and moderator of the curia under Bishops Fabre and Dorsonville, interim executive director of Catholic Charities. When Bishop Dorsonville died suddenly on January 19, 2024, the college of consultors elected Engurait diocesan administrator on January 22, 2024, and he governed the vacant see for over a year and a half.
On June 5, 2025, Pope Leo XIV appointed the administrator himself the sixth Bishop of Houma-Thibodaux. He was ordained and installed on September 5, 2025, at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux before more than two thousand people - the first African-born bishop to lead a diocese in the mainland United States. He speaks English, Ateso, Kiswahili and Spanish.
Bishop Engurait's relationship to the old Mass is, so far, a blank page - and the dossier leaves it blank rather than filling it with inference. As diocesan administrator from January 2024 he was canonically barred from innovation (nihil innovetur), and no act of his on the 1962 Missal from that period is on record. As bishop since September 5, 2025, he has issued no decree, statement or published permission on the old Mass that the sources consulted could find.
The diocese he inherited has a small and imperfectly documented Latin footprint: the diocesan parish finder lists Latin Masses at Blessed Sacrament Chapel in Gibson, without identifying whether they are the 1962 Missal or the ordinary form in Latin. Until Engurait speaks or acts, his posture is no_record - a new bishop, barely a year in, whose record on the old Mass is the record he inherited.