Slawomir Szkredka
Slawomir Szkredka was born on May 12, 1974, in Czechowice-Dziedzice in southern Poland, near St. John Paul II's hometown of Wadowice, and knew from an early age that he wanted to be a priest. He began studies at the Metropolitan Seminary in Krakow, then continued at SS. Cyril and Methodius Seminary in Orchard Lake, Michigan, earning degrees in philosophy and theology. He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles by Cardinal Roger Mahony on January 12, 2002, at St. Mel Parish in Woodland Hills.
His early priesthood was parish work in the Valley and the San Gabriel Valley: parochial vicar at St. Genevieve in Panorama City and at St. John the Baptist in Baldwin Park. In 2008 he went to Rome for graduate studies at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, earning a doctorate in Sacred Scripture, and returned to Los Angeles in 2015 as professor of biblical studies and formator at St. John's Seminary in Camarillo. He is a published scholar, author of Icon of Trust: Mary in the Gospels of Luke and John, known to friends and students as 'Swavek.'
Pope Francis named him an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles on July 18, 2023, and he was consecrated on September 26, 2023, taking the Santa Barbara Pastoral Region as episcopal vicar. In September 2025 he was named apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Monterey, which he governed alongside his Los Angeles region until Bishop Ramon Bejarano was installed there on February 19, 2026. In October 2026 he was named to the U.S. bishops' new task force on artificial intelligence. On the old Mass he has no act of his own on record in either see.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Szkredka has no record of his own in either see he has governed. No decree in his name, no dispensation sought, no homily or public word for or against the old rite has surfaced, whether as auxiliary of Los Angeles or as administrator of Monterey. He is a biblical scholar and seminary formator, and his public ministry has been spent on Scripture and priestly formation, not on liturgical governance.
The two inheritances must not be confused. In Los Angeles, Archbishop Gomez welcomed the motu proprio in July 2021 and urged care in implementing it, and no detailed public decree of his has surfaced; the archdiocese's roughly seven older-rite locations of 2021 were consolidated over time, while the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter's St. Vitus continues. In Monterey, the outgoing ordinary, Bishop Daniel Garcia, ended the diocese's only 1962-Missal Mass at Sacred Heart, Hollister, by letter dated September 14, 2025, directing cessation as of October 13, 2025 - five days before Szkredka was named administrator. The cessation therefore took effect on Szkredka's watch, but the act was Garcia's, not his, and no act of Szkredka's own either sustaining or reversing it has surfaced.
The honest verdict is therefore a plain one, with one open question the integrator should weigh: an administrator who inherited a suppression he did not order, and let it stand without any public word of his own, is not thereby shown to have ordered one. Silence during a three-month caretaker administration is not a decree, and this panel does not treat it as one.