Stephen D. Parkes
Stephen Douglas Parkes was born on June 2, 1965, in Mineola, New York, the youngest of three sons of Joan and Ron Parkes, and grew up in Massapequa. He took a business administration and marketing degree from the University of South Florida in 1987 and worked in banking and retail for several years before entering St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach, Florida, in 1992. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Orlando on May 23, 1998, and is fluent in Spanish.
His Orlando ministry was parochial and campus-based: parochial vicar at Annunciation in Longwood, parochial administrator at Most Precious Blood in Oviedo from 2005, spiritual director for Catholic campus ministry at the University of Central Florida from 2004 to 2011, and from 2011 pastor again at Annunciation. He is the younger brother of Gregory Parkes, Bishop of St. Petersburg, and the two are the only siblings currently serving together as bishops in the United States.
On July 8, 2020, Pope Francis appointed him Bishop of Savannah, and he was consecrated and installed on September 23, 2020, at the Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist, succeeding Gregory Hartmayer, who had gone to Atlanta. His Savannah episcopate has been dominated by two long arcs: the liturgical settlement that followed Traditionis custodes, and the cause of the five Georgia Martyrs, Spanish Franciscans killed in 1597, whose martyrdom the Vatican recognized in January 2025, clearing the way for their beatification in Savannah on October 31, 2026. His motto is Gaudete in Domino semper, rejoice in the Lord always.
- 2021-11-04Initial response to Traditionis custodes, shared in a letter to the faithful on November 4, 2021. The July 2022 letter refers back to this letter; its detailed terms are not reproduced in the sources fetched, and contemporary summaries describe the initial response as not suppressing any Savannah 1962 Mass. Recorded as context for the 2022 settlement, not as a standalone permission. ↗
- 2022-04-15Wrote to the Congregation for Divine Worship (now the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments) in mid-April 2022 requesting permission for specific parish churches in the diocese to celebrate Mass according to the Missale Romanum of 1962. Date given as mid-April in his own letter; recorded here as April 15 as a mid-month marker, confidence high for the act, medium for the exact day. ↗
- 2022-07-15Letter implementing Rome's late-May 2022 reply: the 1962 Mass may be celebrated at Sacred Heart parish, Savannah, weekly until May 20, 2023, and at Most Holy Trinity, Augusta, St. Joseph, Macon, and St. Anthony of Padua, Ray City, monthly until May 20, 2023; the 1962 Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist ends August 7, 2022, and moves to Sacred Heart at 1 p.m. on Sundays; Fr. Allan McDonald named Bishop's Delegate for Mass in the Extraordinary Form; the letter frames the period as a transition to Mass in conformity with the Second Vatican Council. ↗
- 2023-09-01The Dicastery extended the Savannah dispensation for an additional two years in September 2023, so the May 20, 2023 cessation date in the July 2022 letter never took effect. Exact day in September not established; recorded as September 1 as a month marker. ↗
- 2025-01-01Savannah appears among the US dioceses in the Dicastery's published 2025 permissions index licensing the 1962 Missal in a parish church, normally for another two years. The decree text itself was not fetched in this pass; the claim rests on this summary of the index, corroborated by the continued weekly Sacred Heart Mass reported in September 2025. ↗
Bishop Parkes is the batch's hard case, because his signature act announced an ending that never happened. In July 2022 he published a letter implementing Rome's reply to his own April request: the 1962 Mass could continue weekly at Sacred Heart in Savannah and monthly at Most Holy Trinity in Augusta, St. Joseph in Macon, and St. Anthony of Padua in Ray City, but only until May 20, 2023, and the cathedral's own 1962 Mass would end on August 7, 2022, moving to Sacred Heart at 1 p.m. He appointed Fr. Allan McDonald his delegate for the old Mass and framed the period as a transition to the reformed liturgy. Read alone, the letter points toward suppression on a timetable.
The timetable did not hold, and that is why the posture is preserved rather than reduced or suppressed. The Dicastery extended the dispensation in September 2023 for two more years, and Savannah appears again in the published 2025 permissions index. The provision on the ground confirms it: in November 2023 the weekly Sacred Heart Mass and the monthly Augusta and Ray City Masses were still being offered, and in September 2025 the weekly Sunday High Mass at Sacred Heart and the monthly Augusta Mass were still reported. The cathedral venue was lost, but it was replaced in the same city, and the venue count held at four rather than falling.
Two qualifications keep confidence at medium. First, the September 2023 extension and the 2025 permission rest on a secondary source and an index summary, not on fetched decree texts, and Macon and Ray City are not re-verified after November 2023, so sites_now is left null. Second, the counter-reading is real: a bishop who publishes an end date and a transition plan, even one later extended, has not given the old Mass a permanent home. On the evidence of what actually continued, however, Parkes's governing acts - the Rome requests, the delegate, the relocation with a pastor - sustained the provision, and that is what preserved records.