Stephen Jay Berg
Stephen Jay Berg was born on March 3, 1951, in Miles City, Montana, the eldest of ten children, and his first career was music: a bachelor's degree in piano performance from the University of Colorado Boulder and a master's from Eastern New Mexico University, years teaching music at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, and then fourteen years managing a retail nursery company. The call came late. He entered Assumption Seminary in San Antonio in his forties and was ordained a priest of Fort Worth on May 15, 1999, by his uncle, Bishop Joseph Charron.
He served parishes in Bedford and North Richland Hills, then four rural parishes at once from 2002 to 2008, and rose to vicar general and moderator of the curia of Fort Worth. When Fort Worth fell vacant he was elected its diocesan administrator and governed it for a full year - a rare apprenticeship for a bishop. Pope Francis named him the fifth Bishop of Pueblo on January 15, 2014, and Archbishop Samuel Aquila ordained and installed him on February 27, 2014. His motto is 'Thy will be done.' In March 2026, at seventy-five, he submitted the resignation canon law asks of every bishop; as of October 2026 it had not been accepted, and he remains Pueblo's bishop.
- 2021-07-23The National Catholic Register's survey of diocesan responses to Traditionis Custodes listed Pueblo as N/A - no public response. ↗
Pueblo is one of the plain cases. The National Catholic Register's July 2021 survey of diocesan responses to Traditionis Custodes lists the Diocese of Pueblo as 'N/A' - no public response - and nothing since has disturbed that entry: no decree, no statement, no published permission or restriction by Bishop Berg has been found in diocesan or news sources. No church offering the 1962 Missal within Pueblo's territory was identified in any source consulted for this batch.
Berg is a former diocesan administrator and an administrator by temperament, and his silence here is best read the way the survey recorded it: there was, so far as the public record shows, nothing in his diocese for the motu proprio to act on. On the old Mass, his record is no record - a finding, not a gap in the research. (Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Littleton, an FSSP parish, belongs to the Archdiocese of Denver, not to Pueblo.)