Steven Joseph Lopes
Steven Joseph Lopes was born April 22, 1975, in Fremont, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the son of a Portuguese father and a Polish-American mother. Educated in California Catholic schools and at the University of San Francisco and Innsbruck, he entered St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park and was sent to Rome, earning a licentiate and doctorate in sacred theology at the Gregorian. He was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of San Francisco on June 23, 2001, by Cardinal William Levada.
From 2005 he worked in Rome as an official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith while teaching at the Gregorian, and became closely involved in implementing Benedict XVI's 2009 provision for former Anglicans, Anglicanorum coetibus. From 2012 he served as secretary of the commission Anglicanae Traditiones, which prepared Divine Worship: The Missal — the liturgical books that give the personal ordinariates their distinctive Anglican-patrimony rite. He is therefore not merely a bishop who inherited the Ordinariate Use, but one of its principal architects.
On November 24, 2015, Pope Francis named the 40-year-old Lopes the first bishop of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter (covering the United States and Canada); he was ordained a bishop February 2, 2016, in Houston, with Cardinal Gerhard Müller as principal consecrator, taking the motto Magna Opera Domini ('Great are the works of the Lord'). He chaired the USCCB Committee on Divine Worship (2021–2025), and in May 2026 Pope Leo XIV additionally named him apostolic administrator of Australia's Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross. Youthful, Roman-trained, and articulate, he is widely regarded as one of the more liturgically serious bishops in the English-speaking Church.
By any fair measure Bishop Lopes is one of the most liturgically serious and reverent bishops in the English-speaking Church, and a genuine friend of a traditional liturgical patrimony. He did not merely inherit the Ordinariate Use; he helped build it, serving as secretary of the commission that produced Divine Worship: The Missal from sources older than Trent — the 1549 Book of Common Prayer and the Sarum Missal. Under him the ordinariate keeps sacral, hieratic English, chanted propers, a deep choral repertoire, kneeling for Communion, and worship frequently offered ad orientem. For Catholics who love beauty, reverence, and continuity in worship, he is unambiguously on the right side.
His orthodoxy on doctrine reinforces the picture. His 2017 pastoral letter on Amoris Laetitia read the document in continuity with perennial teaching and insisted that conscience cannot overrule the moral law — a stance that earned praise from conservative Catholics. He describes the ordinariate's liturgy as a 'dual hermeneutic of reform' in continuity with both the Catholic tradition and the reforms of Paul VI, deliberately positioning himself above the liturgy wars rather than inside them.
The honest caveat is essential: Lopes is not a 1962-Traditional-Latin-Mass bishop, and the Ordinariate Use is not the TLM. The old Latin Mass is not really within his jurisdiction to regulate, and the diocesan TLM communities squeezed by Traditionis Custodes are not his to defend or restrict; he chaired the USCCB liturgy committee through those years without becoming a public advocate for the 1962 Missal. So the verdict should be warm but precise — a champion of reverent, traditional-language liturgy and of doctrinal orthodoxy, a witness that reverence and beauty still have a home in the modern Church, but not a shepherd whose record includes fighting for the 1962 TLM itself. Traditional Catholics can rightly count him a natural ally in the cause of reverent worship without pretending he carries a banner he has never raised.