Thomas J. Hennen
Thomas Joseph Hennen was born on July 4, 1978, in Ottumwa, Iowa, the youngest of eleven children of John and Jo'An Hennen. He first felt a call to the priesthood in the fourth grade. He took a degree in history and philosophy at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, then studied in Rome at the Pontifical North American College, earning a Bachelor of Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in 2003. Bishop William Franklin ordained him a priest of Davenport at Sacred Heart Cathedral on July 10, 2004, and a year later he added a licentiate in moral theology from the Pontifical Alphonsian Academy.
Iowa used him the way dioceses use their most trusted priests: parochial vicar, campus minister in Iowa City, vocations director, chaplain and theology teacher at Assumption High School, campus ministry director at St. Ambrose, and for more than a decade the diocesan coordinator of Courage, the apostolate to Catholics who experience same-sex attraction. In 2020 he became vicar general; from 2021 he was also pastor and rector of Sacred Heart Cathedral, and he wrote the Catholic Messenger's Question Box column. On July 10, 2025 - the twenty-first anniversary of his ordination - Pope Leo XIV named him Bishop of Baker, Oregon. Ordained and installed on September 29, 2025, at forty-seven he was the youngest diocesan bishop in the United States.
Hennen arrived in Baker on September 29, 2025, inheriting a diocese in which the old Mass had never been publicly legislated on by his predecessor: no decree, no announced permission, no restriction, and no society presence found. In the year since his installation, no public act of his on the 1962 Missal has been found either.
His formation - Roman, moral-theological, spent largely in campus and youth ministry - gives no public indication of where he will land on the question, and this dossier does not guess. On the old Mass, his record so far is the record he inherited.