Thomas Robert Zinkula
Thomas Robert Zinkula was born April 19, 1957, in Mount Vernon, Iowa, and grew up on a farm with eight siblings. He earned a bachelor's degree from Cornell College, worked a year as an actuary, then earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Iowa College of Law (1983) and practiced law for three years. Feeling a call to the priesthood while practicing as an attorney, he entered Theological College at the Catholic University of America and was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Dubuque on May 26, 1990.
As a priest of Dubuque he worked in the metropolitan tribunal, earned a licentiate in canon law from Saint Paul University in Ottawa (1998), and was rector of St. Pius X Seminary in Dubuque (2014-2017). His canon-law training and prior legal career mark him as a canonist-bishop. His episcopal motto is Fiat voluntas tua (Thy will be done).
On April 19, 2017, Pope Francis named Zinkula the ninth Bishop of Davenport, Iowa; he was ordained bishop June 22, 2017. On July 26, 2023, Pope Francis appointed him the eleventh Archbishop of Dubuque, and he was installed October 18, 2023, returning to the archdiocese where he had been ordained a priest. As of mid-2026 he remains the sitting Archbishop of Dubuque. His pastoral profile is broadly that of a Francis-era moderate.
Judged by deeds rather than sympathies, Zinkula's handling of the Traditional Latin Mass in Davenport was, on the narrow metric of Traditionis Custodes compliance, one of the more accommodating in the United States. Faced with a document designed to push the older rite out of parish churches, he kept both existing sites (Holy Family, Davenport and St. Patrick, Iowa City), and he went out of his way to grant two canonical dispensations: from the rule barring the old Mass in parish churches, and from the one-Mass-per-day limit so a single priest could cover both communities. He also named a dedicated priest-delegate for their pastoral care. That is a bishop preserving access, not dismantling it, and the communities survived his 2023 departure intact.
Against that stands the framing. Zinkula endorsed the premises of Traditionis Custodes wholesale, calling the conciliar reforms 'irreversible' and the reformed books the 'unique expression' of the Church's lex orandi, and he barred the older-rite Triduum and Easter outright. His broader profile, the 2023 gender-accompaniment guidelines and prominent synodal role, is that of a progressive moderate. So the generosity reads as pragmatic and pastoral rather than as any positive esteem for the traditional rite; the old Mass was tolerated and protected, not prized.
In Dubuque since 2023 the record is thin: no decree expanding or restricting the TLM has surfaced, and the lone 'Mass in Latin' provision in the 2026 reorganization is not clearly the older rite. Verdict: a qualified friend of traditional communities on the strength of his actual Davenport deeds, but a friend of the people rather than of the rite, and one whose Dubuque stance remains largely unproven. Not an enemy; a moderate who chose access over suppression when he had discretion.