William E. Lori
William Edward Lori was born on May 6, 1951, in Louisville, Kentucky, and ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington on May 14, 1977. Named an auxiliary bishop of Washington in 1995, he became Bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 2001, succeeding Edward Egan, who had gone to New York. On March 20, 2012, Benedict XVI named him Archbishop of Baltimore - the premier see of the United States, the first diocese established in the nation - and he was installed that May.
Since 2005 he has been Supreme Chaplain of the Knights of Columbus, and as founding chairman of the bishops' Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty he was the architect of the 2012 Fortnight for Freedom against the federal contraception mandate. In 2018 Rome also made him apostolic administrator of Wheeling-Charleston, where he led the investigation of Bishop Michael Bransfield; he later acknowledged deleting from his own report the names of clergy who had received Bransfield's cash gifts - his own among them - returned the money, and called the deletion a mistake.
On the old Mass his course ran in one direction. His first response to Traditionis Custodes in July 2021 suppressed nothing and promised that 'every effort will be made to meet the pastoral needs' of those attached to the older rite. But the gentleness ran on a two-year transitional indult, and when it lapsed in 2024 he declined to seek its renewal: the parish Latin Masses ended that August, and the rite was consolidated at a single home, the FSSP-staffed National Shrine of St. Alphonsus in Baltimore.
- 2021-07First response to Traditionis Custodes: nothing suppressed; the new norms needed 'further study' - 'the current practice will continue and going forward every effort will be made to meet the pastoral needs of those who frequent' the older rite. ↗
- 2024-08-01When the transitional indult lapsed he did not seek its renewal: the last Latin Mass at St. Mary's, Hagerstown was 28 July 2024, and from 1 August the old rite in the archdiocese was consolidated to a single home, the National Shrine of St. Alphonsus, entrusted to the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter - 'a permanent home' for the Latin Mass, as the archdiocese put it. ↗
Archbishop Lori is the courteous face of suppression — and that makes him a harder case to read than the open antagonists, but the substance is the same. The trad question is simple: did he protect the old Mass or take the knife to it? He took the knife, slowly, and with an apology in his voice. His first response to Traditionis Custodes in 2021 was genuinely gentle: he suppressed nothing and promised 'every effort' to meet the needs of those attached to the older rite. For a moment it looked like Baltimore might be a refuge.
It was not. By his own words, he understood the transitional indult not as protection but as a weaning — its purpose, he wrote, was that the faithful 'would come to welcome and embrace the Novus Ordo.' That is an assimilationist posture, not a protective one, and when the indult lapsed in 2024 he did not lift a finger to renew it. The old Mass was swept out of the parishes of the premier see of the United States and confined to a single shrine. He kept the FSSP, and that one mercy is worth acknowledging honestly — a beautiful church where the rite still lives.
But one permitted site, reached by his own admission as a way-station toward the new Mass, is the floor of what Traditionis Custodes demands of a cooperative bishop, not the generosity of a friend. Lori delivered the contraction Rome asked for, on schedule, in soft words. More diplomatic than the hard men of the bench — but on the evidence of his deeds, no friend of Tradition.