Welcome, Bishop-elect Szkredka!

With joy, members of the Thomas Aquinas College community welcome the appointment of Rev. Slawomir Szkredka as the new auxiliary bishop for the Santa Barbara Pastoral Region of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Last month, His Holiness Pope Francis named Fr. Szkredka as one of four new auxiliary bishops for the Archdiocese. On Tuesday, the Most Rev. José H. Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles, announced that, upon his episcopal ordination on September 26, Bishop-elect Szkredka will serve as Episcopal Vicar for the pastoral region that includes Thomas Aquinas College, California. The region has been without an auxiliary bishop since the 2022 departure of the Most Rev. Robert E. Barron for the Diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota.

“We congratulate Bishop-elect Szkredka on his appointment, as well his fellow bishops-elect, and we give thanks to God and to Pope Francis for blessing us with a new shepherd,” says Dr. Paul J. O’Reilly, president of Thomas Aquinas College. “We look forward to welcoming him to our California campus, and we are eager to aid him in his ministry to the faithful in Los Angeles.”

A native of Poland with advanced degrees from the the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, Fr. Szkredka is a professor of biblical studies and the coordinator of human formation at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo. Among the many seminarians he has taught over the years was one of the College’s newest alumni priests, Rev. Michael Masteller (’13), associate pastor of St. Helen Catholic Church in South Gate, California.

“He’s a brilliant mind, all these studies from Rome, and yet has that piety, that kind of faith you would find in a regular parish,” Fr. Masteller told the archdiocese’ weekly magazine, the Angelus. “I know they look for bishops who can teach the Faith, and that’s definitely something he’ll be able to do, with respect, with patience, with a listening heart but also with clarity of thought.”

Deo gratias!