Bishop Andrew Cozzens, a proud graduate of Benedictine College in Atchison Kansas, served as a missionary for young people with both the Twin Cities-based NET Ministries and also the national college ministry Saint Paul’s Outreach before entering seminary.
He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis in 1997, and after serving in two parishes was sent to Rome for doctoral studies, where he completed a doctorate degree in Sacramental Theology focusing on Saint John Paul II’s theology of the Priest as the Bridegroom of the Church. His book on this topic was published in 2020 through the Institute for Priestly Formation out of Omaha, an organization for which he also serves as president.
After teaching in seminary formation for 8 years Bishop Cozzens was ordained to the episcopacy in 2013 as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. On December 6, 2021, he was installed as the 8th bishop of the Diocese of Crookston in northern Minnesota. He currently serves as the chair of the USCCB Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis where he has been tasked by the Bishops with leading a three-year National Eucharistic Revival which seeks to impact the US Church at every level strengthening Eucharistic belief and practice.
As part of the Revival he has founded, and is the first President of, the National Eucharistic Congress Corporation and is overseeing the organizing of the first National Eucharistic Congress in the United States in almost 50 years.
Bishop Cozzens will be a special podcast guest for The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz) podcast, appearing on the introduction to “Part 2: How We Worship.”