Octavio Cisneros

Octavio Cisneros (born July 19, 1945) is a Cuban-born American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn in New York City from 2006 to 2020.

Biography

Early life The third of four children, Octavio Cisneros was born on July 19, 1945, in Las Villas, a province of Cuba, to Roberto Cisneros and Olga Lezcano. He and his family moved to Havana shortly after his birth. He studied in Cuba under the Piarist Fathers as a child. In October 1961, Octavio Cisneros immigrated to the United States as a political refugee as part of Operation Peter Pan. Relocated to Marquette, Michigan, he attended Negaunee St. Paul High School in Negaunee, Michigan.

Cisneros then studied at St. Lawrence Minor Seminary in Mount Calvary, Wisconsin, where he obtained an Associate of Arts degree, and at Niagara University in Lewiston, New York, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree. He studied theology at DeSales School of Theology in Washington, D.C., and at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, New York, earning a Master of Divinity degree.

Cisneros served as vice-postulator (or promoter) of the cause for canonization (Sainthood) of Félix Varela, a 19th-century Cuban priest. While auxiliary bishop, Cisneros also served as pastor of Holy Child Jesus Parish in the Richmond Hill section of Queens.

On January 20, 2022, Cisneros traveled to Chalatenango, El Salvador to celebrate a mass at the gravesites of Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford. The two nuns from the Archdiocese of New York had been murdered in El Salvador on December 2, 1980, by soldiers of the El Salvador Army.