With the 100th birthday of Jacques Marie Sébastien de Saint-Blanquat, Bishop Emeritus of Montauban in the south of France, on Friday (21 November), there will be ten bishops in the Catholic Church who are at least 100 years old for the first time.
It last counted around 5,500 bishops.
In spring 2025, this age record was missed by just a few weeks: The religious James Hector MacDonald, Archbishop Emeritus of Saint John's in Newfoundland/Canada, turned 100 at the end of April.
He would have been the tenth centenarian in the world episcopate - had Archbishop Settimio Todisco of Brindisi-Ostuni not died 33 days earlier at the age of almost 101.
MacDonald then died 32 days after his 100th birthday.
Oldest bishop is almost 104
The oldest bishop at present is José de Jesús Sahagún de la Parra, Bishop Emeritus of Ciudad Lázaro Cárdenas and previously of Tula in Mexico for 24 years, aged almost 104.
He has been the senior bishop of the Catholic Church worldwide since summer 2022.
Sahagún de la Parra is one of the last four living fathers of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the last to take part in its opening in October 1962.
The Mexican has been a priest for 79 years and a bishop for 64 years. He is followed by René Henry Gracida, a US Benedictine monk who was Bishop of Corpus Christi in Texas until 1997, at the age of 102.
In 2020, the former Archbishop of La Serena in Chile, Bernardino Piñera Carvallo, reached the biblical age of almost 105.