Bishop Steven R. Biegler was ordained and installed as the ninth bishop of Cheyenne on June 5, 2017. 

He was born on March 22, 1959, in Mobridge, South Dakota. His family owns a farm-ranch operation near Timber Lake, South Dakota. His parents are Alfred (deceased) and Mary Biegler, and he has six brothers and six sisters, including Rhonda Nickerson, who passed away July 9, 2010.

Bishop Biegler graduated from Timber Lake High School in 1977 and attended the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City for one year (1977-1978). “I took a day to think about life and seminary came to mind. I said, ‘Not right now, I’ll have to think about that.’ I was also considering ranching and having a family and those thoughts were part of considering the priesthood and celibacy,” says Bishop Steven.

Most of the next eight years, he worked on the family farm. “We had radios in the tractor, but I would often just turn the radio off. That was a really powerful place of meeting God in the beauty and quiet of nature,” he says. “It was a wonderful time for prayer and discernment.”

When Bishop Biegler felt he needed a change, he went to Wyoming to work with a construction crew filling in old underground coal mines around Glenrock near Casper. 

After that, Bishop Biegler attended Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary and St. Mary’s College, Winona, Minnesota (1986 to 1989) and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. From 1989 to1993, he attended the North American College in Rome where he received an Bachelor of Sacred Theology (STB) at the Pontifical Gregorian University. He was ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Rapid City, South Dakota, in Timber Lake, South Dakota, on July 9, 1993. 

“I went back to the North American College (NAC) as a faculty member from 2003 to 2006, and stayed another year, 2007, and finished a biblical theology degree,” he says. He received a License in Biblical Theology (STL) from the University of St. Thomas in Rome.

In 2010- 2011, Bishop Biegler served as Diocesan Administrator following the departure of then-Bishop Blase Cupich for his appointment as Bishop of Spokane, Washington, until the ordination of the current ordinary, Bishop Robert Gruss.