Christopher J. Coyne
Christopher James Coyne was born June 17, 1958, in Woburn, Massachusetts. He earned a bachelor's degree in business management from the University of Lowell (1980) and a Master of Divinity from St. John's Seminary, Boston (1986), and was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston on June 7, 1986. He later studied liturgy in Rome, earning a Licentiate (1992) and a Doctorate in Sacred Liturgy (1994) from the Pontifical Liturgical Institute (Sant'Anselmo). A trained liturgist, he taught Sacred Liturgy and Homiletics at St. John's Seminary, Brighton (1994-2003) and directed the Archdiocese of Boston's Office of Worship (2000-2002).
He was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Indianapolis in January 2011 (consecrated March 2, 2011), then Bishop of Burlington, Vermont, installed January 29, 2015. On June 26, 2023, Pope Francis named him Coadjutor Archbishop of Hartford, Connecticut. He succeeded to the see as the sixth Archbishop of Hartford and was installed May 1, 2024, upon Archbishop Leonard P. Blair's retirement. He remains the sitting Archbishop of Hartford as of mid-2026.
Media-savvy and generally regarded as a Francis-aligned moderate, Coyne chaired the USCCB Committee on Communications (2015-2018) and has been a member of the USCCB Committee on Divine Worship since 2017. He is not the USCCB vice-president. He drew national attention in Vermont for waiving non-disclosure agreements for St. Joseph's Orphanage abuse victims (2016) and issuing a public apology (December 2020).
Coyne's deeds cut both ways. In Burlington his record is genuinely friendly: in 2017, before Traditionis Custodes, he took an informal Latin Mass community and elevated it into a formal diocesan chaplaincy, appointed a dedicated chaplain (Fr. Brian O'Donnell), and let it flourish with a full schedule -- a Sunday High Mass and weekday Low Masses. That chaplaincy, now the St. Philip Neri Latin Mass Chaplaincy at St. Anthony Church, survived the 2021 motu proprio and still operates. For a Francis appointee and professional liturgist, erecting and sustaining a robust TLM apostolate is a positive, deeds-based mark.
Hartford is the harder case. The archdiocese's most prominent diocesan TLM -- the Saint Gregory Society's Mass in New Haven, celebrated for 38 years -- was suppressed on January 14, 2024 under Traditionis Custodes. The formal decision was Archbishop Blair's, made at the request of the local pastors; but Coyne was already the coadjutor with right of succession when it fell, and now, more than a year into his own tenure as ordinary, he has not restored it. The one exclusively-traditional apostolate that continues in the archdiocese, St. Patrick Oratory in Waterbury, is run by the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest under its own structure -- not a fruit of any Coyne initiative.
Net: Coyne is not a zealous suppressor who dismantles communities on his own motion -- his Vermont history is the opposite -- but neither is he a champion who has spent capital to preserve or restore the older rite in Hartford. He is a media-savvy, rule-following moderate who administers Rome's liturgical line. No public statement from him endorsing ad orientem worship, altar rails, or expanded TLM access has surfaced, and he has left the New Haven suppression standing. On the deeds, the verdict is a genuine mixed: a friend in Vermont, a caretaker of the status quo in Hartford.