Christopher R. Cooke
Christopher Randall Cooke was born on November 8, 1973, in Meadowbrook, Pennsylvania, and grew up in St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Richboro. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware in 1996 and went to work in chemical manufacturing and design, first for Arco Chemical and then for Air Products and Chemicals. By 2000 the engineer's career no longer held him, and he left industry to enter St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, trading process design for priestly formation.
At St. Charles he earned a Master of Divinity degree in 2005 and a Master of Arts degree in 2006, and Cardinal Justin Rigali ordained him a priest on May 20, 2006. He served as parochial vicar at St. Eleanor in Collegeville and St. Martin of Tours in Philadelphia, then as parochial administrator of St. Francis of Assisi in Norristown, before returning to the seminary as director of its spirituality year program from 2013 to 2021 and dean of men for the theology seminary from 2021. Fluent in English and Spanish, he sat on the archdiocesan council of priests and formed seminarians for a decade before his own elevation.
Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of Philadelphia on December 8, 2023, and Archbishop Nelson Perez consecrated him on March 7, 2024, at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, with the titular see of Malliana. As auxiliary he carries pastoral responsibility for some thirty parishes in Bucks County and shares, with retired Auxiliary Bishop Edward Deliman, care of the archdiocese's Spanish-speaking community, work that took form in a new Hispanic deanery announced in September 2024. He remains an auxiliary bishop in active service.
On the older liturgy, Bishop Cooke has no governing record of his own, and this dossier does not invent one. He was appointed in December 2023 and consecrated in March 2024, nearly three years after Traditionis custodes, and real searching across archdiocesan news, the appointment coverage, and general reporting turned up no decree, authorization, dispensation request, or appointment of his sustaining the 1962 Missal, and no public word from him for or against it. He is an auxiliary bishop, and in Philadelphia the governance of the older liturgy belongs to the ordinary, Archbishop Perez, not to his auxiliaries.
What he inherited is therefore Perez's settlement, not a policy of his making. On July 19, 2021, Archbishop Perez announced that places celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass and other sacraments could continue to do so, granting all priests faculty to celebrate with the pre-1970 books until further guidance, with norms to follow. Cooke arrived long after that statement, as a seminary formator and then as the Bucks County and Hispanic-ministry auxiliary, and no act of his has altered, extended, or restricted that settlement. Attendance at any liturgy, praise for tradition in general, and the ordinary's acts are all excluded by rule from moving his posture.
The honest verdict is accordingly no_record, at medium confidence: a searched absence, not an assumed one. It says nothing about his private liturgical sympathies, which no source states, and nothing about the archdiocese as a whole, whose record belongs to Perez. If a Cooke act on the 1962 Missal emerges, it should be added as a dated action and the posture revisited; until then, silence is the record, and the dossier leaves it silent.