Edmund James Whalen
Edmund James Whalen was born on July 6, 1958, in Staten Island, New York, and was raised in Blessed Sacrament Parish there. He attended Monsignor Farrell High School and Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception in Douglaston, graduating with a degree in history, before going to the Pontifical North American College in Rome. He earned his Bachelor of Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in 1983, was ordained a deacon in St. Peter's Basilica in April 1983, and served as a deacon on mission in the Diocese of Kakamega in Kenya.
He was ordained a priest on June 23, 1984, in St. Patrick's Cathedral by Archbishop John O'Connor, and returned to Rome for a licentiate in moral theology at the Academia Alfonsiana in 1985 and a doctorate there in 1995. He served as secretary to Cardinal O'Connor from 1990, taught moral theology for twelve years at St. Joseph's Seminary in Dunwoodie, where he was vice rector in 1997-1998, and was rector of St. John Neumann Residence in Riverdale from 1998 to 2001. He was pastor of St. Benedict's in the Bronx from 2001 and of St. Joseph-St. Thomas on Staten Island from 2007, then principal of Monsignor Farrell High School from 2010 to 2018.
Cardinal Dolan named him Vicar for Clergy in January 2019, and Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of New York on October 10, 2019; he was consecrated on December 10, 2019, holding the titular see of Cemerianus. On April 7, 2026, Archbishop Hicks named him Vicar General for the Archdiocese of New York, the post he holds alongside his auxiliary episcopate.
No governing act of Whalen's own on the 1962 Missal was found, in either the pre-TC months of his episcopate or the TC era that followed. Targeted searching on October 24, 2026, across archdiocesan news, USCCB material, and reputable reporting returned no authorization, decree, dispensation, or appointment sustaining the older Mass signed by him, and no statement of his on the older liturgy at all. Under the project rules that absence is no_record, not a judgment about his views.
His senior administrative posts do not change that result. As Vicar for Clergy from 2019 and Vicar General from April 2026 he works at the center of archdiocesan governance, but no document was found in which he, rather than the archbishop, governed 1962-Missal provision, and proximity to the ordinary's decisions is not credited as his own act. The archdiocese's continuing traditional Latin Mass at Holy Innocents in Manhattan is the ordinary's provision, recorded here only as context.
No site count is asserted for Whalen, because an auxiliary holds no see whose sites could be counted as his, and no society, Roman dispensation, or 2026 statement on the Society of St. Pius X of his own was found. A future archdiocesan document naming him as the decision-maker on a 1962 permission would require this dossier to be reopened from that document.