Gerardo Joseph Colacicco
Gerardo Joseph Colacicco was born on September 19, 1955, in Poughkeepsie, New York, the eldest of four children of a postal worker who later became custodian at St. Mary's Parish in Poughkeepsie, where Gerardo worked in the rectory through school and college. He graduated from Marist College in 1978 with a degree in history, entered Saint Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, and was ordained a priest on November 6, 1982, at St. Patrick's Cathedral by Cardinal Terence Cooke. Early ministry moved between parishes in Rhinebeck, Scarsdale and Hopewell Junction and, in 1989, a term as priest-secretary to Cardinal John O'Connor.
In 1990 he went to Rome, earning a licentiate in canon law from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas in 1992, and on his return served two terms as a tribunal judge alongside parish ministry. He was pastor of Sacred Heart in Newburgh from 1996 to 2002, of St. Columba in Hopewell Junction from 2002 to 2014, and of St. Joseph-Immaculate Conception in Millbrook from 2014 until his episcopal appointment, and was named a prelate of honor in 1999. His formation is that of canonist and parish priest in equal measure.
Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of New York on October 10, 2019, and he was consecrated on December 10, 2019, by Cardinal Timothy Dolan at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Since then he has served as episcopal vicar for the upper counties, the archbishop's eyes and ears in the Hudson Valley and beyond, confirming the young and visiting parishes and priests across a wide territory. On the old Mass he has left no record of his own, a fact his panel states plainly rather than inventing one.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Colacicco has no record of his own. Search as one will, there is no decree in his name, no dispensation he sought, no homily and no public word for or against the old rite. He is an auxiliary and an episcopal vicar, and the liturgical decisions of the Archdiocese of New York belong to its archbishop, not to him. To credit him with whatever provision New York has kept, or to blame him for its limits, would be to invent a record he does not have.
What can honestly be said of the archdiocese is thin, and this panel does not dress it up. No public implementation decree by Cardinal Dolan after Traditionis Custodes was located in this research, and the July 2021 tracker recorded New York as having no response at that time. The archdiocese had said before the motu proprio that the extraordinary form was already widely available; whether and how that availability survived the new discipline, site by site, is a debt this dossier carries openly rather than a fact it asserts.
That is the whole of the verdict, and it is an honest one. A faithful regional auxiliary of a great archdiocese whose own post-TC settlement is itself under-documented, with no liturgical heart yet shown of his own, for good or for ill.