Joel Matthias Konzen
Joel Matthias Konzen was born on November 6, 1950, in Toledo, Ohio, and grew up in Oak Harbor, Ohio. He graduated from St. Meinrad College in Indiana in 1972 with a degree in English, then studied at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, where he entered the novitiate of the Society of Mary, the Marists. He took first vows in 1975 and perpetual vows in 1978, was ordained a deacon in 1978, and was ordained a priest in New Orleans on May 19, 1979, later adding master's degrees from The Catholic University of America.
Konzen spent most of his priesthood running schools. He joined Marist School in Atlanta in 1980 and stayed nine years as teacher, admissions director, principal, and president, then served as vicar provincial of the Marists' former Washington Province and as principal and president of St. Michael's Academy in Austin, Texas. He returned to Marist School in 1999 as principal, helped found Notre Dame Academy in Duluth and Cristo Rey Atlanta Jesuit High School, and in 2015 received the National Catholic Educational Association's Educational Excellence Award.
Pope Francis appointed Konzen an auxiliary bishop of Atlanta on February 5, 2018, and Archbishop Wilton Gregory ordained him on April 3, 2018, at the Cathedral of Christ the King, with the motto Miserere Gaudens, be merciful and with a cheerful heart. When Gregory left for Washington, the college of consultors elected Konzen diocesan administrator on May 24, 2019, and he governed the archdiocese until Archbishop Gregory Hartmayer's installation on May 6, 2020. He turned 75 in November 2025, submitted the required resignation, and, no acceptance having been located, is treated here as still serving.
Bishop Konzen inherited Atlanta's settled 1962 arrangement rather than making one. Archbishop Hartmayer's September 8, 2021 memo on Traditionis custodes, reported by the Georgia Bulletin, kept the 1962 Missal at St. Francis de Sales in Mableton, served by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, and at one weekly Mass at St. Monica in Duluth, and barred any other priest from publicly celebrating Mass or offering a sacrament in that way. That memo is the ordinary's act, and it predates nothing in Konzen's auxiliary service that would let it be credited to him: he was already an auxiliary, not the ordinary, when it was issued.
A search of the archdiocesan paper, the archdiocese's own bishop pages, and the usual appointment and TC-era reporting turned up no decree, letter, permission, dispensation request, or appointment by Konzen himself concerning the 1962 Missal between 2021 and 2026. His one spell governing the archdiocese, as diocesan administrator from May 2019 to May 2020, ended more than a year before Traditionis custodes, so it cannot supply a TC-era act either. His public record in the window is that of an educator-bishop and administrator, not a liturgical governor.
The verdict is therefore no_record at high confidence: absence searched for, not assumed, and stated as a limit rather than a claim about his private views. No site count is asserted for his tenure; the two diocesan locations named in Hartmayer's memo are accounted for in the inherited paragraph above, and the diocesan board row for Atlanta, which reflects the ordinary's preserved arrangement, is not evidence about this auxiliary. If a Konzen-signed permission or letter surfaces, it would be the first governing act to assess, and the dossier should be reopened then.