Joseph A. Espaillat
Joseph Armando Espaillat II was born on December 27, 1976, in Manhattan, New York, the son of Jose and Mercedes Baez, immigrants from the Dominican Republic. He attended Cathedral Preparatory School in Manhattan and earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Fordham University in 1998. He then studied at St. Joseph's Seminary in Dunwoodie, earning a Master of Divinity and a Master of Arts in theology specializing in church history, and he was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of New York on May 17, 2003, by Cardinal Edward Egan.
As a priest he served as parochial vicar at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs in Manhattan, then as administrator and pastor of St. Peter's parish in Yonkers, and from 2012 as director of youth ministry for the archdiocese. In 2015 he became pastor of St. Anthony of Padua parish in the Bronx, where he also directs the Hispanic Catholic Charismatic Renewal of the archdiocese and its Charismatic Center. Known to many as Father J., he launched the podcast and video series Sainthood in the City in 2021 and has been a frequent speaker at youth conferences.
Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of New York on January 25, 2022, and he was consecrated on March 1, 2022, at 45 becoming the youngest bishop in the United States at the time and the archdiocese's first Dominican bishop. He holds the titular see of Tagarbala and remains an auxiliary bishop of New York, continuing as pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in the Bronx alongside his episcopal ministry to the archdiocese's Hispanic and young adult communities.
No governing act of Espaillat's own on the 1962 Missal was found. He was appointed auxiliary bishop on January 25, 2022, after Traditionis custodes, so his whole episcopate falls inside the TC era, yet no authorization, decree, dispensation, or appointment sustaining the older Mass signed by him appears in archdiocesan news, USCCB material, or reputable reporting searched on October 24, 2026. Under the project rules, that absence is recorded as no_record, not as opposition or support.
The older Mass does continue in his archdiocese: Holy Innocents Church in Manhattan offers the traditional Latin Mass daily, including twice on Sundays, as reported in July 2025. That provision belongs to the archdiocese under its ordinary, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, and later his successor, not to an auxiliary bishop, so it is recorded here only as diocesan context and never credited to Espaillat as his own act.
No site count is asserted for Espaillat himself, because an auxiliary holds no see whose sites could be counted as his. No society is attached to his name, no Roman dispensation sought by him was found, and no statement of his own on the Society of St. Pius X in 2026 was found. If a future diocesan document names him as the bishop granting or refusing a 1962 permission, this dossier's posture must be revisited from that document.