Joseph L. Coffey
Joseph Lawrence Coffey was born on May 31, 1960, in Rochester, Minnesota, the fifth of nine children, and was raised in Philadelphia. He graduated from La Salle University in 1982 with a double major in English and French, including a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, and then spent several years far from any seminary path: teaching grade school, working as a ski instructor in Switzerland, and selling automobiles to American servicemen in Germany and Belgium. He then returned home and entered the seminary.
He entered St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia, earning a Master of Divinity in 1995, and was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia on May 18, 1996. After a first parish assignment at St. Katherine of Siena in Philadelphia, he moved in September 2001 to full-time active duty as a Navy chaplain, a course he had begun in the Chaplain Candidate Program while still a seminarian in 1992. His assignments took him to Okinawa, aboard the aircraft carriers George Washington and Ronald Reagan, to the Coast Guard Training Center at Cape May, to Camp Pendleton and Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan, and to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego.
Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, on January 22, 2019, and Archbishop Timothy Broglio ordained him a bishop on March 25, 2019, at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. As Episcopal Vicar for Veterans Affairs he now travels to the Veterans Affairs medical centers across the country, bringing pastoral care to veterans, their families, and their priest-chaplains. His episcopal motto is Christus vivificans, Christ is alive.
No governing act of Bishop Coffey's own on the 1962 Missal was found. Targeted searches of his name with Traditionis Custodes, Latin Mass, the 1962 Missal, and the extraordinary form returned no decree, authorization, dispensation request, or appointment sustaining the older Mass, and no statement of his on the subject. His public ministry since 2019 has been documented chiefly through his veterans-affairs visitation, not through any liturgical regulation.
The archdiocesan permission most often cited for the Military Services belongs to the ordinary, not to this auxiliary. The National Catholic Register's July 2021 survey lists the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA among the jurisdictions whose bishops issued statements granting temporary permission for priests already celebrating according to the 1962 Missal to continue. The article does not name Coffey as the author of that statement, and under the project rules a predecessor's or an ordinary's act is never the auxiliary's posture.
No site count is asserted. The archdiocese is non-territorial, serving Catholics in the armed forces, in Veterans Affairs medical centers, and in government service abroad, so a territorial parish count does not apply, and no list of 1962-Missal sites under Coffey was found. No traditional society, no Roman dispensation, and no 2026 statement on the Society of St. Pius X was evidenced for him.