Keith J. Chylinski
Keith James Chylinski was born on July 23, 1971, in Schenectady, New York, and grew up in Hamden, Connecticut, before his family moved to Berwyn, Pennsylvania, when he was fourteen. He attended Conestoga High School and studied music at Temple University, where a childhood piano talent, rekindled by a Billy Joel concert his mother took him to, became parish music ministry. In that musical life, singing the Church's choral tradition and first encountering Latin in sacred music, he discovered his vocation to the priesthood.
He entered St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood and earned a Master of Divinity degree in 2006 and a Master of Arts degree in 2007, and Cardinal Justin Rigali ordained him a priest on May 19, 2007. He served as parochial vicar at St. Anselm in Philadelphia and Mary Mother of the Redeemer in North Wales, then joined the seminary faculty in 2014, directing its counseling services, serving on the archbishop's racial healing commission from 2021, and as national chaplain of the Catholic Psychotherapy Association from 2018 to 2022. Named rector of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in 2022, he oversaw its historic move to a new campus in Lower Gwynedd in 2024.
Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of Philadelphia on December 8, 2023, and Archbishop Nelson Perez consecrated him on March 7, 2024, at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, with the titular see of Gunela. He continued as rector until a successor took office on July 1, 2025, when he became episcopal vicar for Catholic education, overseeing the archdiocesan Office for Catholic Education, with pastoral care of Episcopal Region II in Montgomery County. He remains an auxiliary bishop in active service.
On the older liturgy, Bishop Chylinski has no governing record of his own, and this dossier does not invent one. He was appointed in December 2023 and consecrated in March 2024, nearly three years after Traditionis custodes, and real searching across archdiocesan news, the appointment coverage, and general reporting turned up no decree, authorization, dispensation request, or appointment of his sustaining the 1962 Missal, and no public word from him for or against it. He is an auxiliary bishop, and in Philadelphia the governance of the older liturgy belongs to the ordinary, Archbishop Perez, not to his auxiliaries.
What he inherited is therefore Perez's settlement, not a policy of his making. On July 19, 2021, Archbishop Perez announced that places celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass and other sacraments could continue to do so, granting all priests faculty to celebrate with the pre-1970 books until further guidance, with norms to follow. Chylinski arrived long after that statement, as a seminary rector and then as education vicar, and no act of his has altered, extended, or restricted that settlement. Attendance at any liturgy, praise for tradition in general, and the ordinary's acts are all excluded by rule from moving his posture.
The honest verdict is accordingly no_record, at medium confidence: a searched absence, not an assumed one. It says nothing about his private liturgical sympathies, which no source states, and nothing about the archdiocese as a whole, whose record belongs to Perez. If a Chylinski act on the 1962 Missal emerges, it should be added as a dated action and the posture revisited; until then, silence is the record, and the dossier leaves it silent.