Neal Buckon
Neal James Buckon was born on September 3, 1953, in Columbus, Ohio, the second of John and Rita Buckon's seven children, raised in Cleveland, where he attended Gesu Elementary and Cathedral Latin High School. At John Carroll University he earned a biology degree through ROTC, graduating as a Distinguished Military Graduate in 1975. He then served seven years on active duty in the Infantry and Transportation Corps, leading platoons in Germany, commanding a company at Fort Stewart, and serving with the Allied Command Europe Mobile Force.
After resigning his commission, Buckon traveled the world, visiting more than one hundred countries, before the call first sensed as a college senior drew him toward the priesthood. He entered seminary in 1989, co-sponsored by Cleveland and the Military Services, serving as a Reserve chaplain candidate, and earned a Master of Divinity and a Master of Arts in Church History at St. Mary's Seminary, Cleveland. Ordained for Cleveland in May 1995 and assigned to St. Margaret Mary, South Euclid, he entered the Army Chaplain Corps in 1996 and served as a chaplain in Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Iraq, and Korea.
Buckon retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel on December 31, 2010, and enjoyed, by his own account, two days of retirement. On January 3, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI appointed him a Military Services auxiliary bishop, and Archbishop Timothy Broglio ordained him on February 22, 2011, at the National Shrine. He has served ever since as Episcopal Vicar for the western region, visiting installation communities and advising their chaplains. His decorations include the Legion of Merit and the Bronze Star; his motto is Opere et veritate: In deed and in truth.
Bishop Buckon's Traditionis custodes record is, on the evidence found, a blank in the sense the batch rules intend, across a tenure that began a decade before the motu proprio and continues through it. Searches of his name against Traditionis custodes, the Latin Mass, the 1962 Missal, and the extraordinary form returned his appointment, his chaplaincy career, his western-region remit, and his awards, but no decree, authorization, dispensation request, appointment sustaining a 1962 Mass, or statement of his on the old rite. His ministry is visible in other registers, confirmations and pastoral visits on installations, but visibility elsewhere is not a governing act on the Missal, and this dossier does not treat it as one.
What exists for his archdiocese belongs to the ordinary, not to him. In July 2021, as dioceses responded to Traditionis custodes, the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, was reported among the jurisdictions where nothing would change in the near future and where priests already celebrating according to the 1962 Missal could continue while the document was reviewed. That continuation was Archbishop Timothy Broglio's response as ordinary, and the contemporary trackers attribute nothing to Buckon. The distinction matters more than usual here, because Buckon's archdiocese is not a territorial diocese at all: it has no parishes of its own, its faithful are served by chaplains on military installations worldwide, and no enumerated list of its 1962 sites was located. Site counts are therefore null before and null now, with the prose accounting above, rather than a guessed integer.
Under the batch rules, mere continuation of an inherited regime never moves posture, and Buckon's long pre-TC tenure does not change that analysis either: pre-TC acts are dated context in actions, never the posture, and no pre-TC 1962 act of his was found in any case. His posture is accordingly no_record, at medium confidence, with two stated debts: the archdiocese's current 1962 provision, which no public source in this pass enumerates by installation, and the unexamined possibility that installation-level permissions signed by Buckon as regional vicar exist without public reporting. Either would belong in a later pass; neither is invented here.