Robert J. Coyle
Robert J. Coyle was born on September 23, 1964, in Brooklyn, New York, to Robert and Kathryn Coyle, and grew up on Long Island. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Fordham University in 1986, and studied at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, earning a Master of Divinity in 1991 and a Master of Arts in theology in 1998. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Rockville Centre on May 25, 1991, by Bishop John R. McGann at St. Agnes Cathedral.
Coyle was commissioned an ensign in the United States Navy on June 3, 1988, and served 24 and a half years on active and reserve duty before retiring from the Naval Reserve on January 1, 2013. As a Navy Reserve chaplain he was associate pastor at St. Dominic in Oyster Bay and St. Patrick in Glen Cove, then served on active duty from 1999 to 2009, with the 3rd Marine Division on Okinawa, in the Middle East in Operations Southern Watch and Iraqi Freedom, and aboard two aircraft carriers. He was promoted to commander in 2005 and named a monsignor in 2008.
Pope Benedict XVI named him an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese for the Military Services on February 11, 2013, and he was ordained a bishop on April 25, 2013, serving as episcopal vicar for the eastern United States. Pope Francis transferred him to Rockville Centre as an auxiliary bishop on February 20, 2018, and he began his ministry on Long Island on April 2, 2018, assisting Bishop John Barres.
No governing act of Coyle's own on the 1962 Missal was found. Searching on October 24, 2026, across diocesan news, USCCB material, and reputable reporting returned no authorization, decree, dispensation, or appointment sustaining the older Mass signed by him, in either his Military Services auxiliary tenure or his Rockville Centre tenure, and no statement of his on the older liturgy at all. Under the project rules that absence is no_record, not a judgment about his views.
The older Mass provision on Long Island belongs to the diocesan ordinary, Bishop John Barres, not to an auxiliary. A pre-TC diocesan plan in 2019 reorganized the Tridentine Mass schedule across the vicariates while keeping the same number of Masses in each, but that plan was the diocese's under Barres, it predates Traditionis custodes, and no part of it is signed by or attributed to Coyle, so it is not carried as his act.
No site count is asserted for Coyle, because an auxiliary holds no see whose sites could be counted as his, and no society, Roman dispensation, or 2026 statement on the Society of St. Pius X of his own was found. Only his Rockville Centre auxiliary tenure is carried here, as tasked; his Military Services auxiliary tenure is summarized in the biography but carries no separate TC block, since the task scopes each man to his home-diocese auxiliary tenure.