Timothy Edward Freyer
Timothy Edward Freyer was born in Los Angeles on October 13, 1963, and grew up in Huntington Beach, the only child of Jerry and Patricia Freyer. After Huntington Beach High School he entered St. John's Seminary College in Camarillo, earned his bachelor's degree there, and studied theology for four years at St. John's Seminary. Ordained a priest of the Diocese of Orange on June 10, 1989, he served as associate pastor at St. Hedwig in Los Alamitos, Our Lady of Fatima in San Clemente, and St. Catherine of Siena in Laguna Beach.
In 2001 he became pastor of St. Mary's in Fullerton, and in 2003 pastor of St. Boniface in Anaheim, where he remained until 2012. That year Bishop Kevin Vann named him episcopal vicar for priests, responsible for the care and ongoing formation of the diocese's priests. He had been the bishop's first liaison to Jovenes para Cristo, the Young Adults for Christ movement, from 1998 to 2004, and he served as a founding board member of the Anaheim Family Justice Center and as chaplain to the Anaheim Police Department.
Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of Orange on November 23, 2016, and Bishop Vann consecrated him on January 17, 2017, at St. Columban Church in Garden Grove. He now serves jointly with Bishop Thanh Thai Nguyen as a vicar general. Fluent in Spanish and formed entirely in Orange County parishes, he is the diocese's steady second hand rather than a figure with a platform of his own.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Freyer has no record of his own on file: no decree in his name, no homily, no public word for or against the old rite has been recovered. He is an auxiliary bishop and a vicar general, and the liturgical decisions of the Diocese of Orange belong to its ordinary, Bishop Kevin Vann, who signed them. To credit or blame Freyer for them would be to invent a record he does not have.
What Vann did is on the record. On July 28, 2021, Vann authorized any priest already celebrating Mass according to the 1962 Roman Missal, in public or privately, to continue to enjoy that faculty. The diocesan board row records that Vann permitted all four sites in 2021, but that after the 2023 rescript the decades-old parish Mass at St. Mary's by the Sea in Huntington Beach was ended. That later change is board-row material only, not verified here from a diocesan source, and no current site count is asserted.
Freyer's place in all of this is therefore administrative, not authorial. As Vann's vicar general he helps run the diocese within which those decisions were taken, but the hand that signed them was Vann's. The honest verdict is the plain one: no record of his own, and no inference drawn from his office.