Timothy J. O'Malley
Timothy James O'Malley was born on December 17, 1959, in Evergreen Park, Illinois, and came to the priesthood by a second road. He studied management at Purdue University, qualified as a certified public accountant through the University of Illinois, and earned a law degree from DePaul University, working as an accountant from 1982 to 1987 and as a lawyer from 1990 to 1992. After a period of discernment with the Society of Jesus, in 1992 he entered Mundelein Seminary, where he took a degree in sacred theology and a master of divinity.
He was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago on May 24, 1997, and spent most of his priesthood in Lake County and on the north side of Chicago. He was associate pastor of St. Agnes of Bohemia in Chicago, then pastor of St. James in Highwood, St. Joseph in Round Lake, and St. Genevieve in Chicago, before becoming pastor of Most Blessed Trinity in Waukegan in 2018. He helped lead a gun buyback with the Waukegan police on April 29, 2023, at which 166 guns were collected, work Cardinal Cupich singled out as priestly service to public safety.
Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of Chicago on December 20, 2024, with the titular see of Numida, and Cardinal Cupich consecrated him at Holy Name Cathedral on February 26, 2025. Effective March 1, 2025, he became episcopal vicar of Vicariate I. Before his appointment he had served on the Priests' Placement Board and as a dean in several vicariates, and his episcopal motto is Our daily bread, a prayer for provision from a man who had worked in accountancy and law before priesthood.
On the 1962 Missal, Bishop O'Malley has no governing act of his own on record. He was a parish priest when Traditionis custodes was issued in July 2021 and when Cardinal Cupich promulgated Chicago's implementing policy in December 2021, and he did not become a bishop until February 2025. No decree, permission, appointment, or public letter of his on the old Mass was found in diocesan releases, the archdiocesan newspaper, or targeted web searching.
What governs Chicago is therefore inherited, not his. Cupich's policy, effective January 25, 2022, removed the 1962 Missal from parish churches to designated locations, barred it on first Sundays and the great feasts, and required written permission from the archbishop for its use. O'Malley serves inside that regime as episcopal vicar of Vicariate I, but administering a predecessor's policy is not the same as authoring one, and this dossier does not credit him with Cupich's acts.
That distinction is the whole verdict. A search that found nothing is not the same as a record of opposition or of support, and neither may be invented to fill the gap. Until O'Malley himself authorizes, restricts, or sustains a celebration of the old rite by a governing act, his posture is honestly no_record, at high confidence precisely because the window in which he could have acted as a bishop is so short and so thoroughly documented.