William Muhm
William James Muhm was born on June 27, 1957, in Billings, Montana, and was raised in Denver, Colorado. He earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from Colorado State University in 1980 and was commissioned an ensign in the Navy Supply Corps in July 1981, serving aboard the amphibious assault ship Belleau Wood in the Western Pacific and at the Naval Air Engineering Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Released from active duty, he worked as an accountant while remaining in the Naval Reserve.
In 1989 he entered the minor seminary for the Archdiocese of New York under the Co-Sponsored Seminarian Program, a vocations partnership between the military archdiocese and participating dioceses, and graduated from St. Joseph's Seminary at Dunwoodie. Ordained a priest by Cardinal John O'Connor on May 13, 1995, he served in parishes at Ossining and Staten Island, then returned to active duty as a Navy chaplain in 1998. As a Navy chaplain from 1998 he served at Atsugi, aboard the Wasp after September 11, at Annapolis, in Anbar Province, Iraq, and at Camp Lejeune, retiring as a captain on May 1, 2018.
After a sabbatical including a thirty-day retreat and 787 kilometers of the Camino, he served briefly as administrator of Most Precious Blood Parish in Walden, New York, from December 2018. Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, on January 22, 2019, and Archbishop Timothy Broglio ordained him a bishop on March 25, 2019, at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. He serves as Episcopal Vicar for United States forces in Europe and Asia. His episcopal motto is He is risen.
No governing act of Bishop Muhm's own on the 1962 Missal was found. Targeted searches of his name with Traditionis Custodes, Latin Mass, the 1962 Missal, and the extraordinary form returned no decree, authorization, dispensation request, or appointment sustaining the older Mass, and no statement of his on the subject. His documented episcopal work is pastoral visitation across Europe and Asia, not liturgical regulation.
The nearest item in the record is a United States Army photograph caption from Defender 23 in Romania, dated May 28, 2023, describing Bishop Muhm reciting a prayer during a Catholic Mass for soldiers and calling a traditional Catholic Mass rare in field environments. The caption does not name the 1962 Missal, does not say Muhm celebrated according to it, and does not record any authorization by him. Under the project rules, presence at or participation in a Mass, and the bare label traditional, never move posture, so the item is recorded in beyond as unestablished-form and is not counted as an action.
The archdiocese-level temporary permission reported in July 2021 likewise belongs to the ordinary, not to this auxiliary, and is not inherited as his act. No site count is asserted: the archdiocese is non-territorial, and no list of 1962-Missal sites under Muhm was found. No traditional society, no Roman dispensation, and no 2026 statement on the Society of St. Pius X was evidenced for him.