Vermont Catholic Bishop Christopher Coyne will leave his role as leader of the state’s largest religious denomination this fall to become a coadjutor archbishop in Connecticut.
Coyne, 65, will help oversee a half-million faithful in the counties of Hartford, Litchfield and New Haven starting in October, all while serving as Vermont’s “apostolic administrator” until Pope Francis names his replacement, the Vatican said in a statement Monday.
Upon his installation as bishop in 2015, the Boston native — who once worked as a dishwasher, sporting goods salesman, lifeguard, musician and bartender — was described in diocesan publicity as “the Catholic Church’s first blogging priest” and “an internationally cited leader in the Faith’s ‘digital revolution.’”
But even with such tech savvy, Coyne has seen religious participation in New England and the nation plummet to historic lows, with the number of Vermont Catholics down by 32,000 in the past quarter-century to 110,000.
When Louis deGoesbriand became the first Vermont bishop upon the state diocese’s founding in 1853, he led a clergy of five members. That figure rose over time to 274 in 1975, only to drop to 55 active priests today, according to church statistics.
Coyne has managed the declines by asking parishes to consolidate or close (from 130 in 2001 to 63 today), adjust Mass schedules, share pastors, or welcome priests from other countries.
Coyne became Vermont bishop after serving as spokesman for the Archdiocese of Boston in the aftermath of the 2002 priest sexual abuse scandal dramatized in the Best Picture Oscar-winner “Spotlight.”
“Coyne’s has been a more forthcoming and compassionate voice,” The Boston Globe — which won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the situation — wrote at the time he replaced a less-transparent lay official, “and, perhaps because he is a priest, his words seem to many to carry greater weight.”
Coyne had hoped to shed that past when he moved to the Green Mountain State. Instead, the Vermont church has faced a continuing string of lawsuits charging past clergy misconduct, and a 2018 BuzzFeed report about the “unrelenting physical and psychological abuse of captive children” at Burlington’s long-shuttered St. Joseph’s Orphanage.
Coyne shocked those accustomed to church stonewalling by pledging to work with authorities, then went on to release accusers from past nondisclosure agreements, form a lay committee to review clergy misconduct files, and publicly release the names of at least 40 Vermont priests — about 10% of all the state’s Catholic clergy since 1950 — who faced abuse accusations.
“While most of these allegations took place at least a generation ago, the numbers are still staggering,” Coyne said at the time. “If only a list of priests with credible allegations of sexual abuse of a minor had been released 15 years ago, perhaps we would be farther along our collective path of healing.”
During his tenure as bishop, Coyne served as communications chairman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and as the pope’s media aide when the latter met with national and world leaders in Washington, New York and Philadelphia in 2015.
During that trip, Coyne had thought he would serve behind the scenes. Then CNN asked if he’d appear live when then-President Barack Obama welcomed the pope to the White House.
“I had planned to just go and be in the background,” Coyne told his social media followers at the time, “but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.”
Correction: This story was updated after the Vermont Catholic Diocese corrected figures on its website on current and past clergy numbers.
