The Rev. Joseph A. Komonchak was born in Nyack, N.Y. in 1939.

He was educated at Cathedral College, New York City, and at St. Joseph's Seminary, Yonkers, N.Y., from which he received an A.B. in 1960. From 1960 to 1964 he studied at the North American College and at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of New York in 1963 and earned a Licentiate in Sacred Theology at the Gregorian in 1964. From 1964 to 1967 he served as a curate at St. Bartholomew's Church in Yonkers, N.Y., while also teaching theology at the College of New Rochelle. In 1967 he joined the faculty at St. Joseph's Seminary, where he taught dogmatic theology until 1977. He received his PhD in theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1976. From 1977 to 2009 he taught theology in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He taught courses on the Church, on ministry, on the Church's social teaching, on modern and contemporary Catholic theology, on the thought of John Courtney Murray, and on the history and theology of Vatican II. In 1996 he was named the first occupant of the John C. and Gertrude P. Hubbard Chair in Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America. Fr. Komonchak retired from Catholic University in 2009 and was granted emeritus status a year later. He is the chief editor of The New Dictionary of Theology. A specialist in the history and theology of the Second Vatican Council, he is the editor of the English edition of the five-volume History of Vatican II. He is the author also of Foundations in Ecclesiology (Boston: Lonergan Workshop, 1995) and of Who Are the Church (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2008). He has published well over a hundred articles in journals such as Concilium, Cristianiesimo nella Storia, The Journal of Religion, The Review of Politics, Revue dHistoire Ecclsiastique, Theological Studies, and The Thomist