History of the intervals between bishops in Utah

Friday, Nov. 25, 2016

Like most of you, I suppose, I’ve been fluctuating widely between patience and impatience as we wait for a new bishop. 

On the one hand I can be patient because, as a friend observes, Monsignor Colin F. Bircumshaw and Monsignor J. Terrence Fitzgerald, our last two diocesan administrators during the interim periods between bishops (sede vacante), have done such a good job that Rome apparently sees no urgency in making a new appointment.  

On the other hand, I can get impatient because those administrators are really pretty hobbled in what they can do: We have to “borrow” a bishop for ordinations or the Chrism Mass, for example, and they aren’t about to mount any new initiatives or create new programs that have to have a bishop’s approval. So, although we’re functioning OK as a diocese, we’re also kind of marking time.

During one of my impatient moods the other day, I decided to look back through our history to see just how this interim period compares with others: Are we waiting longer this time than we have in the past, or does it just seem that way?  

What I found was that, yes, we have reached a record.  I also found that in the early decades of the diocese, new appointments were made, on the average, much more promptly than they have been recently.

The record, in terms of brevity, was the interim between Bishop Duane G. Hunt’s death on March 31, 1960 and installation of his replacement, Bishop Joseph L. Federal. In fact, the installation was instantaneous because Bishop Federal had been installed as coadjutor with right of succession on May 8, 1958.  (A bit of trivia you can bore your dinner guests with sometime!)  

An interesting related story is that Bishop Hunt, because his deteriorating eyesight indicated that he was going to need help, had previously had an auxiliary bishop in the person of the Most Rev. Leo J. Steck in 1948. Unfortunately, Bishop Steck preceded Bishop Hunt in death (1950) and never became the ordinary.

At the other end of the spectrum, the second longest interim period we’ve had was between Bishop George H. Niederauer (installed as Archbishop of San Francisco on Feb. 15, 2006) and Bishop John C. Wester (installed in Salt Lake City on March 24, 2007). Archbishop Wester was installed in Santa Fe on June 4, 2015, so we broke the record in July.

During the early decades of the diocese, a typical interim period would be well under a year: Bishop Joseph S. Glass, for example, died on Jan. 26, 1926, and Bishop John J. Mitty was installed on Sept. 8. After Bishop Mitty was installed in San Francisco on Feb. 4, 1932, Bishop James E. Kearney was installed here on Oct. 28.  

Bishop Glass’s replacement on Aug. 24, 1915 of Bishop Lawrence Scanlan, who had died on May 10, was extraordinarily quick, but Bishop Glass had already been under consideration as an auxiliary for Bishop Scanlan, whose last years were wracked with pain and increasing debility.

I’ve been amused during the present interim that my Catholic friends, knowing that I work at the Pastoral Center, figure I must have some kind of insider track on who the next bishop will be and when we will get him. Message to them: Hey, I’ll read about it in the paper the same day you do!