For decades, a short, wiry priest was the go-to guy in Utah’s Catholic diocese.
Like an Energizer Bunny, Monsignor J. Terrence Fitzgerald was a “consummate problem solver,” observers said, managing many ministries and services with finesse and aplomb, while gaining respect from inside and outside the church community.
Fitzgerald, who died Wednesday at age 89, took all the assignments doled out by any of the four Utah bishops he served as vicar general — and he did them with vigor, optimism and that wry little smile that preceded one of his witty zingers.
Study social work at Catholic University as preparation to supervise the church’s social-service wing? Off he went. Take over parochial schools in Carbon County, Judge Memorial High in east Salt Lake City or Mount Angel Seminary in Oregon? No problem. Persuade more young men to join the priesthood? Will do. Find property for a new church in Park City? Check. Talk Sam Skaggs into donating land for a new Catholic school campus in Draper and then oversee the multimillion-dollar project to completion? Done.
“Anything I needed fixing, he could do it — and quickly,” retired Bishop William Weigand, of Sacramento, California, the second of the four bishops, said in 2011 at the time of Fitzgerald’s retirement.
Fitzgerald “built things,” Juan Diego Catholic High School Principal Galey Colosimo wrote in a personal reflection on the priest’s life — “parishes and schools, friendships and vocations, places of learning, and places of belonging. But more than buildings, he built the Catholic heart of Utah — a quiet church in a desert place, made stronger because one man believed that faith should not apologize for existing and love should never be rationed.”
The first hundred years of the Diocese of Salt Lake City was driven by the state’s first Catholic bishop, Lawrence Scanlan, Colosimo said, “but the second 100 years will be marked by Fitzgerald.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Monsignor J. Terrence Fitzgerald directs a Mass at the Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Salt Lake City in 2004.
Allegations surface
The leisurely life of retirement wasn’t in Fitzgerald’s nature. So after 2011, he continued to show up most days at the diocesan office in downtown Salt Lake City until last year, when a former seminarian in the diocese, William Hambleton, alleged that Fitzgerald had mismanaged sex abuse accusations against priests.
Years earlier, Fitzgerald had told The Salt Lake Tribune that his diocese had in place standards of reporting long before the priestly abuse crisis had exploded across the country.
“We never had leadership that covered up abuse,” Fitzgerald said in 2011, “or transferred priests with problems.”
Hambleton, who was once the principal of the diocese’s Madeleine Choir School, alleges that Fitzgerald was “dismissive of abuse claims.”
His assertions prompted an ongoing internal investigation. And last July, Bishop Oscar Solis, leader of Utah’s 300,000 Catholics, deemed as “credible” allegations that a Colombian priest had sexually abused a teenage Hambleton in the early 1990s in northern Utah.
A Catholic upbringing
(J. Terrence Fitzgerald) Monsignor J. Terrence Fitzgerald, center, with his parents Margaret and Joseph Fitzgerald.
Both pairs of Fitzgerald’s grandparents were Irish immigrants who came to the American West to work in the mines, including one in Park City.
Young Terry, as he was called, was reared an only child in Sugar House, but his mother, Margaret O’Connor Fitzgerald, had 12 brothers and sisters, putting her son at the center of a large and devoted Irish Catholic clan.
Fitzgerald got his education at the hands of nuns and priests at Judge Memorial Grammar School and High School, moving from year to year with the same 52 students. It was a welcoming Catholic cocoon, incubating many of Utah’s future priests and lay leaders.
The eager student, who revered the men who taught and mentored him, never considered any other profession.
The next step was to leave the Beehive State for Mount Angel Seminary in St. Benedict, Oregon, for a college degree and rigorous training as a “churchman.” There, he studied literature and philosophy, Latin and liturgy, as well as how to preach, baptize, celebrate the Eucharist, perform marriages, hear confessions, and administer last rites.
In 1962, Fitzgerald was ordained a priest by Bishop Joseph Lennox Federal at Salt Lake City’s Cathedral of the Madeleine, the same sacred space where he was baptized.
After three decades serving various parishes, Fitzgerald was asked to head Utah’s Catholic Community Services, where his diverse experiences and deep compassion paid off. He gave freely and often, his colleagues said, to those in need — the poor, prisoners, immigrants.
Former Utah Bishop John Wester said of his deputy: “His door is open to princes and paupers and everybody in between.”
That included members of other faiths, particularly leaders of Utah’s predominant religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
President Thomas S. Monson, who died in 2018, was a longtime friend of Fitzgerald. At the latter’s retirement, Monson praised the priest’s “many years of dedicated, Christlike service he has provided” and noted the monsignor’s “tireless efforts to serve.”
‘The wellness of the diocese’
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Monsignor J. Terrence Fitzgerald, during an interview in 2011.
To the Rev. Samuel (Sam) Dinsdale, Fitzgerald was an example of “compassionate leadership, with a strong sense of justice and fairness, who had a special awareness of those on the fringes, those who were vulnerable or in need. His primary concern was the wellness of the diocese.”
He was “so selfless, known for his fairness in difficult situations,” Dinsdale, pastor at St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Holladay, said Thursday. “Bishops and church leadership would put him in positions to help rectify difficult situations, and he used his creativity and energy to fix them, earning everyone’s respect.”
The diocese, Dinsdale said, “will feel his absence.”
And not just the men.
“He was a gift to the diocese and the church,” Karla McKinnie wrote on social media. “We are grateful for his support of the Sisters of the Holy Cross throughout his life.
Monsignor Martin Diaz, formerly at the Cathedral of the Madeleine but now retired and serving as a pastor at Christ the King Catholic Church in Cedar City, echoed that sentiment.
In his love for the diocese, Fitzgerald “made sure that every place in Utah had a Catholic church and that Catholics across the state were well served,” Diaz said. He had an extraordinary ability “to build and to foster development of the various parishes and missions.”
The energetic vicar general “gave of himself day in and day out,” Diaz said. “In so many ways, the diocese is what it is because of his work.”
And so, the priest said, is the cathedral.
At the end of the day, Fitzgerald was “a marvelous leader, a priest’s priest,” Diaz said. “Many priests would go to him for confession and counseling, he guided them, especially those from other countries. He was a friend to so many.”
Diaz believes his mentor is “looking down from heaven — and smiling.”
A funeral Mass for Fitzgerald will be Tuesday, Jan. 20, at 11 a.m. at the Cathedral of the Madeleine. Burial will follow at Mount Calvary Cemetery.