John P. Dolan
John Patrick Dolan was born June 8, 1962, in San Diego, California, the seventh of nine children of Gerald and Catherine Dolan. He attended the School of the Madeleine and the University of San Diego High School, then entered St. Francis Seminary, earning a philosophy degree in 1985, and completed his Master of Divinity and Master of Theology at St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park in 1989. Bishop Leo T. Maher ordained him a priest of the Diocese of San Diego on July 1, 1989.
Dolan spent his entire priestly career in the Diocese of San Diego. He served as associate pastor at St. Michael's (San Diego) and Santa Sophia (Spring Valley), as diocesan director of vocations, and as pastor of St. Mary Star of the Sea (Oceanside), St. Rose of Lima (Chula Vista), and St. Michael's (Poway), before becoming episcopal vicar for clergy and, in 2017, moderator of the curia. On April 19, 2017, Pope Francis appointed him auxiliary bishop of San Diego; he was consecrated June 8, 2017, by Bishop (later Cardinal) Robert McElroy, whose close collaborator he became.
On June 10, 2022, Pope Francis appointed Dolan the fifth Bishop of Phoenix, succeeding the long-serving and notably conservative Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted; he was installed August 2, 2022, taking as his motto 'Abide in my love.' Secular and Catholic press alike framed the move as an ideological shift — replacing one of the American episcopate's leading conservatives with a bishop known for migrant advocacy, synodality, and pastoral outreach to LGBTQ Catholics.
The defining thread of Dolan's life and ministry is loss to suicide. He lost his brother Tom (when Dolan was in the eighth grade), his sister Therese and brother-in-law Joe (during his seminary years), and his sister Mary (in 2022) — four family members in all. From that grief he made mental-health ministry his signature apostolate, founding the Diocese of Phoenix's Office of Mental Health Ministry in 2022, one of the first of its kind in the United States, and co-authoring two books to help Catholics respond to suicide. It is a genuinely admirable work — and it, rather than the liturgy, is where his heart plainly lies.
On the Traditional Latin Mass specifically, Bishop Dolan's record to date is one of non-interference and preservation rather than hostility. Phoenix has one of the strongest traditional footprints in the American Southwest: Mater Misericordiae, a personal parish staffed by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter since 2005, offering the old Mass and sacraments exclusively and daily across multiple worship sites — the historic church on West Monroe Street, the larger St. Edward the Confessor, and St. Cecilia in Clarkdale. All of it was built under Bishop Olmsted, who after Traditionis Custodes (2021) dispensed several parishes and expressly allowed the antecedent rite to continue at the personal parish.
Since taking office in August 2022, Dolan has left that inheritance intact. There is no public decree, suppression, or restriction from him touching the FSSP parish or the diocese's traditional communities; Mater Misericordiae continues to thrive, form vocations for the Fraternity, and operate its churches. The one change sometimes cited — Sunday Mass ceasing at the small West Monroe church in March 2023 — was a capacity-driven relocation of the crowds to the larger St. Edward within the same personal parish, not a curtailment. Because Mater Misericordiae is a canonically erected personal parish served by a society that holds its own Roman permissions for the older books, it stands on firmer ground than the parish-church Masses targeted by the 2023 rescript, and Dolan has not moved against it.
Yet he is in no sense a patron of the movement. Dolan is a Francis-aligned, McElroy-formed bishop whose energies and public identity run toward mental-health ministry, synodality, and LGBTQ outreach — the last of which has produced statements traditional Catholics find gravely deficient. There is no record of him celebrating a pontifical old Mass, publicly commending the traditional community, or affirmatively defending the ancient rite; his posture is toleration of what he found, not advocacy for it. The honest verdict is genuinely mixed: he has preserved the TLM in deed while embodying much of the ecclesial program traditional Catholics resist. The thing to watch is whether the standing permission is affirmatively renewed under his own hand, and whether the FSSP apostolate remains untouched as Roman policy tightens.