Timothy Doherty
Timothy Lawrence Doherty was born on September 29, 1950, in Rockford, Illinois He entered St. Mary Minor Seminary in Crystal Lake, Illinois, then studied at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa, graduating in 1972, and went to Rome, where he studied at the Pontifical North American College and the Pontifical Gregorian University, earning a Bachelor of Sacred Theology in 1975. He later earned a Lateran licentiate in 1982 and a doctorate in Christian ethics from Loyola University Chicago in 1995, making him a professional ethicist before he was a bishop.
Doherty was ordained a priest of Rockford on June 26, 1976, and served at St. Peter Cathedral in Rockford, in Catholic schools in Rockford and Woodstock, and as pastor in Byron (1999-2007) and Dundee. From the mid-1990s he was Rockford's health-care ethicist, later serving as the bishops' conference liaison to the Catholic Health Association's board.
Pope Benedict XVI appointed Doherty the sixth Bishop of Lafayette in Indiana on May 12, 2010, and he was consecrated and installed on July 15, 2010, succeeding William Higi. His motto is The word of God is not chained. In a diocese of sixty-one parishes across central Indiana, he has governed through consolidation and planning, and he has faced public criticism for administrative decisions. His February 2022 letter on the older liturgy matches that governance: permission-gated and oriented toward the reformed liturgy.
- 2021-03-25PRE-TC CONTEXT: A Traditional Latin Mass (Missa Cantata, sung by the St. Dunstan Schola Cantorum, celebrant Fr. Joshua Bennett) is advertised for the Solemnity of the Annunciation, March 25, 2021, 6:30 p.m., at St. Augustine Catholic Church, Rensselaer. An occasional, advertised celebration, not evidence of a stable weekly site. ↗
- 2022-02-22Doherty's Letter on the Mass states that the diocese has 'no personal parishes and no historically ongoing stable groupings of Catholics identified as having Sunday Mass in Latin (Roman Missal, 1962)', that a few diocesan priests would celebrate the pre-conciliar Mass from time to time at different parish churches, that 'there will be no new groups formed in this diocese that use the 1962 Missal', that any priest must request in writing permission to celebrate with the 1962 Missal whether publicly or privately, and that no permission will be given to use the pre-reform Pontificale Romanum. ↗
<p>Bishop Doherty's February 22, 2022 Letter on the Mass is the governing document for Lafayette in Indiana, and it must be read in full rather than through the advocacy summaries that circulate about it. Doherty states, in his own words, that the diocese has no personal parishes and no historically ongoing stable groupings of Catholics identified as having Sunday Mass in Latin according to the 1962 Missal, and that a few diocesan priests would celebrate the pre-conciliar Mass from time to time at different parish churches.</p>
<p>On that factual footing he imposed a permission regime: there will be no new groups formed in the diocese that use the 1962 Missal, any priest must request in writing permission to celebrate with the 1962 Missal whether publicly or privately, a priest on active assignment needs a written letter of suitability before celebrating the extraordinary form outside the diocese, and no permission will be given to use the pre-reform Pontificale Romanum. Priests remain free, in his phrasing, to participate in the 1962 Mass wherever it is offered correctly and in communion with the local bishop, but inside his diocese the older liturgy became a matter of individual written permission, not of a stable community.</p>
<p>That is restriction, not suppression and not preservation. No decree ending a stable site was found, because by Doherty's own account there was no stable site to end, and no authorization sustaining a site was found either. Site counts are therefore null on both sides, with the prose accounting doing the work: occasional pre-TC celebrations, such as the advertised Missa Cantata at St. Augustine, Rensselaer, on March 25, 2021, gave way to a written-permission regime, and whether any priest has since obtained written permission is an open debt, not a fact this dossier invents.</p>