Bishop John Patrick Dolan. / Screenshot from SDCatholics YouTube channel.Pope Francis nominated Auxiliary Bishop John P. Dolan of San Diego to lead the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday.
Dolan, 60, follows Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, who resigned on June 10 at the age of 75, the traditional retirement age for bishops.
Phoenix is the fifth-largest city in the United States, with 1.2 million Catholics served by the diocese.
Since 2017, Dolan, a native Spanish speaker, has served as an auxiliary bishop in San Diego, a diocese with about 1.4 million Catholics, under Cardinal-designate Robert McElroy.
Dolan was born into a family of nine children in San Diego’s Clairemont area. In 1989, he was ordained as a priest of the diocese. Before being named auxiliary bishop, he served as a parish priest for 27 years.
He has held the positions of vicar general and curia moderator. He also supported McElroy in the assignment of priests in San Diego’s 98 parishes as vicar for clergy.
In San Diego, the incoming Phoenix bishop was noted for his assistance of refugees, particularly the Lost Boys of Sudan, a group of around 20,000 boys from the Nuer and Dinka ethnic groups who were orphaned or abandoned during the Second Sudanese Civil War.
Dolan was welcomed as a “LGBT-positive priest” by New Ways Ministry, a Catholic LGBT outreach ministry without authority or recognition from the Catholic Church, after his appointment as an auxiliary bishop in 2017.
Dolan was the pastor of St. John the Evangelist parish in the Hillcrest neighborhood, which is “home to many of San Diego’s LGBT citizens,” according to New Ways Ministry.
“It was an eye-opening experience, but also a happy experience,” Dolan said of his time at the parish.
He was one of 14 US bishops who signed the “God is on your side” statement on defending LGBT adolescents from bullying in January 2021.