page_title: Michael O'Connor (bishop)
section_title: Episcopacy
hierarchical_section_title: Michael O'Connor (bishop) / Episcopacy
context_page_description: Michael O'Connor, S.J., was an Irish-born prelate of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and a member of the Society of Jesus. He served as the Bishop of Pittsburgh and briefly as the Bishop of Erie.
context_section_description: The Fifth Provincial Council of Baltimore, which was held in May 1843, recommended the erection of the Diocese of Pittsburgh and nominated O'Connor as its first Bishop. When Pope Gregory XVI accepted the recommendation, O'Connor traveled to Rome for consecration as a bishop, but he petitioned the pope to revoke his appointment and to allow him instead to enter the Jesuits instead. Pope Gregory, however, refused and said, "You shall be bishop first, and a Jesuit afterwards". He accepted the pope's will and was formally appointed the first Bishop of Pittsburgh on August 11, 1843. On August 15, he received his consecration from Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni at the Church of Sant'Agata dei Goti.
  On his return to the United States, O'Connor passed through Ireland to recruit clergy for his new diocese, obtaining eight seminarians from Maynooth College and seven Sisters of Mercy from Dublin. He arrived in Pittsburgh in December 1843, where he found a diocese comprising 33 churches, 14 priests, and about 25,000 Catholics. To organize the new diocese, he held the first diocesan synod in 1844, and the same year he founded a girls' academy and orphan asylum, a chapel for African Americans, the Pittsburgh Catholic and St. Michael's Seminary. To serve the German immigrants in his diocese, he welcomed the Benedictine monks who founded Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, the first Benedictine monastery in the United States, and to further education he invited the Franciscan Brothers of Mountbellew in Ireland, who established the first community of religious brothers in the United States in Loretto.
  On July 29, 1853, O'Connor was appointed the first Bishop of the newly erected Diocese of Erie by Pope Pius IX. The dividing line of the new diocese ran east and west along the northern boundaries of Cambria, Indiana, Armstrong, Butler, and Lawrence Counties, giving thirteen northern counties to the Diocese of Erie and fifteen to the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Father Joshua Maria Young was named his successor in Pittsburgh, but Young's reluctance to accept his new charge and the petition of Pittsburgh Catholics moved the Holy See to reverse its decision. Five months after his transfer to Erie, O'Connor was re-appointed to Pittsburgh on December 20, 1853, and Young accepted the leadership of Erie.
  In 1854, he was summoned to Rome to take part in the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and it is said that changes in the wording of the decree were due to his suggestions. His health entered into a steady decline and, on the advice of his physicians, traveled throughout Europe, Asia, and North America in search of a more hospitable climate. At the end of O'Connor's tenure, the diocese contained 77 churches, 86 priests, six religious congregations, one seminary, five institutions of higher education, two orphan asylums, one hospital, and a Catholic population of 50,000.
caption: The coat of arms used by O'Connor as bishop.