Monsignor Joseph T. Donnelly, 75, is retiring after eighteen years as the pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Southbury, Connecticut. He was my pastor at St. Bridget Church in Manchester in the 1990s. He presided over my wife’s conversion to the Catholic faith in 1997. He performed our wedding later that year.
He is, for good and for ill, representative of the Baby Boomer priests who came of age in the immediate wake of the Second Vatican Council. Most significantly in the era of Pope Francis and President Biden, he is a case study in how those priests seem to have outlasted younger “JPII priests.” Many conservative Catholics have long thought they would one day restore a more orthodox Catholicism the older generation had given away.
