The Bishops of Salt Lake City: The Churchman – Bishop Joseph L. Federal

Diocese of Salt Lake City archives

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Bishop Joseph L. Federal, the sixth Bishop of Salt Lake City, was consecrated as Auxiliary Bishop here in 1951, then served as Coadjutor and then Bishop until his retirement in 1980. Courtesy photo/Diocese of Salt Lake City archives

(Editor’s note: In honor of the 10th anniversary of the Bishop’s Dinner, the Intermountain Catholic is publishing a series of articles featuring the men who have served as Bishop of Salt Lake City.)

By Gary Topping

Archivist, Diocese of Salt Lake City

Like most of our bishops, Joseph L. Federal was not a native Utahn. Born in North Carolina, he received an excellent Catholic education, beginning in a Benedictine boarding school where he first felt a calling to the priesthood, and culminating at the North American College in Rome, where he was ordained in 1914. Once he became our bishop in 1960, though, he apparently thought of himself as a "naturalized citizen" of the state, embracing Utah Catholics and their spiritual well-being as his cause, and he continued to live here after his 1980 retirement until his death in 2000.

One of his first parochial assignments was the rural parish of Swannanoa, N.C., where he ministered to sharecroppers, for whom emancipation from slavery had meant only a new kind of bondage to exploitative prices and ever-increasing indebtedness. Although Bishop Federal rarely discussed that experience, it would have been good preparation for ministering to miners and field workers in Utah, who were often exploited by large corporations. Named Auxiliary Bishop of Salt Lake City in 1951 and Coadjutor in 1958, he had a long apprenticeship before Bishop Hunt’s death in 1960.

His two decades presiding over the See of Salt Lake City were busy ones. One of his earliest and most enduring accomplishments was the establishment of the Diocesan Development Drive. Diocesan finances before his time had largely been a hand-to-mouth affair in which a bishop who wished to mount a large enterprise was largely dependent upon a religious order to assume responsibility for funding and operation, or upon one-time donations from wealthy and dedicated individuals. It had not been an unsuccessful policy, especially under a resolute and forceful fundraiser like Bishop Scanlan, but Bishop Federal saw that a more systematic and businesslike approach would generate more consistent revenues instead of bouncing from one crisis to the next. Much of the financial stability of our diocese today is a result of that innovation.

The 1960s was a time of great cultural turmoil in the secular world, with the youth rebellion, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protests. The Catholic Church was certainly not immune to those developments, but we had our own turmoil in implementing the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Bishop Federal attended all four sessions of the council, and although his papers documenting his participation have not survived, he apparently voted for all the reforms. As a conservative Southern gentleman, he had his problems with the ways some of the reforms were implemented, but he was a loyal churchman who rolled up his sleeves and followed through.

Another major event was the 1976 celebration of the bicentennial anniversary of the Dominguez-Escalante expedition, which marked the first extensive exploration of the territory of Utah by people of European descent. Bishop Federal celebrated an immense Mass at the Salt Palace behind a huge altar beneath a painting of the two explorer-priests. In the midst of a growing sense of ethnic and cultural pride, the celebration reminded all Utahns that the first Europeans in Utah were Hispanic Catholics.

Finally, Bishop Federal realized that our cathedral, after almost three-quarters of a century of wear and tear, was in need of renovation, both exterior and interior. That necessity became urgent when a bushel-sized stone fell off into the space between the cathedral and rectory. Accordingly, an expensive resurfacing of the stone, replacement of the original tile roof with copper, and installation of new gargoyles (the original ones had long since eroded) was accomplished in 1975.

By that time, Bishop Federal was running out of both money and energy, so the interior renovation was left to his successor. He celebrated his 60th anniversary as a priest in 1984 and in 1998 he became the longest-serving bishop in the United States. Bishop Federal, the churchman, had served the church long and well.

The annual Bishop’s Dinner, which supports the Cathedral of the Madeleine, this year is scheduled for Sept. 26 at The Grand America Hotel, 555 S. Main St., SLC. The guest speaker will be the Most Rev. George H. Niederauer, Archbishop emeritus of San Francisco and the eighth Bishop of Salt Lake City. For information, contact Laurel Dokos-Griffith, 801-328-8941 ext. 108.