1928-1996
Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago

Southern Roots.

Born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1928, the son of Italian immigrants, Joseph Louis Bernadin attended public high school and started premedical studies at the University of South Carolina. He graduated, however, from St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore and earned a Master's degree in Education at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., before being ordained to the priesthood in the diocese of Charleston, South Carolina. Bernadin served as a priest in South Carolina from 1952 to 1966, when he was consecrated a bishop and assigned to serve as auxiliary to Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan of Atlanta, a leader in the post-Vatican II effort to renew the church. At age thirty-eight, Bernadin was the youngest Catholic bishop in the nation. In 1968 Bernadin went to Washington, D.C., to serve as general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and of...