John Joseph McDermott

Bishop John McDermott has spent his whole priesthood inside one state, and he says he has loved nearly every assignment it handed him. More than three decades in, he still speaks about the people and the scenery of Vermont like someone who keeps finding new things to notice, north to south and east to west.

Steady and unassuming, he leads the way he once described it himself, collaborative and encouraging, more inclined to let capable people do their jobs well than to assume he already has every answer. That temperament was shaped early. He was born on the Feast of St. Joseph, the seventh of ten children, and grew up in a home where his parents' faith was simply part of the air, the place he learned to pray and to trust God in whatever came. The priesthood did not announce itself all at once. He spent a year at the Coast Guard Academy first, discovered he got badly seasick, and found his faith deepening on a chaplain's retreat. The turn came quietly one day as he watched a submarine make its way up the Thames River, when he felt a strong sense that he needed to consider the priesthood.

What followed was a life lived almost entirely inside one diocese. Ordained in Burlington in 1989, he moved through parishes and chaplaincies and years of quieter work behind the scenes at the chancery, until he could say he had set foot in all but two churches in the whole of Vermont. He came to believe you should hold your assignments loosely, that clinging to one too tightly can close you off to what the next might bring, and he seems to have lived that out. When Pope Francis named him the 11th Bishop of Burlington in 2024, he was already the diocese's own administrator, and his reaction, he admitted, was equal parts surprise and relief. Surprise at the office, and relief that it was for the diocese he already knew and loved.

For all the offices he has held over the years, what refuels him is refreshingly ordinary. He is a runner and a golfer, a baker and a cook, the kind of man who finds a quiet satisfaction in weeding the flower beds outside the chancery or fixing something around the house, and who took up skiing again not long ago. He is the first to admit he has never been much good at taking a regular day off, a habit he is careful not to recommend to his priests, but give him a few hours outside and he comes back renewed. Now he expects to spend most weekends on the road, parish to parish, determined that the people in the farthest corners of the state, especially down south, know they belong to the same church as everyone else. Ask him what all of it is for, and the answer is plain. His motto is that God alone suffices, and what he most hopes for is a Vermont where more people have come to know Christ for themselves.