Peter A. Rosazza


Peter Anthony Rosazza is a retired American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who served as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Hartford.

Early life and ministry

The eldest child of Aldo and Agatha Rosazza, Peter Rosazza was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in Torrington. He attended and graduated from Torrington High School in 1952. He studied at Dartmouth College for a year before entering St. Thomas Seminary in Bloomfield. He then studied at St. Bernard Seminary in Rochester, New York, and at Saint-Sulpice Seminary in Paris, France, where he was ordained to the priesthood on June 29, 1961.
Upon his return to the Archdiocese of Hartford, Rosazza served as assistant pastor at the in West Hartford and later joined the faculty of St. Thomas Seminary, where he taught French, Spanish, and Italian. In 1972, he became co-pastor of Sacred Heart Church, the mother church of Hartford's Hispanic Catholic community.

Episcopal career

On February 28, 1978, Rosazza was appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Hartford and Titular Bishop of Oppidum Novum by Pope Paul VI. He received his episcopal consecration on the following June 24 from Archbishop John Whealon, with Bishops John Hackett and Ulises Casiano Vargas serving as co-consecrators. He was assigned to pastoral work in Waterbury in 1981, and later in his native New Haven in 1988. On February 2, 1997, he was named Episcopal Vicar for Spanish-speaking Catholics in the Archdiocese of Hartford.
Rosazza is a member of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee for Social Development and World Peace and is liaison with Brazilian Catholics for the Committee on Migration and Refugees. He is also bishop advisor to the National Catholic Student Coalition. Between 1980 and 1986, he served as a member of the Committee of Bishops which wrote the pastoral letter Economic Justice for All. He is one of the founders of the Naugatuck Valley Project, a coalition of churches and labor union locals as well as ECCO, a community organization of 18 churches in the New Haven area. Also, he is one of the five bishops who drafted the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter on the U.S. Economy and Catholic Social Teaching. In December 2009, Rosazza sat for a one-hour public radio interview on the Colin McEnroe show. On June 30, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of Monsignor Rosazza, who had turned 75 on February 13.

Episcopal succession