Friends, relatives and the great outdoors helped inspire journey to priesthood

ROYAL OAK — Bishop Robert J. Fisher wasn’t born yet, but he knows the history. He isn’t the first member of his family to be ordained a bishop. He isn’t even the first member of his family to be ordained a bishop for Detroit.


That distinction would belong to Bishop Joseph C. Plagens, the second auxiliary bishop of Detroit, his distant cousin who served the city from 1924-35.

“He died relatively young at age 53 from a heart ailment,” Bishop Fisher recalls of Bishop Plagens, a Polish immigrant who later left Detroit to serve the dioceses of Marquette and Grand Rapids. “He inspired me just by his desire to be a good, faithful follower of the Lord, and to want to do it here in this country.”

Most of Bishop Fisher’s knowledge of Bishop Plagens comes from his extended family and his mother, who was a young girl when Bishop Plagens would occasionally stop by.

“My mom’s favorite memory of him was when he was coming over to visit, she and her sister got shipped off to grandma’s house so they didn’t cause too much trouble,” Bishop Fisher laughed. “But it sounds like he was a man who really loved the seminary in Detroit, and he also was a man who was very proud of his Polish heritage, and did a lot of ministry among Polish Americans at Sweetest Heart of Mary in Detroit and also in Hamtramck at St. Florian.”

Surrounded by faith

To say Bishop Plagens inspired Bishop Fisher’s vocation might be a bit of an overstatement, but that’s not to say he didn’t play a role, as did many others throughout Bishop Fisher’s upbringing.

The oldest of four children growing up on the west side of Detroit and later Southfield, Bishop Fisher credits his parents, first of all, for creating an atmosphere where faith could be fostered.

“The whole time we were growing up, church and the parish community was very, very important to our family,” said Bishop Fisher, who attended Epiphany Parish in his younger days and later St. Bede in Southfield. “My parents set a great example of prayerfulness at home, but also getting to Mass every Sunday and being very active in our local parish. Whatever was needed to be done around there, very often you would see my parents getting involved, whether it was in the school or just in the church itself.”

Whether it was his father, Robert Sr., helping the pastor at Epiphany fix a broken altar rail, or his mother, Trudy, fixing hot dog lunches for the moms’ club, the Fishers were a fixture of the local Catholic community.

Even young Robert was encouraged to help out around the parish. He remembers well how his childhood pastor at St. Bede would ask him and the other kids to help put together the new hymnals.

“They were all actually loose-leaf pages that had to go in a binder, and we had to stamp the page number on all these stacks of hymns,” Bishop Fisher said.

And it wasn’t just his immediate family. Besides Bishop Plagens, among Bishop Fisher’s extended relatives he counts two IHM Sisters, a great-uncle who was a priest and several distant cousins who were Felician Sisters — “four biological sisters who were active in religious life, too,” he adds.

Being surrounded by so many examples, it would have been strange had the question not arisen that Bishop Fisher might one day consider the seminary.

But ultimately, it was something much simpler that ended up inspiring Bishop Fisher’s eventual vocation: the great outdoors.

Happy camper

The future bishop had pretty much put out of his mind any thought of the priesthood during his high school days at the University of Detroit Jesuit. After graduating in 1977, he applied and was accepted to the University of Michigan with plans to pursue a business career.

After deciding Ann Arbor’s campus was “just too big for me,” Bishop Fisher transferred to the University of Detroit, earning a degree in business and computers — management science, as it was called at the time.

As a child, Bishop Fisher had spent many summers with the Boy Scouts, along with his brother and father, a Scout master at St. Bede, so when a mutual friend who worked with the Catholic Youth Organization camp in Port Sanilac heard he was looking for a summer job to help pay for college, he made an offer that seemed right up Bishop Fisher’s alley.

Except the pay wasn’t great.

“He’d been after me for a long time, saying, ‘You’d really love it here; you’ve got to come here and work,’” Bishop Fisher recalled. “And then he told me what the salary was, and I said, ‘I wouldn’t even be able to afford the gas to drive to school each day.’”

But the friend kept after him, and “just as much to get him off my back as anything else,” Bishop Fisher eventually decided to give it a try.

“And I absolutely fell in love with it,” he said.

He didn’t intend for the summer job to lead to thoughts about the priesthood — with his degree not far off, he figured the plan would be to find a good-paying career and settle down with perhaps a wife and kids — but God had other plans.

“While I was working at CYO during the summers, I met a seminarian who was actually studying for the Archdiocese of Boston but lived in upper Michigan with his family,” Bishop Fisher explained. “We were actually the same age and started the same year along with another good friend of ours. We formed a really good friendship that summer, but one of the things I remember is being so inspired about him. He was a very prayerful man, but he was also wonderful with people and knew how to have fun. And that really inspired me to think once again about the priesthood.”

That seminarian, in fact, turned out not just to be a future priest, but a future bishop, too, and one of Bishop Fisher’s co-consecrators: Archbishop Paul F. Russell, who was ordained to the episcopate last summer and recently was assigned by Pope Francis as apostolic nuncio to Turkey. The other friend was Fr. Ed Zaorski, current pastor of SS. Andrew and Benedict Parish in Detroit.

A family given by God

No sooner had Bishop Fisher mentioned his curiosity about the priesthood than Fr. Zaorski was on the phone with Archdiocese of Detroit’s vocation director at the time, now-Bishop Donald Hanchon.

“I met with Bishop Hanchon several times, but as I prayed about it myself, I kept going around and around because at first I really felt called to family life. I loved kids and I saw myself as being married and living my life that way,” Bishop Fisher said.

Making that part of his prayer, Bishop Fisher decided to try the seminary for a year.

“So I did that. I went to the seminary for a year, and it was an excellent year,” he said. “And at the end of the year I made that same prayer again: ‘Lord, this was wonderful. I learned a lot about myself and my faith, but I still have this sense that I’m called to be a husband and father.’ And I got the same answer back: ‘That’s all right, let’s try it for another year.’”

During seminary, Bishop Fisher recalls many who made an impact on him, including Sr. Mary Finn, HVM, and now-Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron, who was rector at the time.

“I remember one time during my first year in the seminary when we were out in one of the hallways and probably making a little too much noise,” Bishop Fisher said. “And I remember then-Fr. Vigneron, he liked to go to bed early, coming out in his pajamas to let us know that he could hear us and to quiet down,” he laughed.

Before he knew it, ordination was right around the corner, and it was time to make a decision. After four years of seminary, it wasn’t until his internship at St. Malachy Parish in Sterling Heights that Bishop Fisher truly decided the priesthood was for him. But the desire for a family was still there.

“So I asked God anyway, and said, ‘OK, God, I’ll do this, but I still kind of have this desire for my own children and to have that as part of my life.’ And I just had a sense that God would take care of that.”

And God, ever-faithful, did just that.

One way in which Bishop Fisher’s prayer has been answered, he said, is through nieces and nephews, but another is through the children of the parishes he’s served — all of which have had schools.

“It certainly was (a blessing),” Bishop Fisher said. “Certainly the religious formation programs are wonderful, but it’s nice to have that day-to-day experience of having kids running around the parish. I often will tell them that as priests we look at them as being our children.”

Just three years into his priestly ministry, however, Cardinal Adam J. Maida threw the young Fr. Fisher a curveball when the cardinal asked him to take over the archdiocesan Office of Priestly Vocations.

“I remember before going for that meeting with Cardinal Maida, Msgr. (Dennis) Harrity (his pastor at Our Lady Star of the Sea Parish in Grosse Pointe Woods) saying to me, ‘You know, unless you have a really good reason, you need to say yes to whatever your bishop asks you to do,’” Bishop Fisher said. “And I think about that, too, very much in this new role of being an auxiliary bishop.”

Lessons in generosity

One of the central messages Bishop Fisher gave to the new seminarians is also one he himself leans on today: “Don’t be afraid.”

“Whatever it is that God is asking you to do, know that you’re going to find peace and fulfillment in doing it,” Bishop Fisher said.

Though he said he approaches being a bishop with “trepidation,” Bishop Fisher said he takes courage in the example of his predecessors, such as Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, who confirmed him as a young man, and Bishop John Quinn, who taught him in the seminary.

“It’s a great responsibility; it really is,” Bishop Fisher said. “To make sure that this faith that I’ve been given, that we’ve been given, is passed on faithfully to the next generation, it’s an awesome responsibility.”

He also takes courage in the people of God themselves, whom he said have taught him much about what it means to be a priest.

Bishop Fisher recalled one particular Friday evening as a young priest receiving a call from a grieving family whose grandmother had died, and they wanted Fr. Fisher to come and anoint her. It had been a busy week, and all he wanted to do was unwind.

“I was just looking forward to being able to sit down and relax for a while. Of course, I knew that I couldn’t anoint (a deceased person), and the selfish side of me was saying, ‘Well, just tell her that, and stay here in your comfortable chair and go on with life,’” Bishop Fisher said.

“But I just felt the Holy Spirit giving me a good kick in the backside, and so I went. I figured I would at least pray with them. And we did, we prayed around grandma’s bed with the family members.”

A few weeks later, Fr. Fisher noticed one of the family members in church whom he hadn’t seen before, and struck up a conversation.

“They came up to me and we exchanged pleasantries, and I remember them saying, ‘I don’t come very often, but I’ve been coming.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s great, I’m glad to see that you’re here,’” Bishop Fisher said. “And she said, ‘You know why that is? It’s because you came that night. It’s because you spent the time with us when we really needed a representative of the Church to be there.’”

It’s a lesson he won’t soon forget as a bishop.

“It was beautiful to see that person’s faith reignited again, and it taught me a great lesson about generosity and being willing to serve even when every bone in my body is saying, ‘Oh, just stay put.’”

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For more stories about the ordination and background of the Archdiocese of Detroit's new auxiliary bishops, Bishop Robert Fisher and Bishop Gerard Battersby, check out The Michigan Catholic's special section.