Benedict Joseph Fenwick

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Bishop Benedict Joseph Fenwick (September 3, 1782 – August 11, 1846), was the second Roman Catholic Bishop of Boston, Massachusetts.

Fenwick was born in Leonard Town, Maryland, and on June 11, 1808 was ordained a priest in the Society of Jesus.

On May 10, 1825 he was appointed Bishop of Boston, and on November 1, 1825 he was ecclesiastically ordained by Archbishop Ambrose Maréchal.

In 1827, Bishop Fenwick opened Boston College in the basement of his cathedral and took to the personal instruction of the city's youth. His efforts to attract other Jesuits to the faculty were hampered both by Boston's distance from the center of Jesuit activity at the time in Maryland and by suspicion on the part of the city's Protestant elite. Relations with Boston's civic leaders worsened such that, when a Jesuit faculty was finally secured in 1843, Fenwick decided to leave the Boston school and instead opened the College of the Holy Cross 45 miles west of the city in central Massachusetts where he felt the Jesuits could operate with greater autonomy.

He died on August 11, 1846 at the age of 63.

Bishop Fenwick High School in Peabody, MA is named for him.

Preceded by Jean-Louis Anne Madelain Cardinal Lefebvre de Cheverus

Bishop of Boston 1825 – 1846

Succeeded by John Bernard Fitzpatrick