John Francis Whealon

[2] He briefly served as a curate at St. Peter Parish in Akron, Ohio, then entered the University of Ottawa, where he earned a Doctor of Sacred Theology degree.

[1] Upon his return to Ohio, Whealon served as a curate at St. Dominic Parish in Shaker Heights and professor of Sacred Scripture at St. Mary's Seminary from 1946 to 1948.

[2] He received his episcopal consecration on July 6, 1961, from Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi, with Bishops Paul John Hallinan and Floyd Lawrence Begin serving as co-consecrators.

[3] Following the resignation of Archbishop John Mark Gannon, Whealon was named the sixth bishop of the Diocese of Erie by Pope Paul VI on December 9, 1966.

[2] During his 23-year-long administration, Whealon established a program to train married men to be ordained as deacons, advocated the promotion of women within the structure of the Church, and developed a team ministry in which clerical and lay people administer a parish together.

In 2012, a Connecticut man sued the archdiocese, claiming that he had been sexually abused when an altar boy in the 1970s by Ivan Ferguson, an archdiocesan priest.

[5] In 2017 another man sued the archdiocese for negligence, claiming that Daniel McSheffery, an archdiocesan priest at St. George Parish in Guilford, Connecticut, sexually abused him over 250 times, starting at age nine.