A New York native, born in Brooklyn, reared in Queens, educated in Baltimore, and ordained in Charlotte, Msgr. Michael Shugrue, who can trace his ancestral roots to Ireland, followed a circuitous road to get to the Diocese of Raleigh.
While commuting from Queens to a Catholic high school in Brooklyn, he discerned that he wanted to be a foreign missionary. His parish priest at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Elmhurst, New York steered him toward the South to do his missionary work, saying that in the 1950s the South was mission country. In his high school junior year, the future priest applied to Bishop Vincent Waters, Bishop of Raleigh to study for the priesthood. He took his first airplane ride to Raleigh for an interview with the Bishop and was accepted as a seminarian for the Diocese of Raleigh.
He spent his college and seminary years in Baltimore before being ordained in Charlotte at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1966. (Charlotte was part of the Raleigh diocese then.) He earned a masters degree in religious education from Fordham University in 1970.
His early years as an assistant pastor, which was the name for a parochial vicar then, included parishes in Cary, Wendell, Greenville and Raleigh. His first assignment at St. Gabriel’s Church in Greenville was a one-year “training apostolate.” During that year he spent half of the week in a nearby small community ministering to seven families. “It was a learning experience,” he commented.
When he assisted Monsignor Koch at St. Michael’s Church in Cary in 1970, he was also serving as the Diocesan Director of Religious Education.
His pastorates include St. Mary’s Church in Laurinburg, St. Joseph’s Church in Raleigh and Rector of Sacred Heart Cathedral in Raleigh. His longest assignment of nine years was at Duke University where he served as the Catholic Campus Minister.
Following a sabbatical in 1998, Msgr. Shugrue returned to the diocese as Vicar for Priests. In 2002 Bishop F. Joseph Gossman appointed him Vicar General, a post he held until coming to St. Patrick’s Church in Fayetteville in July 2007.
Clergy
