Fitzgerald, Edward (1833–1907), catholic bishop of Little Rock, was born in October 1833 in Limerick city. He was baptised in St Michael's church, Denmark St., where his parents had married the preceding January. He was the eldest child of James Fitzgerald and Johanna Fitzgerald (née Pratt). Eight more children, five boys and three girls, were born before the entire family emigrated to the USA in 1849. One of the boys died in infancy and there are no records of any further children. James Fitzgerald had moved to Limerick from Dingle, Co. Kerry, where his uncle, Fr Kennedy, had been parish priest. Johanna Pratt's background is obscure, though there was a family tradition that she came from Palatine stock. No information survives about Edward's childhood or family circumstances and it is presumed that the decision to emigrate in 1849 was related to the conditions arising from the famine.
He entered the Lazarist-run seminary at Barrens, Missouri, in 1850. Two years later he moved to Mount St Mary's Seminary of the West at Cincinnati, Ohio, and he completed his studies for the priesthood in Mount St Mary's, Emmettsburg, Maryland. He was ordained 22 August 1857 for the diocese of Cincinnati and received his first appointment as the pastor of St Patrick's parish in Columbus, the state capital of Ohio. It was a challenging appointment for a young priest as the parish had been placed under interdict due to a dispute with the archbishop, John B. Purcell (qv), who had been born in Mallow, Co. Cork. Fitzgerald showed great tact and considerable skill in solving the dispute, which seems to have been a factor in his appointment to the see of Little Rock, Arkansas (1867). He was then aged 33 and the youngest bishop in the USA. The see had been vacant for five years due to the disruption caused by the civil war. The diocese encompassed the entire state of Arkansas and what is now the state of Oklahoma, though it had less than 2,000 catholics and only five priests and three houses of the Sisters of Mercy. During his episcopate the catholic population rose to over 20,000 due to a large influx of German, Polish, and Italian immigrants. He met this challenge with an impressive pastoral and structural reorganisation. By the end of his forty-year reign he had established thirty-three missions, each with its own church, and built forty-one parish churches and a large cathedral in Little Rock. There were sixty diocesan priests, 272 religious sisters, and houses of Benedictine monks and nuns. In 1894 he dedicated the first catholic church for black Americans in the state.
He is noted, however, less for this impressive achievement than for his courageous and principled stand at the first Vatican council in 1870. He was one of only two bishops who actually voted against the formal definition of papal infallibility. It became clear in the private sessions of the council that there was not universal agreement for the measure, so a formula was devised whereby the dissenting bishops would absent themselves from the public session when the final vote was taken. Fitzgerald insisted on attending but asked to be allowed to abstain, and when this was refused he voted non placet. After the decree was solemnly promulgated he immediately indicated his acceptance. His action did not adversely affect his position. It was in line with the views of many members of the American hierarchy and he continued to minister successfully within his diocese. He returned to Rome for the conference of United States bishops (1883) as the representative of the archbishop of New Orleans, and played a prominent role in the third plenary council of Baltimore (1884).
It is not clear if he ever returned to Ireland: letters from the rector of Mungret seminary in Limerick, where student priests for his diocese were trained, imply that he did, but no details survive. He suffered a stroke in January 1900, which left him paralysed. He spent the remaining seven years of his life as an invalid and died 21 February 1907. He is buried in a vault under the atrium of the cathedral he had built in Little Rock. In his will he bequeathed $5 to his brother Joseph, and the rest of his estate to the diocese. He had been a bishop for the unusually long period of forty-one years and had made a major contribution to the growth of catholicism in the United States as well as providing an interesting footnote to universal church history.