Msgr. James Shea

Monsignor James Patrick Shea serves as president of the University of Mary. Monsignor Shea was inaugurated in 2009 as the sixth president of the university and, at the age of 34, became the youngest college or university president in the United States. He succeeded Sister Thomas Welder, who had served as president for 31 years. The oldest of eight children, Monsignor Shea grew up on a dairy and grain farm near Hazelton, North Dakota, just 38 miles from the University of Mary’s main campus. He began his undergraduate work at Jamestown College, majoring in English and history. He then entered the seminary for the Diocese of Bismarck, earning a bachelor’s degree and a pontifical master’s degree (licentiate) in philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He studied classical Greek at the University of Texas at Austin and continued at the Vatican’s North American College, studying theology at the Gregorian and Lateran universities in Rome. He has studied management at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business and is also an alumnus of the Institutes for Higher Education at the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. Monsignor Shea served with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity at the Gift of Peace AIDS Hospice while teaching religion at two inner-city schools in Washington, D.C. In Rome, he served as chaplain for the Bambino Gesù (Bam-bee-no Jay-soo) Children’s Hospital and also at the Rome campus of the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of Saint Thomas. In 2002, he returned to North Dakota and served as an associate pastor in Bismarck and Mandan. During that time, he was also the chaplain and a teacher at Saint Mary’s Central High School in Bismarck. He then served as pastor to parishes in Killdeer and Halliday (North Dakota), while teaching at Trinity High School in Dickinson. Monsignor Shea serves on the Boards of Directors for Saint John Vianney Seminary in Denver, Relevant Radio, the Association of Benedictine Colleges and Universities, and the Northern Sun Conference of the NCAA. He has been a member of the National Advisory Council to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. For the State of North Dakota, he has served on the Governor’s Commission on Education Improvement and the Attorney General’s Task Force on Human Trafficking. Monsignor served as chairman of the Catholic Identity Committee on the Board of Directors for FOCUS: the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, and he is a Knight Commander of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. Deeply committed to the education and formation of young people, Monsignor Shea is a priest of the Diocese of Bismarck.