Oscar Hugh Lipscomb

Oscar Hugh Lipscomb (September 21, 1931 – July 15, 2020 ) was an American bishop of the Catholic Church. He served the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama, for 28 years. Lipscomb attended high school in Mobile before studying for the priesthood in Rome. He was ordained a priest in 1956 and served in the Archdiocese of Mobile as a parish priest and teacher. He became chancellor of the archdiocese in 1966 and was consecrated as a bishop fourteen years later. He retired in 2008. He was the first Archbishop of Mobile and its eighth bishop.

Early life Lipscomb was born on September 21, 1931, to Oscar H. Lipscomb Sr. and Margaret Antoinette (née Saunders) Lipscomb. He graduated from McGill–Toolen Catholic High School in 1949, then known as McGill Institute, where there is an athletic complex named in his honor. After graduating from McGill in 1949, he entered St. Bernard Junior Seminary and College in Cullman, Alabama. He attended seminary at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. On July 15, 1956, Lipscomb was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in Rome. He was appointed Archbishop of Mobile on July 29, 1980, and consecrated on November 16, 1980, by his immediate predecessor, Archbishop John May. The Diocese of Mobile was elevated to the Archdiocese of Mobile on the date Lipscomb was appointed its first archbishop.

Lipscomb came into the national spotlight in the United States in the early 1990s due to a controversy involving the Reverend David Trosch, a priest of the archdiocese in Magnolia Springs, a community in south Baldwin County southeast of Mobile. Trosch sparked the controversy with his anti-abortion statements advocating the theory of justifiable homicide in the case of killing abortion providers, and his attempt to place an advertisement in the Mobile Press-Register newspaper with his original cartoon showing a man pointing a gun at a doctor who was holding a knife over a pregnant woman. Lipscomb offered Trosch "the alternative of publicly abiding by the [archbishop's] judgment on this erroneous teaching or relinquishing his public position in the church".

For many years, Lipscomb was a member of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. His resignation was accepted by the Pope in 2008. Nonetheless, he stayed engaged with the life of the Catholic community in the archdiocese.