Young was born on October 29, 1808 in Shapleigh, Maine, to Jonathan Young, a graduate of Harvard, a Universalist, a farmer, and son of an English immigrant, and his wife, Mehetable Moody, daughter of William Pepperell Moody of Saco, Maine, who boasted of descent from an ancestor who came from England in 1634 and founded a family prolific in teachers, Congregational ministers, and hardy tillers of a rugged soil. One of ten children, he had three brothers and six sisters.
Young was trained in a country school and in Saco, Maine, where he lived with his uncle, Sam Moody, a sturdy Congregationalist and small banker. Apprenticed in the shop of the Eastern Argus of Portland, he learned printing and soon undertook the publication of the Maine Democrat at Saco.
In 1828 Young joined the Catholic Church, into which eight brothers and sisters later followed him. In 1830 he went west for his health. As a wandering journeyman printer, he worked in Kentucky and in Ohio before settling down in Cincinnati, where he found employment on the Catholic Telegraph and spent his idle hours teaching Sunday school and in relief work among the poor. Urged by Bishop J. B. Purcell, he studied for the priesthood at Mount St. Mary's Seminary, Emmitsburg, Maryland. Ordained in 1838, Father Young acted as a diocesan missionary, taught at St. Xavier's Academy in Cincinnati, and served zealously as pastor of St. Mary's Church in Lancaster, Ohio. Purcell admired this rigid, determined, energetic New Englander who was still a Puritan in character and outlook on life and apparently had Pope Pius IX name him for the diocese of Pittsburgh when Bishop Michael O'Connor selected the poorer see of Erie. He refused to accept, but when O'Connor was transferred back to Pittsburgh, he accepted the see of Erie and was consecrated on April 23, 1854, at St. Peter's Cathedral, Cincinnati. During a tenure of a dozen years Young created a well-organized diocese, won the love of the Irish, who ordinarily resented a "foreign" bishop, built over a score of churches despite the unfavorable financial conditions of the Civil War period, increased his priesthood from fourteen to over fifty, gave St. Mary's Church in Erie to the Benedictines, promoted an academy and hospital of the St. Joseph nuns in Erie, and promoted academies at Corsica and Meadville. Young died on September 18, 1866.
Young served as Bishop of Erie, Pennsylvania from 1854 until his death. At the beginning of Young's tenure, the diocese contained 28 churches and 14 priests; by the time of his death, the number of churches and priests were both over 50. He established several Catholic schools and orphanages, and a hospital. He also introduced into the diocese the Sisters of St. Joseph from Buffalo, New York.
